Sandra M. García, psychologist expert in grief: "It is not something to overcome, all ways of experiencing it are correct"

During their life, human beings go through many stages and one of them is grief, an inevitable phase when we lose a loved one, whether human or animal, but there are also griefs from emigrating to another country, a breakup, or the loss of a job. This process goes through different phases that, on many occasions, leads the person suffering from it to experience deep sadness if they do not find the necessary help.

Despite the widespread belief that grief is something to be overcome, according to Sandra M. García, a psychologist specializing in loss, grief, and trauma, grief "is not something to be overcome because we will always have a loved one with us and their absence will be present." "I like to describe grief as an encounter with ourselves and with our hearts because when we work through death, it puts us face to face with what we truly are because it leads us to observe how we relate to life or how we are nurturing our values or priorities," she highlights.

As she explains, grief can occur with "the loss of something very important to us, so it doesn't always have to do with death." Psychological help in these cases depends on the person and on "how they have experienced previous losses and their tolerance for pain." "There are people who come to therapy from minute one, but there are also people who, despite feeling very deep pain, do not come, and there are others who do so after some time," she says.

When grief begins to be treated with a professional, "it is important to first address those small parts that are often overlooked." The most important step when starting is "to create a therapeutic alliance with the patient and what we usually do is see what relational needs they are having."

García points out that these needs include being listened to, not judged, or "creating impact", meaning that the person listening to the grieving person also feels their pain. "We need to feel that what we are feeling is normal and that it is part of the human experience," the psychologist points out. Therefore, she emphasizes that it is very important to listen to and validate how a person relates to their pain and how they cope with it.

Knowing what phase of grief the person is in

From there, the psychologist details that the next step is to see where the therapy will be oriented. "First we start by covering those needs and then we see what phase of grief the person is in," she points out. Here, the impact of the circumstances of the death of the person is also analyzed, how they received the news, since in other deaths such as a long illness, their closest circle already grieves during the process, which gives them time to say goodbye to the person.

The first phase is usually, as she explains, the one in which the person is in a process of daze and shock, so the person comes to therapy "with a lot of confusion." In those first moments of grief, the person experiences a kind of anesthesia phase, but these types of people "do not usually come to therapy."

However, the patients who do usually come to therapy are those who are going through the phase of avoidance and denial. "If they are in this phase, the first thing we do is provide a lot of resources and help the person feel secure because, the more security they have, the more secure the person will feel to be able to handle it," indicates García.

Once the person feels they have the necessary resources, "we say that the person enters a stage of connection-integration, where the person talks more about the loved one, tolerates all those emotions more, and talks about them with more fluency, that is, without so much pain or so much restriction."

Furthermore, during this process, the professional and the grieving person can deal with this pain more deeply from within. "This is an important part because after it is when we enter the phase of growth and transformation, and it is when we begin to process grief and the person sees the meaning of the life they had with the person and of the loss," she clarifies.

Consequences of grief in a person's life

Grief from the loss of a loved one, emigration, or a romantic breakup, to a greater or lesser extent, changes the life of the person suffering it. "It's as if all your frameworks suddenly fall apart, what you thought life was, such as the loss of a child or a partner with whom you had a life project and that suddenly ends," explains the professional.

Likewise, it also affects on a physical level because "physically emotions hurt and can cause us anxiety, dejection, insomnia, and physical pain, and on an emotional level because we can end up feeling guilt, regret, anger, or rage, very unpleasant emotions that also lead us to not want to be in contact with the world or to be so in a more challenging way".

Here also comes into play how the person behaves with people. "There are many people who, when they are in the phase of daze and shock or avoidance, the first thing we look at is how functional they are in their lives. If they are eating, if they sleep well, if they go out and socialize or if they go to work because they can lose all of this and start to isolate themselves," she details. 

The impact of a loss also can affect the cognitive part because the typical questions of "why me" or "why my loved one" begin. Although negative feelings are necessary and natural for human beings, when these emotions go from being adaptive and functional to being unproductive and "lead us to get sick and make us disconnect from the world and from ourselves."

In this regard, she emphasizes that "if we don't start to see grief as sadness or something to long for and we don't delve into what that loved one has meant to me, the bond I had with them, or how I related to life and what is now important, that is where it can become something maladaptive or something that leads me to grow."

Different ways of coping with grief

Pain is an emotion that each person manages individually. There are people who show it and it can be seen physically, but there are others who do not, and they carry that pain internally and more deeply. This way of coping, according to Sandra M. García, "depends a lot on the support network we have and the education we have received because perhaps from a young age we have lived in a family that has shared its emotions and says them".

However, if the person has grown up in a family where the general rule was not to express emotions or to be ashamed of them, they will not show them. These types of people, she points out, then do many things in their day-to-day lives. "They work a lot, they are always smiling and it seems like it doesn't affect them, but in the end, these are the people who can end up having a more complicated grief because they are in the phase of avoidance or denial," she explains.

Tips for coping with grief

Although grief is something very personal and individual, there are some tips to be able to cope with it better. Thus, the psychologist recalls that "all ways of experiencing grief are correct because everything we are experiencing has a function".

On the one hand, she advocates for not repressing what we feel and not judging ourselves for the emotions that invade us. "We have to try, as far as possible, to share the pain with other people," she advises.

"Sometimes we feel that we do not have people around us to talk to, so we have friends and family who can serve to distract us because it is something we need," she continues. During grief, the ideal is for the person to have moments where they connect with the pain, but the rest of the time "we need moments of distraction, laughter, or enjoyment".

This connection with pain is fundamental, but "always feeling that we can regulate ourselves. "I can spend a while with the pain, I breathe, I connect, and then, knowing that I can spend another while connected to life," she concludes.