Health loss

Grief and mourning are intense experiences that we will encounter on our paths at some stage in our lives. The loss of a beloved one or something important to us can bring forth intense feelings of sadness, emptiness, anger, incredulity, guilt or a mix of these emotions. We all have our own very personal rhythm when going through the stages of loss and the most wanted outcome is to deal with what happened, by accepting and adapting to the big change.

A particularly tough kind of grief is the one linked with the loss of physical or mental health.

Developing specific diseases may be more understandable and slightly easier to accept depending on our personal resources, age, familiarity and the period of life that we are going through. Unfortunately it can happen, that some diagnoses suddenly come up with no preliminary warnings, maybe at an early stage of our life, by bringing severe limitations to our lifestyle.

Accepting to be ill, can be a particularly tough one. Indeed, the discovery of a severe diagnosis brings us back with unexpected violence to the reality of our limits, transience and to the fact that we are indeed human beings. In our daily life, our brain usually works pretty well in keeping these awarenesses far away from our conscience, but getting sick is quite a reality check.

The loss of our idea of health is an intense life-changing element, that we may undergo facing exactly the same struggles as we do when losing a beloved person. It compels us to face our limits and deal with the restrictions imposed by illness. We may realise that our desired future will be different from the expectations we had and that some of our long-term goals may not be easily reachable any more. We may find ourselves forced to change habits, routines and lifestyle, to even take strong medications and potentially experience undesired side effects. We may feel overwhelmed and powerless, as nothing of all this has been directly chosen by us.

Losing our expected future and our expected self, can be a source of intense depressive feelings and it calls forth all our strength and resources to deal with, reset our expectations and mindset in order to accept our new reality and move on to the best of our ability. Dealing with health loss by ourselves can be particularly daunting and overwhelming.

Remember that you are not alone, seek out for help, ask for support from the people who surround you and when this is still not enough, reach out for specialistic help. Psychotherapy can help you deal with this burden and move towards acceptance.

Bereavement

Bereavement is an extremely touching experience, difficult to articulate in words. The normal reaction to losing a beloved person implies a mix of feelings that can vary from deep sadness to guilt, anger or emptiness. Usually the person experiences the tendency of spending some time by himself/herself in order to cry for the loss, remember the memories, realise what has happened and “adjust” his/her life with the absence of the departed one.

The five stages of grief

Even if psychologists support the theory of the Five Stages of Grief theorised by Elizabeth Kubler Ross, everyone has its own specific pattern of reaction. Usually we need a variable amount of time in order to cope with a loss and it is proportional to the intimate meaning and role that the departed person represented to us.

Often, the very first reaction to some shocking sad news is denial. Many times people remember that their first thoughts were: Are you serious? What are you talking about? That is not possible! Denial is a primitive and protective reaction and it can manifest in different forms: for someone denial can last only few minutes, for others it can last few hours or even days; the person can feel shocked, stunned, turned upside down without realising what is going on and without feeling the relative emotions yet. Denial can then be followed by anger: Why is this happening to me? Why him/her? It is not fair! Why did he/she leave? Anger is a protective reaction as well; our anger can be addressed to different objects or persons, even the beloved one.

After anger, the person usually enters the bargaining stage, when he/she starts to look for explanations and faults about what happened. The universal and most known stage is then the depressive one, when sadness and regrets are dominant. On the contrary, the last stage is characterised by acceptance: realising and accepting the death of the loved person is the first step to go back to reality.

Not everybody is able to reach the acceptance stage: it can happen, for many different reasons, that a person gets stuck in one of the previous stages and needs a little help to elaborate the loss.

What to do

If we have trouble in elaborating bereavement, time is not healing our wounds and we have the feeling of being trapped by intense and sometimes contradictory emotions, psychotherapy can be a useful tool to get past this.

This is for example what happened to one of my first patients and how therapy worked for her.

Maria’s experience

She was a lovely and smart lady over 80 years old, who I will call Maria here; she lost her husband a few years earlier and she was stuck in the depressive stage. Actually Maria didn’t just lose her husband, she had lost her unique, special and long-lasting love after 60 years of marriage, the person she totally relied on for almost all of her life. And she was not able even to think about her life without this precious man by her side. Maria was very depressed and felt lost; no antidepressant was helping her so she decided to start psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy supported her while going through almost all the stages of loss. Indeed she was not alone while she was crying all her tears, expressing all her anger towards her condition and her dead husband who left her alone, while passing through guilt and every regret and remorse. In the end psychotherapy helped her searching and strengthening her personal dispositions that could help her in coping with that difficult period. Little by little, Maria started reorganising her life, finding new ways, new goals and new meanings. After two years of therapy, Maria decided that it was time to end psychotherapy: she realised that she will always be missing her husband, that she could never forget him, but that she could focus on her nephews, her family and friends to feel better. And in that moment she felt that she could do it by herself.

This is a good example of how a psychotherapist can indeed help you express and understand your feelings, realise what is keeping you stuck in a particular stage of grief and prevent you from coping with your loss.