Working Through the Grief Process: Tips from a Christian Counselor

If you get turned around while in the woods or a strange part of the city, one of your top priorities is to find the quickest way home. You want to know and have the safety of knowing that there is a clear path to get where you need to be. Not all of life works like this, even when we want it to. There are many situations where the way home, so to speak, is along a winding road with many unknown twists and turns.

When you lose a loved one, that can be one of the most disorienting experiences a person can encounter in life. This person was a mainstay in your life, someone you likely relied on, who featured in your daily highlight reel, and who you shared life with. With their passing, life has changed irrevocably, and now comes the task of making sense of life without them. Working through the grief process allows you to start rebuilding your life.

Grief: A Challenging But Necessary Process

Over the course of your life, you’ll experience things that affect you deeply and change you. Those watershed moments consist of experiences that are happy and life-giving, but they also include the painful and deeply upsetting experiences that mark you forever. Losing a loved one is one such experience that can change you irrevocably, leaving wounds that may never quite heal.

The question that every person who experiences loss must face is how you go on, knowing that there is no going back. It’s a huge challenge. Grief is the high price that we pay for love and the meaningful connections we make with others. Grieving, however, is a necessary process that can help us begin to come to terms with loss. “Coming to terms” with loss doesn’t mean avoiding it but learning to live with it and carry on despite it.

The grieving process refers to the various ways a person works through the many complex emotions and thoughts that loss stirs up. It’s allowing yourself to face and feel the reality of the loss and begin sorting through it to try and make sense of what life looks like now without your loved one. As you grieve, you allow yourself to experience and express what the loss means to you, and in that way, you come to grips with it.

If you don’t permit yourself to grieve, those emotions and thoughts don’t go away. Often, they show up unexpectedly in other places. Unprocessed grief can result in unfortunate incidents like anger outbursts at loved ones, which can strain those relationships. This makes it important to work through grief and allow yourself to grieve.

Grief Can Be Complex

Take a moment to think about the relationship that you had with your loved one. When you relate to another person, your relationship with them is often complex. You have good days and bad days. Sometimes you’re rejoicing together, and on other days, you have disagreements, some of them quite sharp. All of this is part of what it means to be in a relationship with someone in all of its complexity.

When a loved one passes away, that complexity carries over to when they’re no longer around. As you think about their life and your relationship with them, you will have moments when you weep, others when you smile as you remember them as they were, and you may have other complex emotions too. Their passing doesn’t erase the good or the bad that they did, and your response to them often carries memories of these things, too.

Grief is complex because it raises a lot of different emotions, and these range from anger, shock, disbelief, relief, regret, guilt, and other emotions as well. If they were struggling with their health, for instance, their passing may make you feel sad, but at the same time, you may also feel a sense of relief that they are no longer suffering. All of this can be confusing as you find yourself, from moment to moment, experiencing different things that feel contradictory.

The process of grieving can be a complex one because you may find yourself feeling many different things all at once. Just as you likely didn’t feel only one thing toward your loved one while they were alive, it’s also likely that as you think about them and try to make your way in life without them, that will also raise a variety of thoughts and feelings.

Using the (So-Called) 5 Stages of Grief

On any given day, when you think about your loved one, you could find yourself feeling joy, sadness, anger, regret, or something else entirely. Your mind could drift to specific memories, to scenes when you were having fun, or perhaps when you had a silly argument. These different thoughts and feelings could be triggered by a smell, a particular place, or just randomly.

One of the ways people try to get a handle on grief is to make use of what are commonly called the five (or seven) “stages” of grief. These “stages” outline the grief process, and this can be helpful for several reasons. They can be helpful because they can reassure you that what you’re feeling is normal. They can also help you see that there is a way out of the forest, and you just have to let the process play itself out.

The path you take through your grief is a unique one, and it won’t look like what someone else has gone through. After all, you’re a unique individual, and your relationship with your loved one is also unlike other relationships in significant ways.

For that reason, it is probably best not to think of them as “stages” so much as possible aspects of grief which a person may or may not experience all of and not necessarily in any order. However, with that caveat, the “stages of grief” can be a helpful tool for navigating grief. It’s important to know how to use them.

The five stages or aspects of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. When you first hear of the loss, denial and shock are often the first reactions. You may feel numb and disbelieving about the news that something has happened, and you may find yourself feeling somewhat detached from the loss.

Grief can result in intense emotions such as anger, frustration, resentment, or irritability. These feelings may be directed toward your loved one, yourself, the Lord, or other people around you, like the surgeon or care staff who looked after your loved one.

Third, what may follow is bargaining, which is an attempt to try and regain control over the situation, or to undo the loss entirely. Bargaining can happen by making deals with yourself or with God, or pleading for the Lord to intervene.

What can follow bargaining is depression. When the attempts at pleading or the dealmaking fail to deliver the desired outcome, what often results is a deep and overwhelming sadness, hopelessness, or emotional pain. In the wake of this, one gradually comes to terms with the loss and finds ways to move forward.

Calling this description of grief a “process” makes it seem as though there’s a straight line that goes from denial to acceptance, but the reality is that your grief may (and probably will) look quite different. People don’t experience all of these “stages,” nor do they experience them in the same way. For instance, you may find yourself struggling more with anger and less with depression than other people.

The way to use these stages of grief is to simply see that you may experience many different things along your journey. Instead of being a straight line, the process of grief is a series of movements between different kinds of emotions and thoughts. Some days are easier than others. As time progresses, you learn to cope with the reality of the loss and rebuild your life so that you can carry on without your loved one.

Some Tips for Working Through Grief

If you’ve lost a loved one, some tips that may be helpful for you to work through things include the following:

Permit yourself to feel You must acknowledge and validate your emotions and thoughts, even when they are uncomfortable or painful.

Honor the loss Whether it’s creating a memorial or developing a personal ritual, you can find ways to honor your loss and process your emotions. Some people scrapbook, others light a candle to pray and reflect on the life of their loved one, and others take walks or hikes along trails their loved one enjoyed.

Take care of yourself Grief affects you physically, mentally, and emotionally. Make it a priority to care for yourself, especially if you have others relying on you. Take the time to rest, connect with yourself, eat healthy food, exercise, and relax by doing something you enjoy. Outlets like music, art, or journaling can also be beneficial for your well-being and help to process your emotions.

Be patient Grief is a process that doesn’t work itself out in predictable ways. Be patient with yourself and avoid putting pressure on yourself to “get over” your loss.

Christian Counseling for the Grief Process

Grief doesn’t have to be a solitary journey. You can reach out to loved ones, and if your grief is overwhelming, or you’re feeling “stuck,” or if it’s impacting your ability to function and be present for others in your life, speak to a Christian grief counselor for emotional support and guidance.