Hi, I'm Anna, I'm founder of the Student Grief Network and I wanted to talk today about what grief actually is and how it can impact us, because it is often misunderstood, or simplified, when really it is quite complicated, and it affects more of us than we might realise.
Throughout this video I will use the terms ‘loss’ and ‘grief’. 'Loss' is used when referring to an event, and grief when referring to the reaction.
We often have this perception that grief is just sadness and missing a person, but actually it can involve so many emotions, physical reactions, social and behavioural changes and more.
I'll start by saying grief is a natural and normal response to loss. This could be the loss of a person, but we also grieve when we lose other things in our life. For example, the loss of our health, the breakdown of a relationship, realising that a dream we had won't come true, and social and political injustices we might be witnessing in our communities or around the world.
Today I'm going to be focusing on grief following a bereavement, which is when someone significant has died. This could be a friend or a family member, or someone important in our community. It might be that we had a great relationship with this person, but we can also grieve following a difficult relationship. Maybe a parent that wasn't there for us in the way that we needed, an ex partner, or anything else that might feel a bit more complicated.
There are a number of typical emotions we can experience in grief. For example, sadness - which can lead to crying, but not always - as well as shock, anger, anxiety, guilt, fear, and even positive emotions like relief, gratitude and joy. Some of us might find it hard to connect to our emotions at all and feel numb and disconnected. That doesn't mean that you don't care for the person or you're not impacted. Perhaps we are finding it hard to process the reality of what is happening and we are protecting ourselves by disconnecting.
Our bodies also respond to loss, so we might experience changes to our sleeping patterns, digestive issues, loss of appetite, or maybe eating more than we normally would. Lots of people experience high levels of exhaustion during grief, aches and pains and all sorts of other physical symptoms. Grief can also impact our ability to concentrate and cognitive functions like memory and information processing.
Grief can impact our relationships. For example, if the people around us don't understand or are perhaps dealing with the same loss but in a different way. They can also strengthen relationships, help us connect with people over something meaningful and through supporting each other. We might find that the whole dynamic in a friendship group or family changes when someone dies.
Loss can have practical impacts like changing our financial situation, adding additional responsibilities like having to look after family members or suddenly having to do stuff by yourself that you previously relied on this person for. It might change where you go home in the holidays, or perhaps mean you don’t have a home to go back to at all.
Losing someone can change our whole perspective on the world. It can make us more fearful and pessimistic, aware that really serious things can happen and we might feel less carefree than we used to. But it can also help us put things into perspective. To really stop and think about who we are and what we want to do with our lives and create something meaningful with our futures.
It's worth saying that grief doesn't have a timeline. For many of us, it's really intense in the first few weeks and months after someone dies, but it can also impact us before a death, for example, if someone is unwell and we're anticipating them dying, and it can also impact us months and years down. Grief doesn't stop when the funeral ends, or after that first year anniversary. It ebbs and flows. Some days we might start feeling better. Other days we might feel really raw again and that is completely normal.
The main thing to take away might just be that grief is different for everyone, so it can’t easily be defined. There are lots of things we haven't mentioned in this video that you or someone you know might experience.
Although losing someone is often described as one of the hardest things you can go through, we can find ways to process grief, not move on necessarily, but carry it with us as we build a meaningful and happy life, despite all that’s happened. That doesn't mean it’s going to be easy or perfect, but it is definitely possible.
