A person goes through an emotional grieving process when there is a sense of loss. Although we all go through the same stages of the emotional “journey” necessary to overcome it, there are people who require more time or who get stuck. In these cases, the most advisable is Psychology or Psychotherapy.
When is a person considered to be going through a grieving process?
It is considered that a person is going through an emotional process of mourning when there is a feeling of loss of something or of a loved one. It can be, for example, the fact of losing a valued job, or losing someone you love, either by breaking the bond of friendship or partnership, or by the death of that loved one. This type of event generates feelings of emptiness, sadness, confusion, anger, physical symptoms, guilt, thoughts of suicide, substance abuse, among others. These feelings need at least one year of evolution in the person who suffers from them, and the process goes through several phases.
The time to overcome grief varies depending on the importance and depth of that relationship in our lives and can last for years. For that reason, in some occasions, if the person, after an expected time, has not been able to evolve in a natural way and has remained blocked or in a desperate situation in a permanent way, the most recommendable is the Psychotherapy. However, it is also recommended at any stage of the process, since it helps to alleviate certain pain and teaches to relate to the feeling of loss in a more fluid and healthy way, which allows the process to last less time.
How bereavement affects the individual and typical emotional reactions
Grief does not affect all human beings equally, but also depends on other conditions, such as the emotional intelligence and resilience of each individual, as well as the moment and the basic vital and emotional structural situation of the affected individual. In any case, our ability to cope with change is very important in these situations.
However, there are some phases through which, in general, all human beings go through, as part of the emotional “journey” necessary to be able to assume the loss without it leaving us ballast or pathology:
1) Rejection or denial of that reality: it usually lasts a short time, approximately a few days.
2) Depressive process: sadness, loneliness and pain due to the loss. This is the longest stage.
3) Final stage: begins when the person is able to look to the future and begins to reestablish affective and social relationships.
Grief treatment and results
Psychotherapy and Psychology help to avoid or attend to pathological grief (or anticipated grief, preduel, inhibited grief or chronic grief), and accompanies natural grief, so that the person ends up managing to accept and integrate that loss, as well as being able to continue with his or her life. It achieves this through listening and management of the emotions associated with the loss and provides the necessary tools to improve the ability to reorder a new life without that relationship or lost person.
The results of grief treatment with Psychotherapy are always optimistic, if this process is followed with psychological support, since by sharing this experience, pain and loneliness disappear naturally and gradually. Likewise, a re-learning of the capacities to re-structure a good emotional life is guaranteed.
The recommended treatment to overcome an emotional process of grief would comprise about two or three months, depending on the patient, and the cost of each session would range around 60 euros.