Grief & Loss - Video Transcript

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist and today I'm going to be talking about the five stages of grief. Um I felt that this was a fitting topic for this week's video because just last week I lost a friend of mine to ovarian cancer. She's someone I've known since middle school and it really rattled the community in which I grew up because it was, it was pretty sudden.

Um, so I just wanted to go through these stages, explain them a little bit and just normalize them so that people know that what they're experiencing is normal in terms of grieving and that everybody grieves differently. And um, you know, people might not experience all of the stages.

These are not linear. So you're not going to progress through the five stages in sort of an orderly fashion. You know, some people will experience all of them, some people won't, and some people might kind of hop around, um, and revisit certain stages. So just to keep that in mind as you're hearing this, that it's not sort of like this linear progression.

But anyway, the first stage is denial. And so this is when we're in shock. Um, and we kind of avoid anything that is going to make that loss a reality, right? We just, we're sort of in disbelief. I think this is pretty common when we first hear about the loss of a loved one that we just can't really wrap our head around it.

The second stage is anger. Um this is pretty self explanatory, we might appear a bit more aggressive or irritable when we're in this stage, some people feel anger toward god in this stage. So angers are really a really prominent stage in the grieving process. Um then comes bargaining and this is when we are sort of ruminating or overthinking thinking I should have done this, or I could have done this.

Um we feel maybe some guilt or shame or anxiety about the loss. And then fourth is depression here, we may see some changes in sleeping or eating habits. We might have reduced motivation to do things, we might have this sense of helplessness and really start isolating ourselves from other people.

And then finally we reach hopefully the stage of acceptance and this doesn't mean that the grieving process is over and we're all good. Um it basically just means that we are sort of adapting to this new normal, we're adapting to life as it is now and we've learned how to sort of cope with and tolerate the emotions that come along with that grief and grief can pop up in the future at any point when we least expect it.

And so it's important to know that, you know, it's not, there's not necessarily like an end point for grief that we just, we need to learn how to, except when those feelings come up and and how to cope with them. Um one last thing I want to mention is that grief and loss does not just apply to death.

So whenever we think about grief, I think we often think about the loss of a human being. Um whereas grief and loss can really apply to a lot of other things. So one of which could be the end of a relationship. So maybe we went through a really terrible breakup or we're in the midst of a divorce, you know, the loss of that relationship and that connection to that person will will send you through this grieving process.

Um another situation might be um sort of the loss of this ideal which could relate to a parent, a partner, a child. You know, we sort of had this idea in our minds of of what we wanted or needed this person to be. I often see this in reference to parents, so we needed our parent to be a certain way and meet our needs in a certain way and that they weren't capable of doing that.

And so we sort of go through this grieving process of um relinquishing that idea that that sort of ideal of what we needed from that parent and accepting who that parent is and what they are capable of and what they can actually provide to us. So grief and loss really shows up in a lot of different areas of life. And so I hope you found this video informative and helpful and that it just kind of helps to normalize some of the emotions that you might be experiencing, whether it's the loss of a loved one or the loss of a relationship or kind of a change in how we relate to other people in our lives.

So be sure to leave a comment or like this video or ask a question. Um, I have a youtube channel if you want to subscribe to that to keep up to date on my weekly content, or you can also follow me on facebook and instagram um, at cathartic space counseling and I hope you all have a great weekend.

I'll see you next week.