Ask Angela: Glasgow’s psychotherapist gives advice on coping with the longevity of grief

National World - LocalTV

Glasgow psychotherapist Angela Trainer gives advice on coping with the death of a loved one, even when the pain is not immediate.

Transcript

00:00 My mother died two years ago. I still feel as if I'm grieving. There's days when it even feels

00:03 harder than at the beginning. It's been over two years, why am I not over it?

00:06 Loss isn't a time-bound trajectory of recovery. It moves in circles, it moves in cycles,

00:17 and it comes in waves. So it's not an upward recovery where we get better and better and

00:26 better as each day goes by, the longer time passes. If we think about it, the longer we

00:31 haven't seen someone, often, the more we actually miss them. And that can take us completely by

00:38 surprise. It's also something our culture doesn't really prepare us for. We don't speak about death

00:44 enough in our culture. In normal living, we are in shock for the first months, even year.

00:55 We have this anaesthetic effect of what's happened, so we get carried along by

01:00 arrangements for funerals, about dealing with the person's effects of a house that we need to sell,

01:08 all the things that need to be put in place. So the first year is busy and is often a real shock.

01:14 And people don't really know how to handle it in our culture because we don't speak about it.

01:20 Then we move into the anniversarial grief, and that's where we have the birthdays,

01:26 we have the first Christmas, the first Mother's Day or Father's Day, for example,

01:31 the seasons that we went through where we were perhaps nursing someone who was dying.

01:37 All of these things can take us by surprise. We can really get our breath caught at how powerfully

01:45 we relive what we call the anniversarial grief. And with each funeral or death or even loss,

01:52 often the previous ones are the ones that surface. Sometimes we're at a funeral for someone we didn't

01:58 even know that well, and we might find ourselves deeply grieving because it's pulling the scabs off

02:04 of the wounds. So we do live in a death-denying culture. We deny our own mortality. You know,

02:12 living is dying. We're all moving one day closer every day, and every loss reflects that back.

02:18 And that's the real pain, the impermanence of life. It is a short life. And the best thing we can do

02:26 with the idea that it's a short life is live it fully. How would our loved ones want us to be

02:32 living, given it is a very short life? Would they want us to be miserable and grieving and wallowing

02:39 in the loss, or would they want us to be celebrating them? Would they want us to be

02:44 remembering them? Would they want us to be living joyfully? That can help. Now, not every loss is

02:52 a good loss. Sometimes we've lost people who we didn't have a good relationship with. We're left

02:59 with the baggage of the unfinished business. That may require a wee bit of support. That

03:04 may require the support of a good friend or a trusted professional to unpack some of the

03:11 hangover feelings of the relationships where there wasn't that resolution, there wasn't that happy

03:18 ending, if you like. Grief can be tears and sadness, but it can also be anger. It can be depression.

03:26 It can be rage. It can be denial. It can be addiction. It can be workaholism. Some people

03:33 collapse into their work. So grief has many, many faces, and we do need to recognise those different

03:41 faces. But we don't want to shrink, and we don't want to wait for it to pass. It's not something

03:49 that's going to go away, and we can grow around it so that we actually integrate the grief. We grow

03:57 more as a person. Part of that is time. Time does heal most things, but it's not the only way through.

04:06 The other things that we can do are to celebrate them, to remember them, to talk about the loved

04:13 one that's died, to encourage other people to talk about them too, to explain that we need to talk

04:19 about them, to have memorials for them, to have a day in the garden to celebrate them and ask

04:27 everybody to bring photographs or a song or a story or something that they remember. It doesn't

04:34 have to end with the church service that often we don't even remember because we're in so much shock

04:40 at the time we just have a blurred experience of it. So finding ways to keep your loved one in your

04:47 heart and alive. And as I did in my book, Love Never Dies, when my father died of pancreatic cancer,

04:56 for me reflective writing, writing down my feelings was how the book came to be because I

05:01 didn't intend to write a book. I was simply journaling and writing about the different

05:07 experiences of loss and grief and how I was feeling my way through it and how I was walking him home.

05:14 So I have used that technique with my clients for 35 years as a psychotherapist and I still

05:21 encourage people to do that with grief because I think it's one of the best ways through that I know.

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