The Mind
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Grief leaves the body stuck in flight, fight, freeze response. The cycle of the nervous system is completely disrupted. This is due to one of the two distinct paths followed by people who experience grief:
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1. The first is the path of denial. If you follow this path, it means you have decided to suppress all your emotions and try to continue as if nothing happened. This commonly leads to overworking yourself and generally a lot of stress. You're using smaller issues to cover up larger ones, leaving them unsolved and more likely to 'blow up' later.
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2. The other path involves basically sinking into your emotions. "Feeling all the feels" as some might say. This is a quick path to serious mental health problems including depression.
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The factor both of these paths share is that your attention is diverted, or focused on one thing. That being either the pure sadness of the situation or everything but the situation at hand. Not addressing these emotions properly is what leaves the cycle of the nervous system disrupted with a difficult path to recovery.
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Our nervous consists of the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems. The sympathetic system involves the flight, fight, freeze response or our immediate response to a stressful situation. This is what triggers the flood of emotions. The parasympathetic system is meant to trigger our common sense and relax our body. If the nervous system cycle is broken, it is a constant fight to calm ourselves, but that's exactly what grief does. It messes up the cycle, the routine, nothing is quite the same.
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You may or may not have heard about the five stages of grief. Well if you have, what you've heard is true! These stages are exactly what you can expect after losing someone, but will obviously occur at different rates. The process is so different for everyone, you should never feel bad about having a different experience. As everyone has lost someone for different reasons, they therefore may be stuck longer in the bargaining stage than another person. It's purely situational.
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You may feel like...
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From a physiological point of view, your brain has suffered trauma. The brain is working overtime to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. Every circuit in the brain is working overtime to understand a world that has hugely changed, often in a heartbeat.
As a result, there is loss of focus and memory, foggy brain, confusion. There is also a loss of trust and difficulty forming relationships. How can you read more than a paragraph in a book, remember where you put anything, or reach out to a friend if your brain is working so hard to keep you from falling off the edge?
All these symptoms are usually temporary, but they do last much longer than we expect. This knowledge is particularly important as if we don’t see major change, we become impatient and tend to give up. And this is the last thing we should do. Be patient with yourself. Make lists, set reminders, accept help. We are more resilient than we know. We can do this in our very own particular way.
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