I’m Kate, a psychotherapist writing about mental health and self-discovery, for you to flourish in a life you love. When we cultivate compassion, resilience and understanding, we also create a more harmonious world. Upgrade here for transformative journaling prompts, empowering tools, workbooks and guided meditations (more coming soon). I am especially grateful to my paid members whose small contributions enable me to write. Thank you!

This is the second post on moving through loss and grief. Paid subscribers will find therapeutic journaling prompts for grief in the Members Toolbox page.

When our lives and brain have fallen to pieces following loss, we can feel so alone. Read on to understand your experiences of grief, to make sense of the unthinkable.

Hi friends,

I once bought a book about grief, which I didn’t open for four years. It sat taunting me from the shelf. ‘What do they know about this?’ I’d rage, anger burning in my chest whenever it caught my eye. Or, I’d shrink in shame: it was probably all my fault anyway. These books were for normal people, with normal grief and normal feelings, not for crazy me.

When grief crashed through my body and soul once again, when my third baby Holly died, I was stronger and braver. After counselling training I had built enough resilience to open the book at least; and if it was full of s**t, I could handle it.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, wrote ‘On Grief and Grieving’ when she was dying herself. After dedicating her life to helping terminally ill people face their own death, she widened her work to help all those experiencing grief. It turned out her ideas did include me. Any maybe you too?

Her reflections do not prescribe how to grieve, or what we feel, when to finish or how much is too much, or what is or isn’t normal. She shines a light on the commonality of our experiences, to normalise our craziness, and make sense of our confusion.

Reading her made my shoulders soften, my heart relax, and able to accept my powerful emotions. I was less afraid.

‘The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.’ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross - The Stages of Grief

Kubler-Ross defined (and amended) these stages of grief in her book On Grief and Grieving.

Although she describes the process as stages, she acknowledged that this is not intended to be prescriptive, nor linear, the ‘stages’ may be revisited over time, some will feel more intense than others, and some not at all.

I share this to normalise the wild emotions of grief. You are not alone, you’re not crazy, you’re normal. Read my last post about how, who and what do we grieve for here.

With love and gratitude,

Kate

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