Welcome to our grief maxing series. If you’ve had a major loss, if you’re struggling with the loneliness of grief, with just the pain of it, and with what to do with all these complicated feelings, this video series is for you.
Hey everybody, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a psychiatrist and I talk a lot about grief and loss. Certainly there have been some really wonderful experts who have given us a couple of frameworks about grief.
This series on grief maxing is really designed to help meet you and join you in a way so you’re not alone without a framework, confused about what to do with all this pain. There’s something great to be done with it. There’s something that honors those that you are missing or the experiences that are that are generating this grief. It’s important to center down, to sit with it, to think about it, and to use this video series to help you in the processing and creating some framework around grief.
First, a lot of you have heard about the five stages of grief. This is a framework that was devised by a psychiatrist, Elizabeth Kubler Ross. She published her book on death and dying in 1969. And this has been the classic framework that came from her experiences working with people and working with people who’ve had near-death experiences.
The framework allows us to psychologically see what’s happening. For example, the first stage is denial. Denial happens, you get a phone call and you hear someone has passed, and you think that can’t be true. Because in your reality, it can’t be true. Your nervous system has been wired and is used to there being a world where this person is with you and anything else is and an idea that instantly you reject. This lasts much longer than people realize. And I I think as a clinician, one of the first points I want to make about grief and as we’re thinking and talking about grief is that I don’t want you to in any way think it’s a linear process, that one day you’re sad and and then two years later you’re less sad. There is some truth to that, but what I find is often confusing to people is this nonlinear nature of grief, that a year later you can feel incredibly hurt, sad, present a craving or missing for someone or something that that you hadn’t experienced for months. So the denial is one of those that it happened to me recently in an airport. I was sure I saw someone who I know had passed. And I had to follow them a little bit in the airport. I mean like a deranged person, just checking, making sure. Maybe you’ve had an experience like that. Then I realized that there’s just a little lingering, almost denial, because of course the denial in a lot of ways is true, something that we don’t want to be true. If we were writing the script,we’d go back a couple of pages and change it. So denial is the first stage of grief.
Now, you’ll often experience these in a nonlinear way. You’ll have some denial and let’s talk about the other four feelings or stages as they’re called. Everyone agrees, you experience a lot of these feelings at once.
Along with denial, there are these other feelings, anger, bargaining, where you’re trying to negotiate to have a better outcome than this horrible loss. There’s, of course, depression, just feeling a hollowness, an emptiness, a sadness. How how can it be that there’s a world without this person? And then the the acceptance. Again, not thinking of this necessarily linearly, although I’ve often experienced in grief, I’m really in denial and then I can feel an anger, then a bargaining, and then a sadness, and an acceptance. It’s so important that throughout the years that follow an acute loss or a major trauma that we don’t look to always be making steady progress. That does often happen, but it’s hard when people then have a bad day or a bad week or an anniversary.
So these are the five stages of grief. I’m sure you can see them if you’re in the midst of experiencing a lot of grief. Part of grief maxing is orientation, right? Being oriented to where you are, what stage of grief, to know that it’s going to change and move, getting better, sometimes, “getting worse.” Part of grief maxing is when you’re feeling it more. When you’re experiencing a loss of someone, someone has passed away, and you’re feeling closer to them, a song reminds you of them, don’t push away from that, lean into that. That’s a time to journal; that’s a time to maybe have one of their favorite meals; that’s a time to call someone who also knows them or loves them or misses them and connect. We spend so much time with people in our lives that when they’re not in our lives anymore, it’s such a shame to waste the opportunities when we feel something getting a little closer, when we feel ourselves connecting with them again.
I hope these videos help you not descend into horrible depression and sadness. That part of grief, everybody. You and I both know it. But to be oriented and to sit with your grief, to not be frightened of it, to let it move and to try and learn something if possible, and also do nothing with it. We don’t always have to be productive and linear and progressive. It’s okay just to be sad and hurting and miss someone. I always trying to remind myself, well, that means that we’ve loved, and that’s what we’re here to do.
Everyone, I’ll see you in the next video. Please share and save this. Please subscribe. I hope this helps you improve your mental fitness and this really important part of mental fitness that gets denied and often overlooked, which is our ability to grieve and use grief and see grief as a signal that we’re doing it. We’re creating connection, we’re creating love in our lives, and that means that we’re going to have loss. I’ll see you in the next video.
