Every single person experiencing the pain of grief would like to know that there’s a hard and fast rule that can tell you when you can expect the pain to go away, so your life can get back to “normal”.
In the first place, who’s to say what “normal” really is after a death that’s taken away everything you ever considered to be normal before it happened?
The simple truth is that no hard and fast rule for such a thing exists, although some cultures have “supportive grieving structures” which seek to help define and guide the length of the grieving process for those suffering the pain of loss, grief and bereavement.
Yet as excellent and helpful as these structures are, even they cannot govern the private levels or length of grief experienced within the individual human heart – a heart that must find its own way to a grieving and healing length of time that’s right for that person.
The healing aspects of the grief process are cyclical in nature, often returning you to those places and times in memory where the pain of your loss becomes overwhelming yet again. At times like those you can’t help but question if the pain of it will ever change or end for you.
The answer though is that it will definitely change and become progressively easier to bear as you allow yourself to “lean into the pain of it” to discover your personal healing path. Although the memory of having experienced your loss will never leave you, it’s only as you “lean into” and confront your feelings of loss that you can begin to heal and address the actual length of the grieving process in your life.
Stated another way, the most important thing to know and understand about the length of the grieving process is this – it will be directly proportional to the effort you expend in facing its pain, searching for answers and understanding their new reality in your life, and allowing the healing of the answers discovered this way to soothe and give peace to your broken heart.
The fact that there is no set length of time allotted to the grieving process is a price which grief exacts on us all – yet it is also this fact which allows each person experiencing it’s pain the freedom to determine their own needs of how long it will take to go through it, and find new life in the shade of its reality.
Rather than ask how long the grieving process will be, allow yourself to understand that healing from grief is in fact a process of time itself – time to endure, time to confront, time to search out answers, time to accept, and time to heal.
Allow yourself to take however much time you need, and know that your healing will be fuller and more complete if you set no limits on the time needed for the healing of your own grief.
With Love and Understanding,
Ken Matthies
HeartSpun Posts from the Crucible of Experience
• Enjoy this blog post? Get Free updates by email or RSS
• Need help or a consultation? Contact this Expert
• Share this post on your favorite bookmarking site
• Someone you know would like to read this? Email this blog to them