5 stages of grief and how to deal with it – Times of India

Grief comes in different shades– be it the loss of a friend or relationship, or the death of a loved one. Grieving is a journey of coping with loss, and every person deals with it in their own way. While grieving would be a personal process for many, it is often followed by a range of emotions like sadness, denial, confusion, anger and sometimes even relief.It helps people to process their emotions and come to terms with their new reality, thus eventually moving on in life. And while people’s grieving process might differ, there is no right or wrong way for it. In her new book titled ‘The Path to Self-Love: Heal Your Heart, Set Healthy Boundaries & Unlock Your Inner Strength’, author Ruby Dhal writes about how self-love can help one heal in different ways, thus ultimately making one live their life to the fullest.
Here we share an excerpt from the book, ‘The Path to Self-Love’ by Ruby Dhal, published with permission from Penguin Random House UK.

‘The Path to Self-Love’
How to Deal with Grief
Grief is an emotional response to loss, and as I’ve mentioned before, this loss is not limited to death. You go through grief when you lose a person, thing or even an experience. You can grieve the person you were meant to be. You can grieve the life you wanted to have. You can grieve broken relationships. You can grieve people even while they are alive. You can grieve those who never even lived, such as grieving a baby never born. There’s no right or wrong way to grieve.
Sometimes you feel numb, sometimes full of anger and hurt. Sometimes you’re in denial that you experienced this loss and sometimes you’re confused or even relieved (e.g., in cases where you had an estranged relationship). When experiencing grief, you could go through the five stages of anger, denial, depression, bargaining and acceptance. After you lose someone, it’s possible that your
emotions will become unpredictable, meaning you could be all over the place, and this feeling of being lost can be what affects you the most.

I remember doing a lot of bargaining as a child, especially when my dad would get sick. I made deals with God all the time. I uttered things in my mind like, ‘I will do all my chores,’ ‘I will listen to Dad more’ or ‘I will go to sleep on time,’ and in exchange, I asked Him to ‘Make my dad stop drinking,’ ‘Give me a normal family’ and ‘Make everyone happy.’ It was only when I was older that I understood I was grieving as a child. I was trying to move on from a loss I didn’t completely understand, while worrying about another loss that I wasn’t ready for.
How we see loss in this book is as follows: when you lose someone, you lose a part of yourself. Remember, just a part. One way to think about this is to see the life that you share with others as a jigsaw puzzle. When you love someone, you hand them a piece of you, like a jigsaw piece that fits in perfectly with their life. In loving them, you hand that piece to them with the belief that they will always keep it, and they give you a piece of themselves which fits in perfectly with your life. But when you lose them, the jigsaw pieces that you handed each other are now missing, making your puzzle incomplete, making it feel like a part of you is missing. When you grieve someone that you’ve lost, what you’re grieving is your own self – you’re grieving the part of you that went with them. In moments like this, your main priority is to heal from this pain.
Especially when you built so many memories and shared experiences with the person who’s no longer here. Now, when you go to your local café, all you think about is the iced caramel latte and carrot cake that they loved; when you take your dog on a walk to the park, you remember their dog trotting along next to yours; when you crave your favourite dessert, you pine for the one that they’d make for you – and the piercing ache returns to the pit of your heart. So, how do you heal from this and use self-love as a tool to guide you?
GRIEF LOOKS DIFFERENT FOR EVERYONE

Firstly, you accept that grief looks different for everyone. I’ve shared this in Chapter Two too (page 40). Often, we look at other people’s healing journeys and compare them to our own, feeling uncomfortable that we haven’t come through from this pain as quickly as them – but that’s not a helpful way of looking at it. Everyone grieves in a unique way and their grieving period is different. For some people, grieving looks like getting back to work the next week and putting their head down. For others, it looks like spending weeks on end in bed and refusing to face the world. For some, grieving looks like booking a party holiday and drowning the pain with alcohol. For others, it looks like booking a self-care retreat and disappearing from the world for a few weeks. None of these forms of grieving are ‘incorrect’, although some could be more harmful than others if you continue to do them indefinitely (such as seeking solace in alcohol, non-stop partying, running away from your responsibilities, etc.).
When you accept self-love into your healing journey, you learn to empathise with your pain a lot more. You treat your grieving period as you would a friend’s. You let your heart grieve how it needs to, without comparing it to someone else’s journey. And you understand that the grieving period differs from person to person, so instead of looking at what stage someone else is at, you look at what you need in the stage that you are at (acceptance, denial, anger, depression or bargaining).
Grief can look like:
✳ Crying it out.
✳ Spending the day watching movies.
✳ Taking yourself on a walk.
✳ Expressing your feelings to a friend.
✳ Escaping to a different city for a few days.
✳ Not speaking to anyone for a while.
✳ Speaking to someone who knew them and sharing your memories.
✳ Engaging in self-care activities.
✳ Changing your environment.