How long does it take to get over grief?
Grief is a painful reminder of the gap in our lives formed from losing someone that we love, but does it have a time limit?
What I love about my work as a therapeutic counsellor is that I get to work with individuals with unique emotional needs formed from their own life experiences and of course, when one experiences grief, that experience will be unique to them too. But what about the time element?
Not got time to read this article? Have a listen to it on The Emotionally Speaking Podcast With John Hicks.
Have I got time for grief?
In many ways, grief almost puts a pause on day to day life for a while. We lose a loved one, we experience the shock of that loss, then there is all the running around preparing for the funeral. All our friends and colleagues are rallying around us, offering their support and maybe there is a period of time away from work. We hope that the funeral brings about some kind of closure, perhaps a point in time from which we move on from and after a couple of weeks understandably we are still feeling the grief. The phrase “Don’t worry it get’s better over time.” is often muted from friends, but after months, perhaps years, it may seem that the grief is just as painful now as it was in the beginning and it isn’t unsurprising that we are left wondering why that grief hasn’t gotten any better.
For some of my clients, whilst they miss their loved ones, they equally have to be able to get back to their own lives and function but somehow something has changed fundamentally deep within, some may experience a loss in motivation for work, painful emotional episodes, feel angrier, feel depressed and somehow they are struggling to shake it off and go back to ‘normal’. It perhaps feels like the clock is ticking. “Surely I should be feeling better by now…”
Another aspect is that as that person experiencing grief, we may sense that our friends or other family members are watching the clock too wondering why that little comment about the loved one seemed to trigger that intense emotional response from us, especially after all this time. For some friends, perhaps that offer of support was time limited in the first place, perhaps within all the intensity of the initial loss.
How long does it take to get over grief?
How long does it take to get over grief? How long is a piece of string?
Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer because we are all different. As I write this, I have a picture of a piece of string in my mind and that phrase musing over its length.
Controlling how long grief is going to be experienced unfortunately isn’t an option. For sure, we can try to ignore it, maybe we can try to ‘swallow it’ or ‘push it down’ into the depths of our psychology to hide it away, but in my experience, we only really seem to then engage in an emotional version of the game ‘Whack-a-mole.” The grief will keep trying to pop up and then we will do what we can to smack it down again until it pops up the next time. It’s a turbulent emotional game that we potentially will feel at odds with for many years.
What if we were to change our relationship with grief?
Many of the clients that I work with almost view grief like it is some kind of illness when actually grief is a part of us that we may go for years before we experience it. Grief is a natural response to loss but unless we are really unfortunate we will only experience loss like this infrequently and so when grief happens we somehow see it as something put upon ourselves when in reality it is our own personal and emotional way of experiencing loss. It is a healthy part of us and so how would it be if we could look at it as something that serves us rather than controls us.
What?
I know! I get why that may sound odd but let me share a personal experience.
If we were to use time as a measure of how our grief is going, then I am two years in from losing my father to a short and particularly aggressive battle with cancer. One minute we were celebrating Christmas, then at the end of February 2019 he was given a diagnosis of an aggressive cancer that had spread. The doctor told him that if he was strong enough he could potentially have treatment that might buy him a couple of months but given that the expectation was about three months anyway, there was little comfort or benefit in taking the treatment. He was gone by the middle of the April.
In terms of grief, I started grieving when I first heard about his diagnosis, we call it ‘pre-grief’. I was not surprised about how I was feeling, I work with grieving clients, I guess I knew what to expect to a point. What I didn’t really know was how grief would manifest in me. Weirdly, with all the emotion, there was a kindly voice in my mind encouraging me to welcome these emotions, to not fight them, and perhaps even be curious about them. Seeking to judge them or control them didn’t seem to work for me but choosing to accept my grief, my emotional expression of my loss, as a friend that informed me and reminded me of just how important my father was to me, meant that I was able to find a way to live with that loss in a mentally healthier way.
Grief - “A visiting friend?”
Grief still affected my motivation, at times it ‘floored’ me, sometimes I would find myself sobbing whilst taking my dog for a walk and weirdly feeling grateful for the part that my father played in my life at the same time. I look very similar to my father and last year I experienced a problem with my back. Every time I winced in pain, the facial expressions that I made somehow reminded me of the facial expressions that my father made during his painful journey. I could literally picture his face as he tackled his final days with dignity and courage. Whilst remembering my father’s pain is not pleasant, being reminded of how he tackled his journey is something that I see as a gift to me as I consider my role in the family as the eldest son, a parent of two daughters, a husband and a brother.
Two years on, I know that loss has changed me, grief still hurts but there is no way that I will ever forget my father and I feel fortunate that I mostly remember the good times with him.
I do not feel like I have got over grief. What I have done is choose to welcome it as a resource that supports the way that I live. When it happens, I don’t fight it, I treat it as a visiting friend whilst being curious about what it is that my friend is trying to tell me.
But like with all friendships, we have to allow time to get to know our friends.
What are your thoughts or questions?
Please tell me what this article has brought up for you? What’s your reaction to it? Do you have any questions that you would like me to help you with? Please pop them in the comments below or send me an email by clicking here.
Call on me if you are experiencing difficult emotions.
I work with clients with all manner of differing emotional needs and whilst I do have specialisms in grief and the emotional experiences of being neurodiverse (dyslexic, ADHD etc) I am happy to chat with you about your specific needs and if I don’t think that I can support you then I am part of a network from which I can find support for you.
If you want to talk further then click here to set up a meeting or arrange a call back.