How to heal from grief and loss

Lately, I have had a burden for the struggles of young people and the pain they are under.  One of the
questions I will ask them as I listen to their pain  is 'whether there was some point in their life where they suffered a significant loss in  their life around the time of their diagnosis,'

 In most cases, the emotional walls these young people created within themselves begin to crumble as they recall the death of a good friend early  in their teen years.

You see, in our American culture we are taught that grief should only take a finite number of months to recover and beyond that we should just bury it and 'move on' with our lives.  Grief, however, doesn't work that way. Grief is such a highly individual experience with all people that it is impossible to put a  number on it.

Our American culture also teaches us not to talk about our grief, but to focus instead on our educational achievements. After all, if we focus on the development of our skills or our industrious nature then we will be all right. False.

Young people who carry significant unprocessed loss issues are thrown into survival mode where  they have so much pain in their daily lives that it requires them to focus on just surviving' the day rather than actualizing their potential.

 It is literally impossible for them to do well in school when their whole life is one frantic chaotic set of colliding emotions. As I hear these common stories from young people I am struck by the similarities of those stories and how most of them point back to those early unprocessed grief.

 Not just young people struggle from this, but Adults as well. I remember reading about the high percentage of medical doctors who commit suicide because of their inability to work through their grief after experiencing death within the medical system. These doctors were taught that their calling to this profession was for healing the sick. Many are ill equipped to face grief when sudden losses occur in their practice of medicine. 

 Some hospitals understand this and  have started  groups called grief rounds help medical staff who are having significant problems processing their grief to share what they might be experiencing from any given day. Hospitals who do this understand the value of having emotionally healthy medical staff.

 Grief  isn't  rocket science; yet the emotions we experience from our losses are  real and can cause additional harm as other losses enter into older unprocessed  losses latter on in our lives.

"If there is a God then why do bad things happen" is a common them I hear from people. The sudden loss of a loved one can often be the deciding point on whether people continue to turn from or follow God.

 The other day I read about a 36 year old man who went on a shooting spree in the south, taking out  9 lives, after experiencing the death of his mom. Although I know nothing about this young man, but it became clear to me that when his mom died he was tossed into a whirlwind of emotions that he was totally unaware how to process those feelings. How we handle our grief is a life skill every bit as important as learning to write, spell and understanding math because for the rest of our lives we will be saying goodbye to friends and family along the way.

 When our family experienced the loss of our daughter back in 2007 and we all spiral down into our collective emotions of that loss we chose to keep moving forward, one foot print at a time, attending the  same church we attended before our loss. For us the simple decision to maintain our same rituals we had before the loss was part of the solution for recovering from loss.

 My wife and I chose to find a good listeners who were willing to sit in the muck and mire of our grief, listening to every painful emotion until we had no more pain to share.  I would encourage young people who have significant losses in their lives to not be afraid of their emotions and tell someone they can trust about the pain.

  I would encourage Adults who want to better understand what grief is like to go to my website www.soaringonwingsofeagles.org where they will find a variety of information through videos and testimonials that will help them better understand  the nature of this grief.

When bad things happen doesn't have to be the defining point in our lives.  We do not have to be victims of our grief and by understanding our grief by leaning into those emotions we can be victorious and stronger in the end.

God truly wants you to recover and he understands as our Creator and author of our user manual that recovery from grief takes time; after all, he experienced the same emotions as he watch his son Jesus die on the cross the most painful death any of us can ever imagine. 

 Finally, I noticed that  young people who experience significant losses were better able to help others recover from their losses. Now that is a beautiful thing!