Hi,
I’m Victoria, a licensed marriage & family therapist who specializes in providing mental health counseling services to children, teens, and adult women needing support for trauma, grief, depression, and ADHD. August 30th is National Grief Awareness Day. I wanted to discuss it for the whole month of August. Stick around if you want to share in a journey of grief together.
Anticipatory Grief - Coping with Impending Loss | Grief Counseling
Grief Defined:
When I did a Google search on the word “Grief,” the first response that popped up was “deep sorrow mainly caused by someone’s death.” I asked ChatGPT, “What is grief?” Here are some highlights or takeaways.
Grief is a deep and complex emotional response to loss, particularly the loss of someone or something significant.”
Grief isn't limited to the death of a loved one;
Grief can manifest in various ways, including physical symptoms
The grieving process can be long and nonlinear, often involving periods of adjustment and healing.
Everyone grieves in their way and at their own pace.
As I mentioned above, I specialize in supporting children, teens, and adult women through grief. In my 14 years of experience working with families, I’ve helped young children who lost parents from tragedies learn and believe what happened was not their fault (grief from divorce or death of a parent). I’ve helped teens crawl out of depression who lost friends from suicide or accidents. I’ve helped adult women unpack and thrive from the loss of parental relationships due to divorce or tragic death. I’ve helped adults grieve and move into thriving after the loss of a job or divorce.
I have also worked through and am still working through my amount of grief and loss. From grandparents and great-grandparents and loss of parents through divorce and early death, and I am currently working through “anticipatory grief.”
What is Anticipatory grief, you ask? For me, it’s learning to say goodbye to my remaining parent to stage 4 cancer. ChatGPT defines anticipatory grief as”... the emotional response experienced when someone is expecting a significant loss in the near future, such as the death of a loved one who is terminally ill. It involves grieving the impending loss before it occurs.”
What ChatGPT did not cover in my question:
The anxiety you feel about your morality that comes with anticipatory grief. The anxiety and impending doom, or avoidant waiting, worry to hear the start time of the mortality sand clock. The painful but essential and needed discussion with family on who will be there at the end, where your loved one will spend the last days of their life, and what they want certain people to have when they are gone. It’s like a thousand small cuts to your flesh, each a dull reminder you're on limited time. The guilt you feel that for a split second sometimes you wish it was over, but you truly only want more time. You would do anything for more time. The feeling that you want time to stand still, but it won't, and you can’t. You must keep caring for your children, working on your business, providing for your family, and supporting your clients. The difficulty of being 14 hours away from them. All the questions you want to ask, the memories you want to relieve, the love you want them to feel, but you know if it’s hard for you, it must be soul-crushing for them.
The guilt and sadness of knowing we are in anticipatory grief of losing them and having to keep on living without them. They are battling the life they no longer will live. This is me right now, this is her, my beautiful mother; this is all of us: humanity and the grief we share.
How do I manage:
Grief processing and responses are unquie to each individual, and as long as you are not harming yourself or someone else, the way you choose to grieve is ok.
I allow myself to cry as much as needed (sometimes I need to schedule a good cry)
I laugh as often as possible
I speak with her nearly every day
Sometimes, I need to avoid the feelings, and that is ok
I write, I pray, I sing, I listen to music
I record her, record our talks
We cry together
I leave no positive words unsaid
I lean on friends and family
I go to therapy
I sit and enjoy times of quiet
I ensure I am getting good sleep
I make time for exercise/ movement
I focus on the time we have left together
I use the anxiety of my mortality to fuel motivation for better health choices and focus on quality time spent.
I use Lens Neurofeedback sessions to manage my grief and help process the feelings.
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