Cope with Grief Naturally

When something devastating happens in your life—such as a loved one’s death, a significant loss, or even just the disintegration of an important relationship—you will turn to grief in a variety of ways. Some say the stages of grief (popularized in the 1970s book On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross), namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, are on their way out. Many believe that grieving is private and individualized to each person. Instead of an obstacle you are trying to jump over, grief can be just one of the many things you pick up in life that you carry with you over time. Sometimes it creeps up on you when you least expect it and you rarely have control of it, for example driving by your late grandmother’s favorite lunch spot and suddenly tearing up.

Even if you can’t grab your grief and shake it right out of your consciousness like so many wish for, you can try to live with it day by day with these helpful hints:

Write it out. People have a journal for dreams or everyday occurrences but using the platform of pen and paper (or keyboard and screen) to extract your feelings is helpful to make your emotions tangible, so you can go back later and understand exactly what you were dealing with on any given day. Also called Expressive Writing, this form of healing is also good for stress—which can be a symptom of grief—and is a respected part of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM).

Listen only to your heart. No one—not Kubler-Ross, your sister, best friend, therapist, or me—can tell you how to grieve. Know what you want to do but let everyone help by listening and being there for you. Any friend, colleague, priest, relative, or neighbor is going to want to help you—reminding you to eat, sleep, get dressed, and remember that you are still alive—and just talking to those closest to you is great for owning your grief instead of keeping it inside and letting it eat away at your thoughts. An expert in grief studies and a University of Memphis professor of psychology, Robert Neimeyer acknowledges the impossibility of organizing grief and says, “When we're confronted with emotional chaos, we yearn for clarity, and the Kubler-Ross stages of grief serve as a kind of road map…. But it's more accurate to think about phases of adaptation rather than stages of grief. And they overlap rather than fall in sequence.”

Stay on a Routine. If you fall into a pattern of undoing everything in your life while you are grieving there may not be enough to put back together once you are done. A few weeks of unrest is typical and no one can be blamed for doing so, but months or years spent in grief could mean you may not return to the world as you knew it. You could lose your job, your friends, your social scene, even members of your family could fall away if you become unresponsive in the wake of disaster. Death or loss is hard on anyone, even if it is expected, but allowing it to consume you is to become self-destructive to all the good things in your life. As with any change good or bad, adapt with it and sticking to a routine can help you stay out of the grief rut.

Because grief cannot immediately be understood, rationalized, or contained, this is not by any means a handbook for someone who has had a loved one taken away from them. Providing natural pill-free alternatives to the grieving process is one way to help start the healing process because no amount of time is going to make you feel better but these little tips could just save you from falling into a terminal grieving mode.