Healthy Grieving and Mourning to Release Broken Bonds:

Continued from the article," How to prevent "Health Obstructions"? >>>

Grief is the normal process of reacting to the loss and grieving is a natural response that liberates psycho-spiritual attachments or bonds on losses, barring those shocked people who can't form real bonds due to extreme grief.

Grief can be relieved by way of mourning. Mourning is a natural healing process at mental, emotional and spiritual level that eventually helps up in returning to normal balance and functioning, and frees up energy to form new bonds from broken bonds and allows us losers to regain life balance, energy, and purpose to form new bonds. Mourning heals the pain and emptiness of any loss over the period of time. All adults and kids must mourn at various losses as they age and change. Even though the loss occurred may be similar to that of others, still every loss is unique, as far as the sufferer is concerned, since every person, his behavior and his existing circumstances forms a unique combination. Each type of loss implies the person has had something taken away. As a family goes through a terminal illness of its member, many losses are experienced and each of them triggers its own grief reaction, for person to person. Grief reactions may be felt in response to physical losses like death or in response to social losses like divorce or loss of a job. 

Normally we associate "grief" just with the death of a loved person, pet, or relationship. Actually, we must mourn like innocent children, at the endings of all those things to whom we were attached throughout our lives, either physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But we tend to suppress it. Grief may be experienced as a mental, physical, social, or emotional reaction. Mental reactions can include resentment, guilt, nervousness, depression, and desolation. Physical reactions can include sleeping disorders, eating disorders or discomforts like headaches, tics, muscle spasms or stomachaches along with many other ailment symptoms or ill-health conditions. Many of the bodily ailments and discomforts are promoted or caused by psychological repression and related thoughts. Social reactions can include excessive concern or worries of others in the family, seeing family or friends or returning to work. Grief may be described as the presence of physical problems or a change in the normal behavior as a result of shame, guilt, self-reproach, hostility or because of constant thoughts of the person who died.

Mourning implies the process, by which people adapt to a loss. It is influenced by cultural customs, rituals, and society's rules for coping with loss. To grieve well, inner and outer (social) obligations are to be taken into account. Unfortunately in our society, we associate crying with weakness or childishness and resist crying in public- especially males. However crying is a natural bodily balancing response that purges stress-producing chemicals, like urinating or vomiting. Withholding permission to cry and express related emotions and thoughts blocks grief, and causes physiological stress, which may culminate in numerous symptoms or ill-health conditions. 

People while grieving often feel extremely exhausted because the process of grieving usually requires physical and emotional energy. The grief they are feeling is not necessarily for the person who died, but also for the unfulfilled wishes and plans for the relationship with that person. Death often reminds people of past losses or separations. 

If normal grieving is blocked, person feels "depressed" and/or "irritable." If this persists, or that person accumulates too many un-grieved losses and repressed sadness and anger, he (or she) may become addicted or physically sick (e.g. migraines, cancer, hypertension, diabetes...).

Phases of Grief:

Everyone reacts to grief differently. An introvert personality may be reticent or withdrawn or one individual will be open and talkative. Some of us adjust well to very severe losses, while others recover poorly from far less trauma. It is our natural instinctive tendency to return to balance, so as to return to our natural state of health.

Healthy grieving is very essential for personal and family health, bonding, and growth. -still few of shocked people could not be able to cope with such traumatic incidents.

Some common symptoms of Blocked Grieving: 
Seeming "forever" sad, quietness, or depressed, or often feeling numb or "nothing" in general, or about a loss (broken bond). Mind remains full of thoughts about death, like death is temporary, not final or death is final and terrifying, it cannot be changed; Dead person can come back to life. Curious about death; May have exaggerated fears about particular place, vehicle or workplace, may feel abandoned, Heightened emotions, guilt, anger, shame; Increased anxiety over own death; mood swings; Fear of rejection; not wanting to be different from peers. People who always seem very intellectual or "so called" unemotional may be wounded frozen grievers.

Repressed anger: Signs include repeated: procrastination tendencies; unpunctuality; sadistic or sarcastic humor; cynicism; sighing; inappropriate cheerfulness; magical thinking, over-controlled monotone voice; insomnia or excessive sleep or/ and weight loss or obese, waking up tired, tiring easily, or inappropriate drowsiness; irritability; crankiness, aggressive behaviors; imaginary illnesses, clenched jaws or teeth grinding (specially at night); back pain; muscle spasms, tics, or twitches; and fist clenching, or other automatic actions, problems in eating, sleeping, and bladder and bowel control;. Some of these may have medical causes.

Minimizings and/or denials. Consistently downplaying or underestimating the loss for a sake false satisfaction. Unable to digest the fact that the ultimate denial is of one's own denial. Denial is a common symptom of false-self dominance.

Chronic weariness, depression, or apathy. It takes a lot of personal energy to steadily repress frightening emotions and awarenesses. Regressive behaviors (loss of interest in outside activities); Impulsive behaviors and frustrations; Feels guilty about being alive (especially related to death of a brother, sister, or peer).

Blocked mourners may have one or more of those symptoms and often they are inclined to hide or disguise them unconsciously -out of repressed shame, guilt, and anxiety. Frozen grief can gradually and silently slows down or even stops both personal growth and the future healthy bonding. Chronic sickness or depression, substance or activity addiction (like workaholism), obesity, uncontrolled behavior or rage sadness to the extent of suicidal tendencies, ongoing hostility, promiscuity, repeated law-breaking troubles are all possible symptoms of blocked mourning or other such wounds. 

Grief and mourning -spare no one and- are normal life events. All of us have developed our own way to cope with grief. This 'in built' grieving mechanism may be faulty and/or far away from the necessary grieving process as discussed above. Good grieving means an unhindered natural healing process -that completes in a manner as discussed above- so as to allow the sufferer to accept their losses and form healthy new bonds.

Understanding and promoting good grief can help us to realize the gravity of our losses like:

	Our losses are relative
	Our losses are predictable;
	Can be material and/or intangible and ...
	Our losses may be either planned or/and expected
	Unforeseen (e.g. a car accident or amputation)
	Our endings can either be very slow (like natural aging), or may be sudden (e.g. being robbed, flooded, or fired without warning).

Good grieving always makes us hopeful that forming new bonds is  possible. We're each born with the innate capacity to form minor to major emotional attachments or bonds to things, people, places, rituals, ideas, and other things that we come across during our life journey. Since Life usually forces these bonds to break over the period of time, obviously we're also equipped naturally with the capacity to grieve: so as to move through a predictable sequence of emotional, mental, and sometimes spiritual states. If unobstructed, this sequence eventually relieves our distress and distraction from broken bonds, over the period of time, by evolving true acceptance. Our genetic programming to survive and to grow naturally tries to propel us through this sequence.

This good grieving process includes a gradual shift from mental chaos to realistic, consistent clarity on that mishap like reviewing the losses, reasons of that mishap, whom to blame or held responsible and gravity of that losses in distracting the life. Over the period of time, our psyche can gently and patiently help us to find out our own answers to these questions.

The Spiritual Level of Good Grief: 
Faith or belief in one's religion or philosophy implies nothing but the surrendering of your ego before the almighty nature, so as to discover your true-self. This is just like an innocent child that surrenders before the parents when find himself (or herself) petty, inept and forlorn in acquiring those things, which he (or she) desired. Sheer thinking of security can boost your survival efforts to overcome nearby negative factors. A stable, nourishing spiritual faith in a trustworthy Higher Power, 'Nature', or 'the Universe' may relieve grief via prayer, reflection, and perhaps spiritual mentoring - regaining or growing a new, firm faith that their Higher Power, or 'Nature,' as trustworthy in ways that can't be humanly understood. It seems that people with firm positive spiritual faith can often reach acceptance of major losses more quickly than 'non-believers.' Do not switch faith or religion just because someone recommends it. Be a better Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim, if you are already one of these. 

By this way, through healthy mourning, the mental, emotional, and spiritual levels are eventually contributing the healing process. All the losses, tensions gradually subside over the period of time. Inner wounds heal, and inner "gaps" start to refill with new bonds. Each person's unique needs, behavioral traits, and surrounding situations shape, if and how this completion occurs, and how long it takes. Because mourning involves mind, body, and spirit, naturally conscious effort can't speed it up. On the other hand, this grief relieving process (mourning) can be unconsciously slowed or stopped, in the case of shocked people. This seems to be very common when the sufferer is emotionally weak, weak-willed, servile and easily prone to existing hostile  circumstances.

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