Life often involves change and losses and this can leave us feeling scared, hopeless, lost and stuck. For example, if you’ve been married 30 years and your spouse suddenly dies or leaves you, you may not know who you are without him. If your child is killed in a car crash without a goodbye it may be hard to know how to move forward. Perhaps you had the same job for five years and you where suddenly let go. These are all traumatic events, a shift in your identity description and a loss of security.
It is important to give yourself time to grieve and regroup in these situations. As a therapist, I have seen great growth derive from painful shifts like these because people are forced (over time) to expand and reinvent themselves, their role and their relationship to the world. This isn’t fun and it takes heroic strength and some faith that they will figure it out over time and things will slowly improve.
Grief and loss are often foisted upon many of us to no response of our own but we can learn to accept it and to work to make our lives whole again in ways that are under our control.