Erroneous Beliefs about Grief

One of the cremation services offered in College Park, MD is access to grief resources after the death of a loved one. Grief is part of the journey you will have to travel when someone whom you love dies.

Your grief will not be exactly like anyone else’s grief for your loved one. Our relationships with those we love are personal and individual, and the things that we grieve about when they are gone reflect that uniqueness and individualization.

It’s important to remember that grief is a response to loss. While we typically think of grief as being specific to the death of a loved one, the reality is that we can experience grief over any type of loss.

These losses may not be the death of a person, but they are the death of something. Losses like this can including being laid off or terminated from a job, not getting a job that we really wanted, moving away from a place we love to a new city (perhaps because of a new job), breaking up a long-term relationship (married or not married), and losing a close friendship because of time, distance, or an unresolvable difference.

Loss can come at many places and in many ways in our lives and they can trigger feelings of grief. If these kinds of losses come on the heels of the death of someone you love, they can intensify your grief until it can seem as though grief is swallowing you up.

You may, in an attempt to stem this overload of grief, be more susceptible to some of the erroneous beliefs about grief.

One of these erroneous beliefs about grief is that if you ignore the pain of grief, then it will disappear faster. The reality is that you more you try to ignore the pain you are feeling from grieving or the more you do to try to distract yourself from it, the longer you will actually have to grieve.

The painful part of grieving will not go away until you face the emotions and feelings of grief and deal with them. This can be unpleasant at times. It can be confusing at times. It can be very unsettling at times.

However, all of this is a normal part of the grieving process, and ignoring it or trying to distract yourself from it will only make it last longer and make it much worse.

Another erroneous belief about grief is that you are truly grieving the death of your loved one if you cry about it. Crying is good for you (although if you cry long enough, you may have a headache and swollen eyes that only sleep will take away), but crying is just one way to express the emotions of grief.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing someone – or even you – is not grieving deeply just because they – or you – aren’t crying a lot. There are many ways to process grief without any external manifestation of it.

The need to be emotionally strong after the death of a loved one is another erroneous belief about grief. This one may be harder for you to navigate through because this erroneous belief is projected on us by society.

We are expected to return to our normal lives shortly after the death of our loved ones and function as though nothing traumatic has happened to us. We are expected to meet or exceed all the expectations of us as well, or better, than we did before our loved one’s death.

However, pretending to be strong when you are emotionally shattered inside means delaying grief. While you may be able to do this for a while (perhaps even years), eventually a day of reckoning comes when you can no longer hold off the grief. It will be stronger, more intense, and likely will take make longer to work through.

If you need information about the cremation services offered in College Park, MD, you can talk with our expert staff at Donald V. Borgwardt Funeral Home, P.A.