Understanding Your Grief
Understanding and Communicating your Grief
Understanding how you are feeling can help you begin to process some of your feelings as well as enable you to communicate these feelings to people who want to help you.
As a bereaved sibling wWe can be caught in a ‘catch 22' situation at the beginning of grief. We need as much support as possible but often those who want to help don't know how to, as they may have no perception of what we are really going through. To help them to help us, it is often up to us to try to explain how we are feeling and actually end up helping them to help us. However, if you yourself don't understand and are finding it hard to describe how you are feeling then instead of turning to others for help, you might feel it is just easier to hide away. Although occasionally we may need to grieve alone, this isn't a long term solution to day to day life. It's very important to let other people help you and support you through your grief.
Communicating
Communicating with others has numerous benefits. Every time we tell someone about the death of our siblings it helps us to begin to process and acknowledge what has happened which in turn helps us begin to deal with what has happened to us:
Friends/Family : If we are communicating with a friend/family member it may help them understand more clearly what we are going through. Therefore they may feel less apprehensive about reaching out to help you in the future and know more clearly what may help you. Support and understanding from people you are close to can be a fantastic cushion not only in the early stages of grief, but all along your grief journey, especially during anniversary periods.
Counselling : If the communication is in the form of counselling, then this has the benefit that you won't be worried about upsetting or ‘burdening' the counsellor as you may feel with friends or family. This form of communication will probably be more structured. Counselling can be a huge help at any stage of grief.
Internet: As offered on this site, communication via the internet (either via our pen-pal list or forum page) can offer support in numerous forms. You have the opportunity to meet and chat to other bereaved siblings whose advice and support can be invaluable. As the path of grief we have been forced to walk is so very lonely being able to communicate with others who are either in a similar position right now, or who may be further down the line is very comforting and helpful.
Understanding
Finding out about grief, the different stages and types of grief can help us verbalise our feelings. Grief is something that tends not to be discussed very much, partly because it is inherently depressing and partly because people don't know how to talk about and react to death. Therefore when we are faced with death and consequently grief, we can feel at a loss about how to describe and understand what is happening to us. Learning about different ways people grieve and the different stages can be reassuring and show us that we are perfectly normal and that these extremely strong and confusing emotions are perfectly normal even though we may not know how to handle them.
There are various ways we can try to learn about both grief in general and more specifically our own grief.
Books: This is a fantastic way of learning about both grief in general and specifically how sibling grief can differ from other forms of grief. There is a list of particularly good sibling grief books in our TCF library. You can read the reviews and either decide to purchase them yourself or if we hold them in our library you are welcome to borrow them.
Media: There are various sources of media such as TV, radio, newspapers and magazines which have touched upon the areas of bereavement and grief. More recently, articles specifically directed at sibling grief are emerging. This can help those of us who are grieving the loss of our siblings but also they can enlighten others who are unaware of the difficulties of this type of grief. If you are struggling to find ways of asking for help, you could show one of these articles to a friend to help both of you.
Counselling: Learning about grief using counselling, will help you identify which stage of grief you are going through, and maybe talk about different coping mechanisms. This may also be helpful if you feel you have been ‘stuck' in one stage of grief and are struggling to move on from this part of your grief.