Dealing With Grief

Risk Factors

Medical research has not identified what causes complicated grief or who may be more susceptible. However, there are some established situations where a person is more likely to develop prolonged grief. These include:

• An unexpected or especially violent death
• Lack of a support system – either family or close friends
• Suicide of a loved one
• Childhood separation from parents or loved ones
• Dependent relationship with the deceased loved one
• History of childhood abuse or neglect
• Being unprepared for the loss
• Experiencing multiple losses within a short period of time

These factors may indicate a situation where prolonged grief can occur. However, some people will not experience prolonged grief even when they are exposed to one or more of these situations. The best way to diagnose complicated grief is to carefully monitor your loved one and make sure that the symptoms of grief subside over time.

Symptoms

As mentioned previously, the initial symptoms of complicated grief are similar to those of normal grief. For the first few months, normal grief and complicated grief are often indistinguishable. The difference occurs because the symptoms of normal grief begin to disappear over time while the signs of complicated often linger or worsen.

Other signs of chronic grief include:

• Obsessive focus on the loss or on reminders of the lost loved one
• Intense yearning for the deceased
• Numbness or detachment from the outside world or from inner emotions
• Preoccupation with personal grief
• Bitterness or anger
• Inability to find pleasure in life
• Depression
• Inability to carry out normal routines
• Lack of trust in others
• No motivation to attend social events
• Feeling that life has no meaning or purpose

A healing bereavement process . . .

Grieving is allowing yourself to feel all the emotions and pain of your loss—the anger, the loneliness, the despair, etc. Some people think if they start crying they’ll never stop, but they will stop because crying will help them heal. It may not feel like it in the moment, but crying is a cleansing process.

A healing bereavement process . . .
For me grief has been a process of allowing myself to feel the depths of my pain and then finding a way to get those emotions outside of my body. The feelings of pain that come with a loss are a natural part of being human. If we don’t allow ourselves to feel them, we deny them and stuff them down, where they fester in our unconscious. In grieving, we bring those emotions to the surface and allow ourselves to feel them.

A healthy bereavement process will then find safe ways to let the emotions out. Creativity has been a very helpful way to do this for many people. Journaling, music, photography, painting, scrapbook making can all be ways that allow us to name our experience and bring our emotions out of our bodies.

A therapist friend of mine told me that she was seeing a client whose husband had died. The client was working through her pain by making scrapbooks about her husband. The client had a teenage son who was having a very hard time dealing with his father’s death. My friend referred him to a male counselor who had also lost his father as a teenager.

Several months later my friend met up with this counselor, and she asked him how the teenage boy was doing. He said, “Oh, he is doing great—he took up scrapbooking too!” I am quite sure this teenager never imagined that he would one day be scrapbooking. And I never imagined that I would have a book of photography and poetry published either. But grief has a way of taking people places they never imagined.

Healthy bereavement is a series of choices. In the early stages a statement like that doesn’t make sense—your pain is not a choice. But for healing to happen choices are made to grieve and then choices are made to process all the messy emotions of grief and then more choices are made to move into a new sense of life and well-being. However, it is always important to remember that each person’s journey is unique, and their timetable is their own.

Bereavement and Your Teeth

How Stress Affects Your Oral Health

Excess stress may give you a headache, a stomachache, or just a feeling of being "on edge." But too much stress could also be doing a number on your mouth, teeth, gums, and overall health.

The potential fallout from stress and anxiety that can affect your oral health includes:

• Mouth sores, including canker sores and cold sores
• Clenching of teeth and teeth grinding (bruxism)
• Poor oral hygiene and unhealthy eating routines
• Periodontal (gum) disease or worsening of existing periodontal disease

So how can you prevent these oral health problems?

Mouth Sores

Canker sores -- small ulcers with a white or grayish base and bordered in red -- appear inside the mouth, sometimes in pairs or even greater numbers. Although experts aren't sure what causes them -- it could be immune system problems, bacteria, or viruses -- they do think that stress, as well as fatigue and allergies, can increase the risk of getting them. Canker sores are not contagious.

Most canker sores disappear in a week to 10 days. For relief from the irritation, try over-the-counter topical anesthetics. To reduce irritation, don't eat spicy, hot foods or foods with a high acid content, such as tomatoes or citrus fruits.

Cold sores, also called fever blisters, are caused by the herpes simplex virus and are contagious. Cold sores are fluid-filled blisters that often appear on or around the lips, but can also crop up under the nose or around the chin area.

Emotional upset can trigger an outbreak. So can a fever, a sunburn, or skin abrasion.

Like canker sores, fever blisters often heal on their own in a week or so. Treatment is available, including over-the-counter remedies and prescription antiviral drugs. Ask your doctor or dentist if you could benefit from either. It's important to start treatment as soon as you notice the cold sore forming.

Teeth Grinding

Stress may make you clench and grind your teeth -- during the day or at night, and often subconsciously. Teeth grinding is also known as bruxism.

If you already clench and grind your teeth, stress could make the habit worse. And, grinding your teeth can lead to problems with the temporomandibular joint (TMJ), located in front of the ear where the skull and lower jaw meet.

See your doctor and ask what can be done for the clenching and grinding. Your dentist may recommend a night guard, worn as you sleep, or another appliance to help you stop or minimize the actions.

Bereavement

Bereavement is defined as a state of sadness or loneliness. An individual is in a state of bereavement when that person experiences loss of another person. The loss could be due to relationship breakups, death, loss of pets, someone moving away forever, divorce for instance, loss of employment, etc. thus, the cause for bereavement might be different for each person. Bereavement behaviors are loneliness, anger, guilt, numbness, shock, agitation, etc. Bereavement grief means a package of emotions related with the loss of an individual. Researchers oftentimes pertain to bereavement behavior as grief cycle. After an extensive research of over four decades and still continuing, researchers have discovered some usual demeanors observed in persons in mourning. When an individual is undergoing through this grief, the person observes behaviors such as crying, insomnia, restlessness and withdrawal. But the most commonly observed behaviors are denial and shock. Bereavement grief is almost just a part of each person's life. This kind of grief has a large extent of effects, and the density in which an individual could be affected vary from one person to another. There are 2 kinds of bereavement grief. The first one is complicated and the other is a normal grief. When a person is suffering from a complicated grief he or she sometimes may attempt to kill him/herself. Most persons typically fall helpless prey to complicated bereavement grief due to a sudden shock. On the other hand, normal bereavement grief is commonly accepted for a person.Mourning has a despair and disorganization behavior, where someone is crying and grieving due to being away from a person or due to loss of a loved one. Bereavement behavior not just affects a person mentally, but it also causes risky and dangerous effects on one's healthy life and well being. Heavy symptoms of breathing problems and abdominal pain are observed even after six months of an event that has happened. Volatile reactions are always observed in individuals who feel that their social image or their identity is being affected. Changeable reactions may cause people to get easily frustrated, harbor jealousy and hatred with other persons. They have a natural tendency to feel they are helpless, and this hurts a lot; feeling furious is also commonly frequent in them. Reorganization is observed on this kind of behavior when a person or something is lost without their fault or without the individual being dead. Also, some bereaved people can't realize the reality because of the feeling of shock and denial, and a feeling of being unreal is very common. People aren't able to accept the facts, or reality which has happened in them. Oftentimes, they are afflicted with depersonalization and anaesthetizing of effect. Fortunately, you don't need to pay a large amount of money or go to any doctor for the remedy. You yourself are enough to come out of it of this condition. And, you are not able accomplish this alone you can certainly contact Hand of Passion at 877 867 8556 for immediate attention.