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Grief Overload ~ Normal Grief
Dear Marty ~ Traumatic Loss, Delayed Grief Reaction, Complicated Grief, "Grief Overload"
Q & A by Bereavement Counselor Marty Tousley
Question:
Fifteen years ago, my fiancé was brutally murdered. I was a teacher at the time, and I also loved to sing. Shortly after this tragic and
traumatic loss,
and within two weeks of each other, two of the students in my class died. After that, I completely lost both my desire and my ability to sing. Four years later I met another man, and got pregnant shortly after we were married, but I had a miscarriage when I was just four months along. We saw a marriage counselor for a while, and she stated that perhaps I had
never fully grieved
for my fiancé who was killed, but that's as far as it went. Things grew steadily worse in our marriage, and about a year ago my husband began abusing drugs. We had to file for bankruptcy, and a month after the bankruptcy hearing, I filed for divorce.
Before my fiancé died, I was thin, confident, fun-loving, interested in trying new things, sang in two church choirs and at weddings, was very self sufficient and independent. Now I'm back living with my parents. It's a hard, conscious struggle for me to keep a job without getting fired, and lately I've become so ditzy it's unbelievable. I get lost easily, and my parents run through a check list for me before I go to work. For the last couple of years, every now and then I've had
nightmares,
where anything bad - mostly murders - would happen to my family. I feel like I'm a nut job telling you all of this . . . I know there are a lot of people who have had worse happen to them and they don't seem to be having a hard time getting on with life.
My family doesn't believe that I ever
grieved my losses,
and now I'm ready to admit that I don't think I ever did either. I don't even know where to start, or what to do. All I know is that I cannot survive the next 15 years this way. This sounds rather deep, but I feel as if my soul is becoming very tired. I am wondering where one would even start on the grieving process. Do you have any suggestions?
Answer:
I'm so sorry that you've experienced so many losses in your life over the last 15 years, and I can only imagine how overwhelmed and traumatized you must feel. It's not surprising to me that, because you've been hit with one significant loss after another, probably with little opportunity to process each of them separately and individually, you now find yourself in what I would certainly call grief overload. Grief is like that - if we can't give it the attention it demands at the time of our loss, it doesn't "go" anywhere, and it doesn't get resolved - it simply goes underground and waits for us to take care of it. And sooner or later, out it comes, just as if any or all of these losses had happened yesterday. As soon as we are hit with just one more loss, or even the anniversary of a past loss, it is not at all uncommon for that event to trigger all the grief reactions we've been suppressing for a very long time - like the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
This is not "going out of your mind" or "having a nervous breakdown" - it is a normal reaction to a very abnormal situation. Since your losses have come so regularly and so close together, I would expect that you are still in a state of shock and disbelief, not even ready to begin the work of grieving. That's not necessarily a bad thing - denying the reality of what is happening can be nature's way of cushioning all those blows because they are way too much for you to take in all at once, and it's the only way you can continue to function on a daily basis right now. It may even feel as if you must take a defensive posture, keeping yourself in a state of heightened alert to guard against the next onslaught of very bad news that surely must be waiting just around the corner. Certainly when someone close to you dies, it brings home to you that if it can happen to that person, then surely it can happen to you, too. With all of this going on, with your assumptive world turned completely upside down, is it any wonder that your soul feels so tired?
You say that several years ago a marriage counselor suggested that you may not have fully mourned the loss of your fiancé, and for the last two years you've been having nightmares, which suggests to me that you have a great deal of unfinished business - probably related to unresolved grief - that on some unconscious level (through your
dreaming)
is demanding your attention. Please don't underestimate the impact of each of these losses you've endured; any one of them is significant, but when they are cumulative they can lead to a complicated grief reaction.
Since you have access to the Internet, you have a world of information, comfort and support at your fingertips, but I don't think it's realistic to expect that each of your issues can be fully addressed in an exchange of one or two e-mail messages. I think it's important that you have someone to talk to in person about all of this, so that your feelings about each of your losses can be explored, expressed, worked through and released.
There are all kinds of resources "out there" in your own community aimed specifically at those who are grieving - you just have to make the effort to pick up your telephone and ask for the help that you need...
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