Topic Tuesday // Tues, 26 April, 7pm AEST // Grief

@awe absolutely! Not everyone can bear the weight of our personal story and I think, in many respects, folks have to earn the right to hear it. It needs to be safe and vulnerability can go, not always, hand in hand with shame and fear.

@And-016 Thank you and you are welcome. I hope I have helped in some way 🙂

Thanks @awe and @Fatima - so true. Another myth I have heard about is that when we reflect over again on our grief or retell the circumstances surrounding our grief, we must be 'stuck in the past' or 'dwelling' on our loss? Is this actually true, can we become stuck?

I have not been able to concentrate enough to read a book for at least a year.

Continuing on what @awe said .... the issue of having some people who can listen to your pain, who can listen to your issues, and can sit comfortably with your grief ... when I've met people like that in my grief "journey" it is immensely powerful. They would never know just how much they have made my day!

Hi @Heartworks

You've been through a lot too!

I suspect it has become a big part of the new you. There are so many layers to all of this.

Some people think that the “old you” will return but you can’t return to being exactly the same person you once were. The traumatic events are too large to not leave a significant impact on you – how you think and how you act. You might be less carefree; you might have a more generalised anxiety about the ways life can suddenly change. Your sense of security can be profoundly affected. What you might also acquire, though, is an extra (or new) dimension of empathy; a greater compassion for the experiences of others and resistance towards drawing inferences about the experiences of others. The development of those positive qualities is not a given, mind you. There are often also feelings of injustice and anger, and for some that can become consuming. For others, an empathy emerges through it all.

@Former-Member Take a holiday to the past, just don't set up home and live there 🙂 that's how I look at it. Anniversaries will re-hash emotions and events, and experiencing those is fine, however as mentioned, living there for days on end can enable us to be stuck. We are creatures who ner to make sense or meaning of things, I think 🙂

I think it's helpful to know that everyone grieves differently - there are no rights or wrongs.

@Fatima - concentrating is often something that is hugely impacted by grief. My personal experience was that I never know if I could fully concentrate again, I worried about being able to complete study, hold down a job, etc. It did return, but at a point where I'd written it off.