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Friday, December 8, 2023

Life Is Hard Chapter 3: Grief

            Samuel Bean

Professor Oliver

PHIL 1030-011

12/8/2023

    
                                How to Grieve Beneficially                                 

Grief is a tricky subject to talk about since not one person’s ideas about grief are the same. Through much research and deliberation however, there are some things that we as humans can do to help us cope with loss. With loss, we will experience a variety of emotions including anger, guilt, fear and sorrow. As George A. Bonanno said, these emotions do not come in stages as many people are led to believe. Instead they come in waves and should be thought of more like an oscillation since it is repetitive. In the book “Life is Hard” it states, “As time passes, grief alters not because the reasons for it change, but because grieving is something we do, in time, as part of human life. It’s not an emotional state but an emotional process.” This further reinstates the idea that grief comes in waves and the longer we deal with it, the better equipped we are to handle these feelings in the future. 

In order to help mediate the negative feelings of grief, Epictetus said you need to change your mindframe about it. He believed that if we knew what it meant that what we love is perishable, then we could effectively outsmart grief. We should not get turned around and worked up over things in which we cannot change and have no control over; such as death or another person’s actions. Instead we should only focus on things which we can change and detach from everything else. Everything in your life, apart from you, is temporary: People, objects, feelings, and even ideas. If we can wrap our heads around this concept sufficiently, grief becomes exceedingly easier to handle. A stoicism proposal states that we can either hold our desires close and change the world to meet them or change our desires to match the world as it’s going to be. And as it turns out, we cannot always change the world to our liking, so that ultimately leaves us with one choice; to change your desires as the world changes and “go with the flow.” 


With loss, the ultimate goal is to grieve well, not to extinguish grief. In the past 30 years, psychologists have provided studies on how being forced to debrief a traumatic event directly after it happened has negative effects on mental and physical health which can last for many years. Grief takes time and if we don’t allow ourselves time to process what happened, then it can eat us up and cause detrimental problems later on in life. As the book “Life is Hard” states, “to find a way through grief is to sustain a relationship on new terms.” Everyone will eventually learn their own way to cope and work through grief. And in doing this, we are able to find comfort in the memories associated with the person lost. 

Throughout my reading of this chapter, many questions about grief in my own life began to arise. Personally, I have only lost a couple people in my life to death. While my young age had a major part to do with it, I got over these losses very quickly in relation to the people around me. As I grow older, most of the grief I experience comes from relationships with other people, however I seem to work through these pretty easily too without many problems. While this may seem like I figured out how to grieve well, one question always seems to make me question myself. Does grieving someone quickly mean you didn’t love them as much as you thought you did? My answer to this question would be no because with time, people learn to grieve more appropriately and should be able to grieve quicker than others based on sheer experience, no matter how much you love that person. With this being said, ever since I was kid I’ve been able to grieve quickly so I’m not really sure how to interpret this question. Furthermore, whenever I look back on past relationships I tend not to have an overwhelming amount of love for that person anymore, or at least not like I once had. So, in relation to myself, the answer to this question is a yes, grieving quickly means you didn’t love that person as much as you thought you did. However, if we are speaking on a more general note, I don’t think my personal experience should sway my opinion, so my answer is no. Sometimes some things are easier to grieve than others but that doesn’t necessarily give any insight to the one grieving, only to the relationship between them and the person being grieved. 


Below I have attached a link to an interesting study which goes in depth about what happens inside your brain when you grieve along with why it takes time for you to heal. 

How grief and loss affect your brain, and why it takes time to adapt : Shots - Health News : NPR


1 comment:

  1. "not one person’s ideas about grief are the same"-- bit of an overstatement. People's ways of grieving differ, but not entirely uniquely for each of us. I take the main point to be that we should not acquiesce in imposing others' expectations on ourselves, but should let our own emotional needs lead us if grief is to be purgative and ultimately reconciling.

    Link those proper names, etc.

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