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Stages of Grief

The work of grief cannot be hurried. It takes a great deal of time, usually a year
or more. It may be the purest pain you have ever known.

The following are stages of grief that are commonly experienced after a loss. You
may not experience all of these, and you may not experience them in this order. It
is important to realize, however, that what you are feeling is natural and that, with time, you will heal.

Shock
Some people experience shock after a loss, saying things like “I feel numb” and
displaying no tears or emotions. Sometimes there is denial. Gradually the
bereaved become aware of what has happened, and they are able to express their
emotions. Other people never go through a prolonged stage of shock. They are
able to express emotions immediately.
Emotional Release
At some point a person begins to feel and to hurt. It is very important not to
suppress your feelings. Suppressed feelings often surface at a later time in
unhealthy ways. Shared feelings are a gift, and bring a closeness to all involved.
Preoccupation with the Deceased or the Crisis
Despite efforts to think of other things, a grieving person may find it difficult to
shift his/her mind from thoughts about the deceased person. This is not unusual
and, with time, should not be a problem.
Symptoms of Some Physical and Emotional Distress
These distresses may come in waves.

The most common physical distresses are:
• Sleeplessness
• Tightness in the throat
• A choking feeling
• Shortness of breath
• Deep sighing
• An empty hollow feeling in the stomach
• Lack of muscular power (“It’s almost impossible to climb stairs” or
“everything I lift seems heavy”)
• Digestive symptoms and poor appetite

Closely associated with the physical distresses may be certain emotional
alternations, the most common of which are:
• A slight sense of unreality
• Feelings of emotional distance from people – that no one really cares or
understands
• Sometimes people appear shadowy or very small
• Sometimes there are feelings of panic, thoughts of self-destruction, or the
desire to run away or “chuck it all.”
These emotional disturbances can cause many people to feel they are approaching
insanity, but these feelings are actually quite normal.
Hostile Reactions
You may catch yourself responding with a great deal of anger to situations that
previously would not have bothered you. The feelings can be surprising and very
uncomfortable. They often make people feel that they are going crazy. Anger can
be directed at the doctor, the nurse, God, sometimes even at your loved one who
died.
Often, there may be feelings of hurt or hostility toward family members who do
not or, for various reasons cannot, provide the emotional support the grieving
person may have expected from them. Anger and hostility are normal. Do not
suppress your anger. However, it is important that you understand and direct your
anger towards what you are really angry at, namely the loss of someone you
loved.
Guilt
There is almost always some sense of guilt in grief. The bereaved think of the
many things they felt they could have done, but didn’t. They accuse themselves of
negligence. These hurts pop up in grief. Guilt is normal and should pass with
time.
Depression
Many grieving people feel total despair, unbearable loneliness and hopelessness;
nothing seems worthwhile. These feelings may be even more intense for those
who live alone or who have little family. These feelings are normal and should
also pass with time.
Withdrawal
The grieving person often tends to withdraw from social relationships. Their daily
routines are often disrupted as well. Life seems like a bad dream. This is normal
and will take some effort to overcome, but the rewards are worthwhile.
Resolution and Readjustment
This comes gradually. The memories are still there, the love is still there, but the
wound begins to heal. You begin to get on with life. It’s hard to believe now, but
you will feel better. By experiencing deep emotion and accepting it, you will
grow warmth, depth, understanding and wisdom.

Homeopathy

We all grieve. It’s part of life. The fact that it is a universal exper­ience raises the question of whether or not we should consider griev­ing to be normal and, if not, when is it not normal? In other words, when would it require treatment? That question, in turn, raises fundamental questions about the purpose of Homeopathic treatment. After all, why would we want to treat normal life?

Let’s begin by addressing that. The first principle of Homeopathy is the treat­ment of like with like. Every remedy is described in the standard materia medica which collate the information from sources such as provings and clinical experience. These remedy descriptions are like stories or patterns. Homeopathic treatment involves selecting the remedy whose description best matches the stories or the life patterns of the patient. In orthodox medical practice we treat pathology – disturbances which we call diseases or illnesses.

However, the Homeopathic treatment is both deeper and more encompassing than the orthodox approach. It involves a full consideration of the person who has the disease, the human being who is experiencing the illness. This means that pretty much anything and everything the patient tells of their experience is poten­tially usable in the process of remedy selection. What this doesn’t mean, how­ever, is that every aspect of a human being or their experience can be changed by a remedy. We need to make a judge­ment about exactly what we’re hoping to change. Let’s consider grief in the light of that perspective.

The Homeopathic approach to suf­fering is different. Homeopathic medi­cines don’t suppress symptoms. Rather they stimulate the processes of repair, of recovery and even of growth. From a purely theoretical viewpoint therefore Homeopathic medicines can play a more useful role in grief than drugs can. However, just let me add one word of caution here because although a remedy can facilitate the process of grieving, it cannot replace it. In other words, Homeo­pathic remedies cannot make grief go away. Nor can they enable someone to avoid grief. Coming to terms with life without your loved one and coping with the impact of their death will still take time, care and attention. The best way to deal with grief is to come to terms with this massive change in life con­sciously, with the support of loved ones or professionals who can listen, advise and care.

Homeopathic teaching has two insights to offer: The first is the process of healing and recovery. We know from our Homeopathic principles that every­body is unique, so we accept that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to deal with grief. The second is that what Hahne­mann referred to as “vital force” has a kind of intelligence. What that means is that our healing system deals with what’s most important first and attends to more superficial, or minor problems later. We often experience this as an initial rise in energy or well-being before there is an improvement in specific symptoms and we also commonly find that “inner” problems resolve before “outer” ones. This is important to understand because some physical diseases, for example eczema, psoriasis, arthritis, can undergo flare-ups during grief, but might not improve until the underlying mental dis­tress settles.

A further insight from Homeopathy can be gleaned from the materia medica. The descriptions of the remedies show us common patterns of disorder as well as help us to understand what differ­ent people need to help them cope. Let me give some examples which I hope will make this clear.

Immediate phase – shock
When someone witnesses a death they might experience acute shock. This cer­tainly occurs commonly in traumatic sit­uations such as road traffic accidents and other violent deaths, but can also occur when someone who is ill suddenly collapses and dies. The shock reaction is one we all know. When shocked by something we feel a bit stunned, a strange combination of both numbness and feeling everything more intensely – every little noise startles us, lights seem too bright and so on. Shock has elements of fear, agitation and even panic. This is a state well recognized as an indication for Aconite. It’s that high adrenalin wide-eyed flight or fight response where the person feels shaky, afraid and rather stunned. Shock is an acute, intense, sud­den state. It usually occurs at the time of the traumatic event and the good news is that it doesn’t last long.

Acute instability
Whether or not shock is felt, what most people experience next is usually a period of great instability. This is a time of tremendous emotion and mood changes can be dramatic, swinging wildly from deep depression to hyster­ical laughing within minutes. The pic­ture of Ignatia is typical of this period. It can show itself through rapidly chang­ing, intensely mental states with out­pourings of tears and distress one minute and silent closing down the next. This instability can lead to what appear to be inappropriate behaviors: laughing when others are serious and sad, or re­fusing to speak when spoken to.

The person in the Ignatia state has a strong tendency to sigh big, deep sighs and they will frequently complain of the sensation of a lump in the throat which makes swallowing difficult – a symptom relieved more by the swallowing of solids than by liquids (quite contrary to what you’d expect). It’s no surprise that this intense and unstable state most com­monly appears in the first few hours and days after the bereavement but it’s also a very common pattern to appear dur­ing funerals.

The angry phase
Anger will emerge to a greater or lesser extent depending on both the character of the individual and their prior feelings towards the deceased and the extent to which there is some sense of whether or not the person experienced a “good” death.

For example, the Magnesium salts, Magnesium carbonicum and Magnesium muriaticum both share the character­istic of rapidly flaring anger which dis­appears as quickly as it appears – flashes of anger. Both also share the character­istic of intense feelings of emotional sensitivity and loneliness. Kent describes them as being the remedies for the orphans and Jan Scholten, the Dutch homeopath, describes how they are fre­quently indicated in children whose parents have separated or divorced. Jan also suggests that Magnesium carbon­icum is more indicated when the patient has strong feelings of anger towards their father and Magnesium muriaticum more indicated when the anger is felt towards their mother. This anger might have been present before the death of the partic­ular parent or it might emerge only after­wards.

If the person’s dying has gone badly then often the relatives and loved ones have strong feelings of injustice, feelings that the deceased was not well treated in their last illness or final days. That state of anger and indignation is com­monly seen in the indications for Staphy­sagria which is another intense and unstable state characterized by the expression “it’s not fair!” Colocynth, which we associate with abdominal colic, is also indicated in these angry, indignant states.

Loss
It doesn’t take long before the bereaved feel a profound sense of loss. In the old materia medica, the language used to describe this is “forsaken feeling”. There are quite a number of remedies which include this feature but let me just high­light a couple of very different patterns which share this common feeling. Pulsatilla is a remedy well indicated for people who have intense feelings of loss. In particular where people have a sense of loss characterized by feelings of aban­donment. They don’t just feel alone, they feel as if they’ve been left alone.

The response to this deep feeling in the Pulsatilla patient is to seek com­fort and support. They feel emotional, weepy and distressed and they need the company and sympathy of others. A person in such a state can come across as very needy and, it’s true, they do need a lot of care, support, and attention. They want to be hugged and held. The Pulsatilla state also has the feature of instability which we considered in the earlier phases of grief. Their moods may swing wildly and this, of course, makes the experience all the more unsettling, both for the person experiencing the grief and for those around him or her.

A very different way of dealing with the sense of loss is seen in the typical Natrum muriaticum picture. In this case, the person really needs to be left alone to deal with things. They absolutely hate fuss and feel much worse when people express their consolation towards them. To try to help them the same way you try to help someone who is in a Pulsatilla state will not bring any success. In fact, it will make them feel worse. The per­son who needs Natrum muriaticum really does need time alone and, whilst they don’t want to be ignored or for­gotten about, they do need people to be aware of their need for personal time and space.

Getting stuck
When does grief ever need to be treated? Well, there’s a judgement to be made at every point. To what extent is the per­son’s distress not bearable? If some dis­tress can be eased, then shouldn’t it be? And to what extent is the picture chang­ing and evolving? In other words, is the person stuck? Or are they still pro­gressing? These are not easy questions to answer but in answer to the first I think it is helpful to consider the ques­tion “is the person coping?” not “is the person suffering?” because suffering is an integral part of grief.

If the person is coping then there is little need to intervene. But if they aren’t coping, then the next question has to be “what would help this person to cope better?” And the answer to that ques­tion is highly individualistic. I hope these simple examples I’ve given here already show how people may experience grief in different forms at various times. And how we all cope in our own ways. It’s important not to judge, not to assume that we know better than the bereaved but, instead, that we care about them and that we show that care through helping and supporting in the ways which help them best.