Angry? Depressed? You Could Be Grieving Over World Events
https://www.forbes.com/sites/remyblumenfeld/2019/04/28/angry-depressed-you-could-be-grieving-over-world-events/If you’ve noticed that you’ve been unusually angry, depressed or generally in disagreement with things as they are, you could be experiencing grief. No one needs to have died for you to be grieving. It could be that you feel an important avenue has become closed off to you, or that something is standing between yourself and your deeply held values. You may be sad, angry or depressed because of world events.
I trained as a grief counselor and if I were to share the two biggest things I learned they would be these:
-When we grieve, it is not so much for the person who has died as it is for who we once were with them when they were in our world. We are grieving the unconditionally loved son or daughter, the dependable wife or husband, the joyful best friend, who we will never be again to the mother, father, partner, child, friend or dog who has died.
-Grief is not reserved for our feelings of loss towards a person. We also need to grieve who we once were and will never be again. We can grieve our spent youth or our lost fertility; we need to mourn the opportunities and prospects which time and aging have taken away.
Recently, some of my coaching clients have been sad and angry because of Brexit, climate change or specifically the election of the 45th President of the United States. Their feelings often border on grief. The novelist Ian McEwan still feels a visceral emotion about Brexit, telling the Observer, “Sometimes, I wake in the morning wondering what is bearing in on me, and then I remember.”
..more..
= new reply since forum marked as read
3 people in my family have died since Trump became president. Another 2 have cancer. While that grief manifested more obviously in a normal, healthy way, my body response to the grief of seeing what has happened to our country is just the same. I wake up feeling like I cried all night, even though I haven't. In fact, I wish I could cry, but it's more suppressed. It's stuck in a loop of anger, rather than coming out in a healthy way. I know so many people who are aging rapidly, including my mother, which makes me incredibly sad. Never mind the loss of family members to "the cult" which is another type of grief. Then top this off with other ongoing events & tragedies in our lives which we have to compartmentalize in order to survive this.
