Covid Grief Counselling (Covid Grief Therapy) and Coping with Pandemic related Grief
Coping with loss is difficult, but in the COVID pandemic it’s even harder and complicated in lockdown. Grief is universal. At some point in everyone’s life, there will be at least one encounter with grief. It may be from the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the end of a relationship, or any other change that alters life as you know it.
Grief is also very personal. It’s not very neat or linear. It doesn’t follow any timelines or schedules. You may cry, become angry, withdraw, feel empty. None of these things are unusual or wrong. In 1969, a Swiss-American psychiatrist named Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote in her book “On Death and Dying” that grief could be divided into five stages. The five stages of grief are: denial /shock, anger, bargaining, depression & acceptance
Not everyone will experience all five stages, and you may not go through them in this order.
Grief is different for every person, so you may begin coping with loss in the bargaining stage and find yourself in anger or denial next. You may remain for months in one of the five stages but skip others entirely. But this pandemic have changed the way we process, express grief and also grieve.
The covid pandemic has changed the rules of the grieving process and way we perform last rituals / rites .
Covid Grief is different from other because of the following:-
- The loss of life to the coronavirus is sudden
- Family members are unable to grieve, when themselves are afraid of contracting Covid infection
- Threat perception
- Feeling helpless
- Guilt of not doing much to rescue them (like to find bed, oxygen, medications, pay hospital bills and so forth)
- Guilt of transmitting infection to the deceased
- Unable to be there during last few moments
- No information about the last few moments terrify the family members
- They can only imagine the last moments of struggling to breath
- The separation only adds to the grief and sadness of loved ones left behind.
- Guilt of not taking them for testing, for treatment and to the right hospital early
- Anger on China for spreading illness
- Anger on people, community, administration, hospital, hospital staff, government and so on
Everyone grieves differently, but there are some commonalities in the stages and the order of feelings experienced during grief. The key to understanding grief is realizing that no one experiences the same thing. Grief is very personal, and you may feel something different every time. You may need several weeks, or grief may be years long.
If you decide you need help coping with the feelings and changes, a mental health professional is a good resource for vetting your feelings and finding a sense of assurance in these very heavy and weighty emotions.
There are simple steps such as
Virtual funeral (covid) to facilitate grief
1: Rapport Building
2: Talking about the deceased
3: Talking about the circumstances about the death
4: Ventilation
5: Any thoughts of responsibility / guilt feeling
6: To accept the reality of the loss.
7: To process the pain of the loss.
8: To adjust to a world without the deceased.
9: To find a way to remember the deceased while embarking on the rest of one’s journey through life.
These tasks are not meant to be a fixed progression, instead: Tasks can be revisited and worked through again and again over time. Various tasks can also be worked on at the same time. Grieving is a fluid process