Losing a loved one to suicide can feel like a loss like no other. I’m often asked by my clients who have experienced this, “What can be more devastating?” The bereavement journey comes with a range of emotions, questions, and the stickiness of stigma that is associated with suicide. Loss of this nature can cause interruptions to the normal grieving process and become prolonged or persistent. We can become intensely preoccupied with our thoughts and emotions related to the death, also known as complicated grief.
The Mourner’s Journey
The emotional tsunami from a tragedy, is all-encompassing and overwhelming. From shock and disbelief (e.g., “this doesn’t feel real, it can’t be true”) to anger and helplessness for feeling abandoned (e.g., How could she do this to us?) to a sense of feeling rejected (e.g., Wasn’t I enough?) and in some cases even feeling deceived or betrayed for not knowing, the emotions keep coming.
A friend of mine, who lost her 18-year-old son to suicide, described her journey of grief and the memories that went with it as, “The ascension and descension of an inconsolable wave.” When her sadness increased, she also felt the love and bond she had shared with her child, and when the feeling of melancholy settled, she felt a sense of anguish about the absence of sadness. Over time, sadness about the loss she endured had become her way to feel connected with her son who was not physically present in her life anymore.
Her journey was also an isolating one, as she felt she could not openly talk about suicide for fear of hearing judgment about his death, something she felt she could not accept or tolerate. She told me, “If anyone ever tells me that what he did was selfish, I don’t know how I will respond.” Even though she had harbored this same thought in her struggle to understand what had happened, it was too painful to hear her son be stigmatized from an outsider.
If you have known someone who has died by suicide, as hard as you may have tried, you would not have been able to stop yourself from asking “Why?” and “What if?” repeatedly. Unanswered questions tend to dance around traumatic loss like puppets on a string. Your thoughts tell you: There must be some reason, and moreover, I should have known. Did I miss the signs? Did I fail as a friend? How did I not see that things were so bad? Could I have prevented this?. If this storm of questions has played on your mind after a loss of this nature, you are not alone. It is natural for our minds to want to grasp and hold onto something that makes sense, calms our mind, that is explainable, even if the solace it provides is only for a few moments.
When should you seek help?
The global rates of completed suicides continue to increase with each passing year. However, many of us may feel it is not something that will happen in our world (it happens to others, but not to my family or friends). So, when we do find ourselves facing a loss of this kind, being able to accept and comprehend the magnitude of its impact does not seem plausible at first.
So, how do you know when you should seek professional help? Broadly speaking, there is no threshold around when one should seek therapy. Therapy provides a grounded and supportive space to talk openly about ones’ thoughts and feelings, one’s vulnerability. But in the context of suicide survivor loss, there are some instances when it would be important to seek help, if you haven’t as yet.
Beginning with a self-assessment about where you are in the grief process can act as a compass for what you should do next. Ask yourself:
- Timelines of loss. Are you feeling stuck and intensely preoccupied with thoughts and feelings about the person you lost, long after the loss occurred? Does your pain feel unrelenting? While there is no timeline for when grief begins and ends, it varies by person. But there is also a gradual adaptation to the loss that occurs naturally over a period of time. While we may still feel sad and overwhelmed by the loss, we are also able to begin to function in other domains of our lives such as academics, work, parenting, etc. If you find this is still incredibly difficult or impossible to do, it may be good to consider talking to someone about what you are going through.
- Self-Blame. Do you find that you continue to blame yourself intensely, without any significant shift over time? While blame, self-criticism, guilt, and regret are completely normal reactions in response to loss, these thoughts and associated feelings tend to reduce or waver in intensity over time. We also learn to assimilate or integrate new information, or other aspects of the loss that we hadn’t considered earlier. In the process of grieving, we start to look at the circumstances of the loss in its totality, rather than focusing intensely and narrowly on one aspect, such as self-blame or guilt. In this way, while grief does not have a finite end point, our experience of it does change and shift across time.
- Acceptance is a critical component of healing and adapting to traumatic loss. If you find that you continue to feel stuck in a place of suffering, are unable to talk about how you feel or accept the permanence of loss, find yourself avoiding memories of the person you lost, or are withdrawing from family and friends, these may be a few signs that you have not been able to fully acknowledge the loss and it’s impact on you. It’s also not uncommon to experience episodes of depression or have a delayed reaction to loss.
Therapy can help you construct a path to making sense of all that you are experiencing, which is central to the process of grieving. This does not mean you will have all the answers, or never have difficult moments again, but therapy can help facilitate how you cope with and participate in the bereavement process.
(Originally published on Medium. Follow Dr. Divya Kannan on medium.)