Thursday's Therapy - Holiday Sanity ~Child-Loss Grievers' Reminder List - 19 Symptoms Grieving Parents Have that Others May Totally Miss

Thursday's Therapy

Holiday Sanity

~Child-Loss Grievers' Reminder List

19 Symptoms Grieving Parents Have that Others May Totally Miss

{A Reminder List to Take With You

to Keep Your Sanity during Holiday Get-Togethers}

(if you should decide you indeed are able to attend)

• High anxiety
• Agitation
• Disability - usually invisible to others on the outside
• Physiologically Traumatized Brain
• Lifetime Grief = Time it's going to take to deal with child-loss grief
• Necessary Changes that must come in our life as we discover our "New Normal"
• Need for Grief's Clarity - Knowing what really matters versus (for instance) our culture's habit of deifying holidays, rituals, etc.
• Dealing with Grief's Demands - Amount of the level or degree of the griever's life that it takes to deal with the grief
• Incapacitation of higher-level functioning - Survival itself is hard enough to do - Habitual behaviors now become difficult to do, much less the detailed, complicated functions that need to be accomplished. (eg, Billing, Bidding, Buying, Managing our households, Managing our businesses)
• Battling Unrealistic Expectations from others - {Family members, Do not EVER put your expectations on us. WE have to manage our lives, and odds are, they are going to look VERY different than what you have in mind for us.}
• PTSD (Often, child-loss grievers have many symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - see our past posts on PTSD for lists)
• Fight-Flight-or-Freeze Syndrome that comes with enduring child-loss trauma
• Assumptive-Belief Conundrum -All you ever thought or knew the world to be about is now subject to question; this includes re-working your faith and beliefs from the ground up
• Hyper-Arousal causes us to self-protect because any little stimuli can send us into a cortisol (stress-hormone) uproar that may take days, weeks, or months to resolve and we already have quite enough on the plate to walk through without adding any further toxicity from unhealthy relationships
• Hyper-Vigilance - Our child has already died/been killed; our systems are naturally looking around every corner for the next disaster to come down, and our hearts and brains are immediately put on notice to search for a way to stop what seems to be an inevitable disastrous consequence, whether that disastrous consequence is actually going to pan out or not, we (our involuntary, autonomic systems) think the worst and try to prepare ourselves for tragedy...these reactions can be instantaneous, moving from fear to (feelings of imminent) disaster in mere moments...
• Added Secondary Traumas - Others' expectations for normalcy in us are devastating and become for us a secondary trauma that can be as painful to grapple with as our very decimating loss of our child
• Identity Confusion - Not knowing who we are now, nor what we are capable of doing now or in the future
• Accommodation and Assimilation of our Grief are the actions called for over time in order for us to walk through this grief and trauma, but we will NEVER "get over it" / that "Get Over It" attitude is Incomprehensible to us for such a deep and devastating loss as that of losing our precious child
• Financial Crisis that such major grief and trauma throws us into - we are simply incapable of accomplishing all that we did before because approximately 90% of our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls are of necessity needing to be poured into grieving our deep grief

May your holidays be blessed and nurturing!

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