Wednesday's Woe - The Domino Effect of Child- Loss

Wednesday's Woe

The Domino Effect of Child- Loss

To the general public, grief comes in stages, but here's what we know...

The general public wants to think that grief has predictable stages to walk through, and then we're done. But this has not been our experience with Child-Loss Grief. Grief, the word itself, sounds like a singular emotion, but, as one griever brilliantly put it, in Traumatic Grief (like Child-Loss) it is more like a Tangle of Emotions. And to help herself grieve, she had to sort out the tangles, she had to sort out each individual emotion. I would add, we have to sort out each individual loss. Our Child-Loss seems to breed other losses, almost like a domino effect.

Take one example. We not only have lost our child; we have lost the "nest" of the sweet, intact family that we always assumed would be a part of our lives until we die; even should we lose all others around us, our little intact family would remain with us. The constant reminder of that stark loss comes around every day really, but is even more accentuated with every birthday, every holiday, even every public ritual we would normally attend.

In tomorrow's Thursday's Therapy, we hope to talk more about the accumulation of losses that seems to come, part and parcel, with Child-Loss Grief.

Picture, thanks to Google Images