This is not fair! This is not how this is supposed to go! I wasn’t ready!

Yep, those words have all escaped my lips before, some just as recent as a few weeks ago.

Experiencing a grief event is one of the hardest things in life. From physical, to social, to anticipated, and/or sudden loss, all of it hurts!

Shock, avoidance, fear, confusion, numbness are some of the first feelings that we experience during grief events. These are signs of the first stage of grief that we know as denial. In this stage, we are searching for ways to retreat from our actual reality. We create a “preferred reality” that is more tolerable. Denial can be thought of as our body’s defense mechanism. It says, wait a minute, this is too much. I cannot handle this news..it’s what I call the “check out” phase.

During my “check out” phase when my daddy died, I told myself he was in Nigeria and that’s why I was unable to see him. He traveled a lot preaching and it made sense to me, so that was my “preferred reality”. You see, this was more bearable for me than to accept that we had laid my daddy’s body to rest and I was never going to see him again. My life as I knew it had been interrupted, flipped upside down, and I could not see how going on was going to happen. My daddy was the rock of our family. He held us together! What was going to happen now?

I was in this stage of grief for a little over five and a half months. When the numbness and shock started to fade and the suppressed feelings began to surface through my actual reality, my journey began.

In this stage, it is important to allow yourself to feel the emotions that come up for you, because interesting enough, this is where your grief process starts.

The healing journey begins with one step. Let’s go! You can do this!  

Till Next Time, 
Coach Rosie