How to be Happy when You Lose a Loved-One
By: Angely Rose
Losing someone you love is one of the most painful tragedies a person can encounter, whether that someone is your dearest teacher, friend, family member, life partner or colleagues. All individuals on Earth must have gone through this problem at least once in their life. When experiencing loss, it doesn’t always mean death, but also personal departures and other circumstances that take away our loved ones. This problem is one of the major problems that most people encounter because it can cause many mental health problems including depression, stress, and many more. It makes studying, working or just living hard and painful. So, how can we cope with those emotions after losing our loved one? How do we learn to take steps towards a new life? It might seem hard at first, but consider these following steps to help you and do not forget to stay COMMITTED throughout this whole journey to a new beautiful life.
All of the Steps to Help you to be Happy Again:
Self Awareness
First of all, we need to learn how to be self-aware. In this step, you can take a deep breath and learn to accept all of the truths about yourself and the situation. It’s totally normal to feel sad, just allow your emotions to come out because it is also an important part of being aware of your emotions and how to control it. During this step, it is important to keep out all of the accusations (either it is self-accusations or accusations for other people). Thinking about our or someone else’s fault is not going to help you to get that person back, so learn to keep out regrets and accusations out of your beautiful mind! Life is a maze with many different possibilities, the ones that we chose and the one we have never entered. This leaves us with the ‘What-ifs’ or the “If onlys”. But those thoughts only bring us pain and regrets which brings us nowhere. Life is full of everybody coming and leaving, so just let it be and learn to accept it (even though I know it is hard).
Expressing and Controlling Your Emotion
Grief is a hard process, so expressing your feelings is an extremely helpful way to help you cope with it. You can express your feelings through many different ways. The way that I suggest the most is writing your feelings down, in a diary or your personal journal. Writing is one of the best ways to express your emotions because you can release all of the details out on the paper which can be a good way for you to reflect back on the situation later. Sometimes, when you read that later, your perspective towards the situation might change a lot and it helps you to see how you were, how much you have improved, and how far you have come.
Another way of expressing ourselves is through verbal communication. You can find people whom you can trust or can relate to the topic the most to talk to and to let them help you. After you release all of your emotions, you are going to feel much better. Whew! On the other hand, if you just let the feelings and emotions eat you up inside and just hide it, I can assure you the situation can be worse because those negative feelings are really powerful. Don’t ever let them have control over you!
After that, you need to learn how to have control over your thoughts and emotions. I know that there might be a lot of negative feelings and thoughts after you lost someone. It is totally fine if you have them a lot at first, but you need to learn how to control it step by step. You need to learn not to let that pessimism overwhelms your mind. Try to take a step out of the darkness and another step into the light. One way of doing this is to try.
Start to Work Towards Goals
Losing someone you love is extremely hard to cope and is time-consuming. It is a huge obstacle that holds you back from completing your goals in life. So, you need to restart working towards your goals or you can create a new list of goals. Grab a sheet of paper, write down a list of things you think you can do to help you start again. You can try putting things like being social active again, join more social events, find new hobbies or you can spend more time with your hobbies. Focus more on yourself, you can try setting more goals that can allow you to take care of yourselves. Create some me-time and allow yourselves to do the things that you like. Hobbies or interests can help you a lot better.
Look Back to the Positive Sunshine
After allowing enough time for you to be sad and to grieve, you can start to look back into the positive sides. Please remind yourself of how the person that left you would want you to be. They would want you to be happy and strong to continue the journey without them. They trust you to continue the journey with a smile, so please make that come true. Think about how far you have come and listen to the words that the person who left has told you. I can assure you that you will definitely meet other new people that mean so much to you in the same way. Just allow some time for yourself to come back.
Allow yourself to find a new light, new journey, new hopes, and new possibilities. Although you have lost someone important, you can still be strong and happy to continue your own life. Start planning what are you going to do next. What is your next step for your life? Make some changes, take some risks, try new things, find light to your world. Usually, new things can lead you to unexpected and amazing destinations.
Lastly, let the past be and START A NEW JOURNEY!
Here is a website you can visit for more information on the five main stages of grief.
https://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/