“We don’t stop loving.
We don’t forget. We don’t stop hurting. We don’t get over it. We journey
forward. Living the best that we can. We hold them in our hearts. Until we’re
together again”
Grieftolife.com
The loss of
my bunny; Pixie (you can read more about her death here) has really
shown me a lot more about grief and that has included recognising the
importance of having help and support…
A
huge motivation in me maintaining I’m NOT Disordered and my safety, is my hope
that my experiences are helping others in some way. The notion that I didn’t go
through all that I have for no reason has been massively reassuring and a
positive step in my mental health recovery. It has given me hope. Hope that all
those hard lessons I’ve had to learn, were worthwhile. Like they were thrown at
me for a reason.
So,
similarly to my mental health, I want to use my experiences around grief, loss,
and bereavement to help others safely navigate (in my opinion) one of the most
difficult emotions you can go through. Having lost Pixie almost two weeks ago,
I’ve turned to numerous things to help and support me to cope with my grief in
a healthy way, and I thought I’d share what I have found the most beneficial
for my mental health:
So
firstly, practical items – chosen from Etsy…
SELF-SOOTHE:
Learning the Dialectical
Behaviour Therapy (DBT) skill of self-soothe in the
section of the Therapy labelled ‘Distress
Tolerance,’ I was initially kind of reluctant to tell people how helpful I
found it because I was so worried it would give others selfish, materialistic
connotations about me. As though hearing that washing my hair could help my
mental health meant two things:
1.
I can’t have been that unwell if something so simple could make a
difference
2.
I must be really shallow and self-obsessed if I felt I had to do
something for me to help me
Gradually, though, I began to warm to the idea of telling others
what I found helpful because I found that sometimes, when I was in a mental
health crisis, I needed to be reminded by others of the coping skills and
mechanisms that were helpful. As though my head was so focused on being unsafe that
there was no room to entertain healthy thoughts like those around what I could
be doing to keep myself safe. So, telling the hospital staff, and then the
professionals who would continue my care in the community after being
discharged, was pretty necessary and in recognizing that, I had to just swallow
my pride and ignore any concerns as to what others would think of me.
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