Each person experiences grief in a different way. If the situation is experienced as a couple, what advice can you follow so that it does not affect the relationship?
As we have already seen, grief is a non-linear process that a person goes through several times in their life. There are mourning for the death of a loved one, the loss of a pet, a job, a love or a friend.
Grief allows us to introspect, review and reconstruct ourselves based on the pain, which is sometimes experienced individually and privately, although it will always be necessary to socialize thoughts and emotions with friends, family and even mental health professionals, if required.
In that sense, grief is experienced internally and shared, but, What happens when you live as a couple? Can it affect the relationship? Join more or separate? This will depend on the way in which both people handle the process, taking into account that individually there will be differences and peculiarities.
According to Pilar Pastor, psychologist at the ; of Spain, in the area of couples there is a added difficulty is that this process must be managed with the previous dynamics of the couple and with the added burden that is usually placed in moments of pain.
They may both have lost a child or a friend, but the way of assuming, expressing and living that pain is different, since they are both different and “Therein lies the challenge of the couple who experiences a loss: knowing how to understand that the other’s grief, their way of expressing it and living it, is as valid as their own.”Pastor emphasizes.
Keys to overcoming grief
The expert mentions two fundamental ingredients to overcome grief as a couple and they are: clarity and patience. By putting them into practice assumptions, thoughts and suspicions can be avoided, but; In addition, clarity in thoughts and emotions enhances mutual empathy.
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“It is the couple’s way of adjusting, of being able to see how they can help each other and, also, of checking what expectations of each other they cannot or will not meet,” adds Pastor.
Another recommendation is listen to the other, carefully, affectionately and with an open mind to understand what is happening, how they are dealing with it and how their process is going.. It will be normal to go through moments of great tension with conflict and irritability in the face of change, pain, memories, among other factors, as well as Most of the energy is focused on the process itself and that changes the dynamic of the couple.
The crisis as a couple
Grief, which is already an individual crisis, It can become a joint crisis depending on the different reconsiderations that those involved are making.That is, when the way in which life and the world is understood is reviewed, as a result of the death of a loved one, it is transformed, values are reordered, life, relationships are observed, and likewise, and in This process can generate incompatibility.
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“The way in which the two of them face the process and how they resolve it will determine the union and growth as a couple, or their distancing. In order to be able to go through this path together, it is important to be clear that what is in the basis is love. From love it is connected with understanding, empathy, patience and respect”, concludes the expert.