The loss of a child is one of the most painful events that can happen to a mother and father. In their loss there is no consolation, there are no words they can say to you that can help alleviate the pain they feel. The process of overcoming your loss and being able to move on will involve pain and the only way to overcome this pain is to be able to feel it, understand it and accept it, to be able to continue leading your life, because your life will still be here. For this reason, in this Psychology-Online article, about how to get over the death of a childwe want to offer you all the help that is in our hands to help you recover the balance between the past, which must always be remembered, and the future that awaits you ahead.
The loss of a child is one of the most stressful life events with the most emotional and personal impact that a person can suffer. Faced with this loss, all our projections towards the expected future are interrupted and an imbalance occurs in our lives. All the expectations we had about our lives change with the loss of a child. In addition, very intense emotional reactions appear, such as sadness, guilt, anger and fear. Next we will see how to deal with the death of a child.
How to overcome the loss of a child? Getting over the death of a child must go through a grieving process natural and will be necessary, its stages and the emotional reactions implicit in it. Given this, overcoming grief must involve accepting the circumstances, creating new projections for the future and stabilizing the intense feelings produced by the loss. The phases or stages of grief that must be experienced are explained below.
1. Acceptance
The first difficulty that parents who have suffered the loss of a child must face is their acceptance, the reality of the loss. Accept the death of a child It can be very difficult and tends to provoke feelings that the loss is not real. At this stage of the grieving process, parents must become aware of the irreversibility of the loss, achieving both intellectual and emotional acceptance, which can be very complex.
In the acceptance process, the appearance of “whys” is very common and in many not-so-complex griefs, looking for a hypothetical why can be conciliatory, even if it is far from reality. In this case, to this question there is no convincing answer that will help reduce painful feelings, there is no answer that can be satisfactory. Faced with this, also not being able to give an answer must be accepted to these questions and it will be necessary to reflect on whether the answer to this question would help alleviate your pain.
2. Work on emotions and pain
To be able to face the pain of loss, it will be necessary to work with the emotions that it has raised. Faced with loss feelings are experienced very intenselysuch as sadness, guilt, anxiety, fear and anger or rage, among others:
- Sadness: sadness will remain by your side for a long time, it will appear everywhere and it will invade you at many times. Avoiding sadness will not be a sign of overcoming, on the contrary, sadness should not be avoided, hidden or ignored, because if you force yourself to avoid it, sooner or later it will appear again. Sadness is an inevitable feeling when a child dies. and this pain must be faced. Faced with this, allow yourself to express all the pain you feel, mourn the loss, vent, this does not mean that the pain will become more intense, on the contrary.
- Blame: Why didn’t I act differently, how did I not realize it, how could I let it happen, why didn’t I tell him,…? Countless questions will invade your mind and guilt will appear, a guilt that is related to the fact of remaining alive while a person so important to you has died, but this reality cannot be changed and therefore, the suffering experienced is already too great to bear. to add the burden of guilt, self-reproach and self-disapproval. On the other hand, as the grieving process progresses, it will be normal for you to experience guilt on those days when you feel better, but your joy is not a betrayal of your child, allow yourself to feel the good moments, in the same way that you give way to the bad guys. In the following article you will find.
- Anger or rage: experiencing feelings of anger is normal, it is part of the pain experienced when losing a child. Anger tends to be related to the irreversibility of the loss, to not being able to change things and can be located in oneself or in others. This does not mean that your character is different or that you are a bad person, because you have suffered a circumstance that is overwhelming and it is normal to experience all kinds of emotions. Feelings of anger will help you express your frustrations and these must be accepted and channeled. In the following article you will find.
- Anxiety: feelings of anxiety tend to be more present at the beginning of the process, when acceptance is not present, since anxiety appears when the attachment figure is temporarily absent, but when this absence is maintained permanently, anxiety becomes transforms into pain.
- Fear: feeling afraid in these circumstances is a totally normal emotion, since all the expectations for the future that you had created have vanished with the loss and the future remains uncertain.
In this phase it is very important recognize and cope with pain, feel it and express it. Any loss with a person with whom you had an emotional bond will entail pain, although this appears in different forms and intensities and is expressed differently in different people.
3. Adaptation to a new future
The death of a child will entail a rethinking of our entire life, it means a change in all future plans and expected expectations and given this, we must adapt to this new situation. Once the person has been able to accept the loss and has managed to understand, express and stabilize his or her emotions, he or she must embark on the path of reorganize your life and try to return to normality, achieving a balance between what he already had and the future that awaits him. The person must readjust their life adaptively towards a new world, while continuing to forget the past, but maintaining attention on what life will be like from now on.
How to overcome the death of an only child? Adaptation to a new future will be necessary in all losses, since it will not matter whether the loss was of an only child or in a family with more children, since the expectations of the future change in both cases with the loss and in both cases it will be necessary. go through the three processes: acceptance, work with emotions and projection into the future.
Finally, with the passage of time the family will be able to emotionally relocate the deceased child, managing to live without him and we must keep in mind that even if the loss is overcome, there will be many moments where the feelings will emerge intensely again, as could be the case on birthdays. Grief is a long process and can lead to many relapses and in the face of them, you will have to work again.
How to overcome the death of an unborn child? The loss of a baby in the womb can cause the same pain as the death of an older child. Many people tend to think that because the baby was not born, the bond does not exist and in this regard they are very wrong. The emotional bond of the parents with the unborn baby is established a few weeks after being conceived. Faced with this bond, a set of expectations are configured about what the baby will be like, what they are going to have prepared for him, how they will want to educate him,… a whole life already revolves around the baby before it is born and therefore, the overcoming of Your grief must go through the same processes than the loss of an older child, because the baby already occupies a large emotional space in its parents’ minds before being born.
How to get over the death of a baby? In the same way that the loss of a child in the womb tends to be socially minimized, the loss of a newborn is not given the same importance as the loss of an older child. However, as we mentioned previously, the bond with the son had been established even before being born and with it great expectations. In addition to this, this loss adds an enormous emptiness, because after waiting, after all the preparations for the day of his arrival, all the energy and time destined so that when he arrived he would have everything he needed, suddenly vanish. and the parents find themselves alone again, having held their baby in their arms. Given this, in addition to immense helplessness, all the feelings related to loss and the processes of its improvement must be the same.