Breaking Through To The Other Side: Coping With Death

Jessica Kane is a professional blogger who writes for Legacy Headstones, a leading Ohio-based headstone manufacturer and vendor.

The death of a loved one is something that is guaranteed to happen during the course of your life. Yet for many people, that unexpected happening creates a period of grief that can be hard to move past. While coping with death is something that is not easy and requires time, it is the case that there are strategies that you can follow that will help put your mind at ease sooner.

Here are some of the top ways to move past grief when a loved one has passed on:

Use family history to intellectualize

In modern psychology, one of the coping mechanisms that people have in dealing with the loss of a loved one is to intellectualize their feelings. Intellectualization is a coping device in which the person will gather as much information and knowledge as possible in order to analyze the situation leading to the loss. By doing this, an individual detaches emotionally and views the situation as an outside observer instead of being directly affected by it. Sometimes, intellectualization allows for an individual to feel that they more control of the situation.

While that can be a positive process from the standpoint that it creates a layer of insulation, it may help to channel the potential of intellectualization into a process that increases your perspective and helps you cope with grief. Using family history to learn about the lives and deaths of your ancestors can be a good way of adding perspective by creating a complete picture of how your family has died over time. Once you know the totality of the last few hundred years, it should make it easier to understand that your family has been dealing with death for a very long time. It can also help to work on a project like this that your loved one would have been proud of. In Japan, grief cycles tend to be shorter because families use a centralized crypt or grave for several generations of family member, which means that there is holistic perspective regarding the life and death of their family from the onset.

Understand terror management

Terror Management theory is a simple theory that comes from the desire to live but knowing that death is inevitable. This conflict produces terror in humans. It is with culture that humans are able to handle the terror of death because culture gives meaning and value to life. Some psychologists have shown through research that those behaviour changes can include increased zealousness, strengthening of beliefs, and a willingness to go outside our current belief systems–all aspects of culture. Because a lot of these behaviours are unconscious, it is a good idea to go online and look at terror management theory so that you can have a deeper understanding of how grief is or will affect you. Once you know, it will be easier to navigate through your own feelings when the time comes.

Think about past times that you shared with your loved one

Some psychological researchers have shown that using nostalgia to cope with your loss can be a very positive way of helping you through the grief process. In one experiment, it was noted that people exposed to sad news following a recent death tended to think nostalgic thoughts about the happy times that they shared together with their loved ones. That type of response was then shown to make them happier overall.

Honour your loved one’s memory

Another positive way of coping with death is to take up a project that honours the memory of your loved one. Whether that project takes the form of a hobby that they loved or is one that helps create a tribute to their life, you still end up forming a sense of completion and an understanding that you are not helpless in the face of grief. Both things can help you to cope with death better.

Don’t grieve alone

Depending upon your culture, you may find that after the funeral most people that were close to a loved one tended to grieve for them on their own. If you are able to instead spend time with each other while you are still grieving, it can be a positive way of helping everyone move past the death and back to a focus on your own lives.

Coping with death is something that is important for everyone close to a deceased one to go through. It can be harder for some than others, but by approaching the grief process with strategies that help you both honour the departed loved one and help you to recover your balance, you can break through to the other side of grief.