When we have lost someone or something we deeply love or care about, the pain often seems unbearable. Our heart feels like it has been ripped out and the tears unstoppable. For others, there are no tears, but uncontrollable anger and frustration where only immersing themselves into activity after activity is the only way to deal with the emotion. What ever the reaction to losing someone or something, this is a scary time and we often feel helpless in our ability to control our emotions and our life in general.

Understanding that coping with loss is a natural and normal process is sometimes useful. After experiencing loss, people generally follow a typical emotional process. Understanding what is happening is often useful. It helps to insure that you are not going crazy and that you are indeed a normal functioning person.

Carol, at Learning Dynamics, offers each person tender loving support during this difficult time. This is done by allowing the person to share their loss and their feelings in whatever way that works for them. There is not one way to cope with loss and we all do it differently. How we do this depends upon our personality and our past experience with loosing people, jobs, pets and things that are important to us.

Dealing with the loss of someone we loved or something we have lost is hard work. It takes an enormous amount of energy. We often fight this process of loss by stuffing it or avoiding it. Working through loss is allowing oneself to experience whatever feelings are there at whatever point we are in the process. Once we allow ourselves to experience the emotions, we can than deal with the loss and begin to resolve the issues around the loss that are impacting our life.

We can always count on loss to strain relationships with family and friends. People are generally uncomfortable with loss and don’t know how to respond appropriately. Consequently, they say all the wrong things that hurt our feelings and leaves us feeling alone and abandoned. It takes work and support to navigate through this difficult time, to insure our relationships with important people in our lives remain intact.

Our faith and spirituality is often challenged during loss. The one thing that has always been steadfast seems to be nonexistent and inaccessible. Again, it takes perseverance and courage to deal with these seemingly unthinkable thoughts and feelings.