No!
Good day to all, Henry here. We got a bit sidetracked for Christmas, but I wanted to give a few more thoughts on grief. As I said in my last post, shock is the first stage of grief and loss. The second stage is denial: “No. This has not happened!” It is critical to realize that these stages are not separated by clear lines. We are in shock and saying: “I don’t believe it. I saw them just yesterday. It isn’t possible. They looked so good.”
Denial is a universal attempt to maintain things as they were. It is dominated by avoidance of reality, wishful thinking, and repression. I remember being called to a unit in the hospital where a patient was going to hear that their cancer was untreatable. The doctor wanted me to be available and to go to the patient’s room after she got this news. I waited outside the door anxiously until the doctor left. When I entered, the patient was sitting up and did not seem stressed. I asked her how things were going and she replied that everything was fine. With my heart in my mouth, I said I had just seen the doctor leaving her room. “Yes,” she replied, “he was just telling me what kind of treatments he has for me.” She was quite composed and relaxed. I have always thought that this was an example of massive denial.
Emotionally the person in crisis may seem indifferent, even euphoric. Yet if they are challenged, their defense is often so thin that they react with hostility. This is when they are resisting the knowledge of their loss. They tend to be very resistant to change.
If physically hurt, this is the time when they are physically healing at the maximum rate.
I remember a woman who lived a thousand miles from her parents. When her mother died she decided not to go to the funeral. Much later she said that for the intervening ten years until she visited the family home again, she had been able to imagine that her mother still lived at home. That is denial. It is a natural stage in dealing with the crisis of grief and loss in our lives. Denial can last for minutes, hours, days or years.
Any comments? Recognize anyone?
February 2nd, 2006 at 12:39 am
[…] rst two stages I talked about were those of Shock (which we perceive as overwhelming), and Denial (where we attempt to avoid reality). Now we come to the third stage: that of acknowledgmen […]