Grieving, Feeling Powerless

Grieving is part of the process: Elizabeth Kubler-Ross may be best noted for her five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. While these stages are often thought of in terms of people dying, that can apply to just about any situation where one feels they have no control over the situation. It could be as simple as your favorite hair stylist of 15 years retiring or as serious as being diagnosed with a terminal disease.

There is no set order for these emotions to take place. Not everyone experiences all of them. Maybe most confusing, you may think you’ve dealt with your anger and are now more accepting of the situation, only to find yourself really angry the next day.

Fear is another emotion that comes into play and is often the underlying factor as to why we become angry, depressed or as I prefer to think, “this can’t be happening to me!” (Denial). Fear can make us feel alone so that we withdraw and isolate ourselves. It can cause us to strike out and say hurtful things to people we love.

Feeling powerless in the face of illness is common. It is easy to define yourself by what you can no longer do and how you appear. You may feel that you have been robbed of everything that makes life worth living. Yet, great things can be achieved by connecting with your inner self and starting the healing from the inside out.

In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, you would learn of someone with the diagnosis and your heart sank because you knew there just weren’t a lot of treatment options. Interestingly, one women saw this very differently. She was very clear that AIDS had saved her life.

Prior to her diagnosis, her life was in a constant state of turmoil because of drug addiction. Once she was diagnosed, it shocked her into treatment and she began helping other women and families with AIDS. When someone commented how sad it was that she had AIDS, she replied, “If it wasn’t for AIDS I’d be dead. I know I wont have a long life, but thanks to AIDS I actually have a life.”

This is just as true for caregivers. When I started working in brain injury, a mother of a brain injured 20 year old told me that she hated to say this but, “our life is much better because of her head injury.” Mom became involved in an organization, which greatly benefited from her extensive abilities, and provided a much needed outlet for her creativity and energy. It also forced her to examine a marriage that wasn’t working. While separating in the months after their daughters injury, she and her husband did reunite, having worked on various issues that had plagued their past relationship.