Ana María Egido: «Grief makes the person connect with the void»

Grief is one of the most intense psychological phenomena and, while it lasts, the most emotionally painful.

As it is based on a situation of loss, it goes hand in hand with the need to adapt to a new reality in which we miss something or someone. For this reason, emotional discomfort is often combined with objective changes in our environment: not being able to talk to someone, seeing the place where we live transformed, etc. It is, therefore, an experience that not everyone finds easy to manage.

To better understand the nature of psychological grief, We interview the psychologist Ana María Egido, co-author of the book Grief and resilience: guide to emotional reconstruction.

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Interview with Ana María Egido: understanding the grieving process

To learn the key ideas that help understand grief, we interviewed Ana María Egido, psychologist at El Prado Psicoluciones and co-author with Rosario Linares of the book Grief and resilience: guide to emotional reconstruction, published in the Oberon publishing house.

How did the idea to write the book come about?

Grief, whether due to a breakup or the death of a loved one, is one of the reasons why many people come to our office.

Although grief is something universal, that is, something that all human beings will go through at some point along the way. of our lives, we observe that there is a lot of ignorance about it and this makes people live it more suffering.

It is for this reason that it seemed useful to us to be able to write a book aimed at the general population, so that whoever reads it can become familiar with the process and understand it better.

On the other hand, we also wanted to give it a practical approach, so in the first part of the book we talk about what grief is and what it means. feel when we go through its stages, and in the second, we focus more on what we can do to survive a duel in a way resilient.

We feel very grateful, throughout these months we have received many comments from people and professional colleagues who have recommended the book to both patients and to people they know who are going through grief because they consider it a complete guide that helps understand the process and emotionally relieves those who are going through it. he.

Do we tend to overlook the existence of forms of grief that have nothing to do with the death of someone important to us?

Normally the word grief leads us directly to think about the death of a loved one, but there are other losses and events that can also cause us to go through it.

In the book we have guided the grieving process based mainly on loss due to death and emotional breakups, but beyond this, we wanted to offer a vision that can be useful in a general way for people who are going through any type of grief, so that in this way, they can identify the pain that it causes them and have resources to face it.

Depending on each person, there are other losses that can cause us to grieve. In a chapter of the book we wanted to collect some of them with reference to perinatal grief, since We have found that many couples suffer without being able to express their pain or see their loss recognized.

It is a way of claiming and being able to draw attention so that we can understand that parents who have lost a child before birth or in the first days of life are They face a very painful process of grieving that is rarely legitimized or recognized by health professionals as well as by the family, work environment or wider circles. nearby.

We have come across cases in which we are told how women who suffer an abortion are admitted to the same floor as those who are admitted to give birth, sharing a room with them.

Another demand they have is in relation to the recognition of grief. They tell us that people in their family, work or social environment do not understand why they feel sad because of so much. time, do not give them the attention or help they need, or try to console them while encouraging them to have another child soon.

Another of the losses that we mention, because we think it is very important to make it visible so that it is taken into account due to the high level of pain it produces, is the death of a pet. People who are grieving the loss of their pet need to be accompanied, they need their time to be able to overcome the loss, and not recognizing this process only makes it difficult for them to recover in a normal way. appropriate. Animals are part of the lives of the people who care for them and they leave a tremendous void after their death, which is why we consider it important to respect and validate their pain.

Beyond the losses we mention, there are other types of circumstances that can lead to a grieving process, such as the loss of health. (loss of physical or cognitive abilities), migratory grief (change of country of residence mainly) or loss of a job, among others.

Based on your professional experience, do you think that those who have gone through more grieving situations tend to feel less discomfort, without needing to have ever gone to therapy for this reason for consultation?

It is a complex question, since this depends on each particular case. Let's look at some possible scenarios in relation to this.

There are people who have suffered previous unelaborated losses and in whom the current loss reactivates these previous unelaborated grief, so even if they have suffered these experiences before, the current loss can make them cope worse, and often leads them to consultation.

On the other hand, if the tasks of grief have been carried out adequately, having adaptively survived other losses can make The following ones are faced from these experiences that in the end teach us that we have been able to sustain the pain, so we can also do it. now.

But it is important to keep in mind that each grief is different, and depends not so much on having had previous grief experiences, but about the moment in which the loss occurs, the bond or relationship that was had with that person and the circumstances of the loss. loss.

Can grief evolve into depression?

Grief is a process that makes the person connect with the deepest emptiness and sadness, which for a time “step away” from life as you lived it before in order to reestablish yourself and find a new meaning that helps you continue forward. Many people may confuse these states with a depression and in most cases this is resolved through the passage of time and by completing the tasks of mourning.

It becomes depression when the sufferer cannot redefine the meaning of his life, when he stagnates and continues living, pouring out his attention on the person who is no longer there, when they cannot function normally in the different areas of their life, when the level of Suffering does not become more bearable and the person continues to live with great discomfort even though some time has passed. considerable.

In these cases, the intervention of a mental health professional would be necessary so that the grief does not fester and lead to other psychological disorders.

When is the moment when a person should consider going to therapy to treat their grief discomfort?

As I mentioned before, one of the key moments to go to therapy to treat grief is when a reasonable amount of time has passed and the person is still without being able to restore your life, when the discomfort (guilt, dejection, anger, loneliness) overwhelms you and you feel that you do not have resources or enough strength to tolerate it.

It is also advisable to go preventively, that is, if you feel that, even if a short time has passed since death, the help and accompaniment of a professional can help you direct the grieving process, providing you with information about the process you are going to experience and offering you resources to help you alleviate the pain. Therapeutic work on grief is very important and is key to helping mourners experience it with less disturbance.

Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, society has had to face a new way of grieving. What are its characteristics or what makes it different?

One of the most mentioned topics during this pandemic has been the grief of family members who have lost loved ones whom they have not been able to accompany or give a dignified farewell.

The mourning over COVID-19 has brought us certain peculiarities that we must take into account. On the one hand, in some cases, and especially at the beginning when we did not have sufficient means and information, there have been cases in which family members, professionals or caregivers themselves have been able to be vectors. of contagion. For these people, the feelings of guilt and anger are, if possible, much more pronounced, and can lead to complicated grief.

Another characteristic of this grief is that it accentuates helplessness, feelings of guilt, fear, anger and loneliness. Mourners may feel intense discomfort because they have not been able to accompany them, because their loved one has not been able to be offered help and attention that he needed, because they have not been able to say goodbye, because they have not been able to receive the affection of other loved ones while being confined. This experience has reminded us of the unpredictability of death.

Finally, I would like to highlight the importance of farewell rituals and support in the last moments of life. In the story of people who have not been able to say goodbye to their loved ones, we can appreciate how necessary it is to be able to say goodbye to the body to begin to accept what has happened and minimize the feeling of unreality, the funeral has a great value of reparation both internally to begin to process the death and on a social level, giving us the opportunity to to be able to talk about what has happened, about what we feel in order to give it meaning and to receive the affection and closeness of the people who love us and constitute our network of friends. support.

The fact that family members have not been able to do it or have done it quickly and with hardly any relatives, has been one of the dramas of this pandemic.

If you want to purchase the book Grief and resilience, you can do it in this page.