PTSD is commonly associated with veterans returning from combat or with victims of abuse. But did you know it can also impair your ability to work through grief when suffering a loss? PTSD is often difficult to diagnose at first because it so closely mimics the grief cycle. But when healing doesn’t come, when anger builds, or when you find yourself reliving the event(s) surrounding your loved one’s death over and over and over, it is time to seek help. Other symptoms associated with PTSD include avoidance of anything that reminds you of the trauma, “numbing out” with drugs or alcohol and a sense of fear and vulnerability that pervades your life. You may also feel depressed and suicidal. People who tend to develop PTSD often lost their loved one violently, for instance in a sudden car crash, through murder or suicide. Sometimes they witness the death and are helpless to do anything about it. PTSD can develop soon after the event, or months later.

If you are experiencing difficulty moving through the grief process that doesn’t ease up, or if a friend or family member is suffering, you needn’t despair.You are not alone and there is help.

-The first and best thing you can do is seek counseling.There are many qualified counselors and therapists who specialize in trauma and PTSD. Your doctor can help you find one, or you can find someone by calling mental health clinics or your hospital’s trauma center. There are a variety of treatments they will use to guide you back to health.
-It is also important to reach out to others- perhaps in a support group, or online chat group.Others who have been where you are can offer insight and support.

-Avoid alcohol and drugs. It is too easy to avoid the very thing you need to confront to heal when you numb out.

Perhaps the toughest part of PTSD is that you must confront the source of your pain in order to work it through.It takes time and patience and is seldom something you can do on your own-though there are steps you can take that will help.  Take hope that many that have walked a similar journey and  have come full circle to health.

Different people respond in different ways when facing the same crisis. When it comes to dealing with the loss of a child, a huge number of varied responses can be seen among grieving peole. While some of the responses are healthy ways of dealing with the situation, others could be detrimental to one’s own wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of everyone deeply involved in the loss. People’s emotional quotient, their general outlook in life, their religious outlook, and a whole lot of other factors determine the way in which they would respond to the crisis that they are facing in life. Sometimes people with a religious background can be seen turning to atheism or agnosticism. People who have no faith in religion can also sometimes be drawn towards a deep personal faith in God due to their current crisis. Some lose their enthusiasm in life, while others find a fresh purpose for living. Some totally break down never to return from the loss while others draw strength from a hitherto unknown source within their inner selves and go on to succeed in life. Therefore the response to the loss of a child can sometimes reveal the inner qualities of a person in stark relief.

Death is probably one of the most enigmatic phenomenon that is so common and yet so painful to deal with. We see death so many times in our lives and yet every single occurrence brings pain and sorrow with it which takes a very long time to heal. Parents who are trying to cope with the death of their own child often have a number of questions that plague their mind. They wonder is they had done anything wrong which in turn caused the death of their child. People in certain religious circles go through a lot of guilt especially when they believe that their actions had somehow triggered the cause for the loss of their beloved child. Some people have their faith in God shaken up by this crisis. They get angry with God wondering why He let their child die when He had the power to save. Death and suffering in this world are in fact the basic issues which make atheists and agnostics feel that they are right in saying that God does not exist. Still others who have a deep personal faith in God react in exactly the opposite way and get even more intimate in their relationship with their Creator. They deepen their faith in God and become even more unshakable in their commitment to their religious beliefs.

One of the best expositions that reconcile the existence of God and the reality of human pain and suffering comes to mind. We normally believe that God is all powerful and can control any event that takes place on earth. We think that for some strange reason God does not act the way we expect Him to and lets all kinds of bad things happen on the earth. However, the explanation as taken from the Bible states that God gave the authority over the earth to man. God therefore no longer has any authority to intervene directly in human affairs. All the pain and the suffering is the direct result of the deterioration of the earth due to sin, and God is not responsible for the mayhem we have landed ourselves into. Whatever we choose to believe, one day we will have all our questions answered. Maybe until then, we may have to wait patiently.

After the loss of a child, a husband and wife may want to spend some time apart to mourn their child. Both feel anger, betrayal, and pain at the death of someone who they had and have so much hope and love for. Seeing each other may be a reminder of a dream that is gone.

It is a well-known fact that the death of a child is one of the leading causes of divorce. The turmoil and heartache of losing may shatter the human spirit. Husbands and wives may change drastically while in the mourning process. Life may never be the same again. Keeping the relationship together after the loss of a child might not be on the top of a couple’s list of things to do, but it may be the key to lessening the pain of and transcending loss.

Keeping Together–Seeing Your Partner As A Partner Again

After the loss of a child it is important to give yourself time and room to mourn and remember your child. You may always feel an emptiness and longing in your heart. There may be very little relief from the heartache you feel for your child. At times, the present pain may go away, but the ache grows and lives on inside you. Taking time for yourself to heal and rise above loss is healthy and will be healthy for your family when you decide to “return” from mourning. The question is, will you return and, if so, when? One way to make sure you return to your family is to remember that your husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, or significant other is also feeling the same way. He or she has also lost a child.

By seeing your child’s other parent as a partner instead of just another person, you can keep your relationship together after a tragic loss. You can give each other time and space to mourn your child, and you can give each other support and encouragement when it is needed. Remember that you both loved and love your child. Share the memories and remember the love that you had for your child and for each other.

Keeping together means keeping the love alive. Many parents lose these feelings for each other after a tragic loss because of the mourning process, which may take months and even years. Time spent separately and feelings of loneliness, meaninglessness, and depression can push two people who loved each other apart. To keep together, try to do things you usually did before your child passed away. Try to celebrate the holidays again. Valentine’s Day is a perfect holiday to remind yourselves that you still love each other. Keep your child’s memory alive by reminiscing together, creating a scholarship in your child’s name, making yearly donations in your child’s name, wearing a locket with your child’s picture in it, or many other ways.

Keeping the love alive and the relationship in tact may not be easy. The dream that you once had together may seem broken into shards after your child’s death. The dream may seem distant, but it has not died. Always remember that you can patch up again. And you can rebuild together with each other.

No parents ever decide to have a child believing that their child will die before them. In their children are parents’ hopes for the future and their belief in continued life after their own deaths. Learning that your child may die before you is an unbelievable shock and intense tragedy that is difficult to get over. Anticipating the death of a terminally ill child may cause many changes in your and your family’s life. A dying child may take a toll on the family in many ways. Your financial circumstances may change due to medical bills. The focus of your familial attention has shifted to your child. And you may find yourself questioning life and your beliefs.

When parents learn that their child will die of a serious illness, they go through a stage of denials. First, parents may not believe the diagnosis and may try to get a second opinion. Then, when parents finally believe that their child is seriously ill, they may try everything they can possibly try to get their child well again. This may include alternative medication, eating nutritionally and spiritual healing and praying. After a great deal of money spent on these therapeutic methods and a number of fundraisers put together by family and friends, parents may then accept the heartbreaking truth with difficulty.

Turning Anticipation To Acceptance

Sometimes doctors know exactly the number of days a terminally ill child may have left to live. Other times, doctors may just know an estimate. “It could be any day,” are the words they give. It may be easy for parents to find fault with a higher power or even with themselves, and it may be easy to go into a kind of pre-mourning. Emotions may take over, and the fact that your child is dying might cause you to already start mourning. However, instead of spending this time being angry, miserable, and hurt, you may try making every moment you have left with your child count. Realize that your child is a gift and show gratitude for this gift by making the best of whatever time there is left. That way, when time runs out, you will have less of a chance of regretting that you have not given your all towards the fight.

When your child leaves this life, the intense pain of the loss may fill your days. You may wonder if this pain will ever leave you. For many, this pain will stay forever. In a way, it is as if part of you has died with your child. However, the intensity and rawness of the pain changes over time. Families and friends offer comfort, and being in their company may lessen your pain for a time. The real acceptance of your child’s death may come when you realize that your relationship with your child has not ended. In fact, you continue to be your child’s mother or father even after his or her death. And you will always be. Nothing changes that fact.

You can continue parenting your child in many ways. You can donate money to a charity, volunteer your time, participate in a relay for life, or start a program in honor of your child. Keeping your child’s memory alive by giving your time and love will also help you start to heal. The pain may stay forever, but it may start to lessen once you begin to accept the possibility of life and love after death.

The journey of grieving may be a long, painful and strenuous one. Losing a loved one can create an empty space in your life that seems more and more prevalent each day he or she is gone. The color of their eyes, their laughter, their little habits that used to annoy you and make you laugh are no longer there. Instead there is only a void that sits heavily on your heart. And each day without a loved one may cause you even more pain.

The end of grief may take a long time to come, but it will eventually come. Each person mourns differently. For some, it may take a few months, for others a few years. And for others still, it may take a decade or more of soul-searching grief. But when the end of mourning a loved one comes, you may or may not even realize it. There are turning points in the journey of grieving that may give you evidence of the end of your mourning.

Seeing The End Of Grieving

Even if there may be family and friends around to support you while you grieve, the grieving process itself is an individual thing. Only you will be able to decide when and where your grief will end. One morning you may open your eyes and decide you don’t want to get out of bed. Instead you roll yourself up in your blanket and cry yourself sick. Then a month or a year later, you may open your eyes one morning and feel like you actually want to see what the new day will bring.

When your loved one passes away, you may break into heartbreaking, agonizing tears each time you pick up a picture of them. You may not even bear to look at a video of your loved one, yet you have a pressing need to look at any image of them at the same time.

By sharing your feelings with a group or a spiritual leader, you may be able to reflect on your loss and give thanks for the opportunity to have had the time you had with your loved one. Sometimes, just spending time self-reflecting and doing a little soul-searching may help move you towards the end of your grieving. Open your eyes to the love around you. You not only have the love between you and your loved one, but you also have the love of family and friends. The mourning process may be an individual process, but you can do it alone surrounded by love.

A point may come when you are finally able to pick up a picture of your loved one and still feel the ache of missing him, but not cry desperately. You are finally able to open the box of your loved one’s belongings that you have put away in the attic or a closet and not break into sobs. It is not because you don’t miss him or have forgotten him. It is because you have given thanks to the time you have shared with him and have finally accepted the fact that his love still surrounds you all the time. Your relationship continues to live, even after death.

The loss of a child could be one of the most traumatic experiences that parents can go through. The dreams, hopes and aspirations that they had built up for the child over the years get shattered in a split second. Even in the case of a still-born child, the loss can be very traumatic. So it is quite understandable that parents would find it even more difficult to cope with the loss of their child when they have spent more time raising the child. The more time the child had spent along with the parents, the more memories the parents would have to deal with. Familiar incidents would often trigger those memories back which could be debilitating at first. While time often heals and takes care of the intensity of the pain, the loss is something that every parent can never get over. The vacuum would always be felt even when parents have many other children in their family.

For couples that face fertility problems, the loss of a child in the form of a miscarriage or a still-born child could shatter their hopes of having their own biological children. With every successive loss, their grief would increase and their hopes would get dimmer. They would even dread to attempt another pregnancy fearing that it might end in another loss as well. For such couples, adoption can be a suitable option. As long as they can accept the fact that they might have to relinquish their desire to have their own biological children, they would be able to find adoption as a suitable solution. For women that might still be capable of bearing their own children without medical complications, adoption can be kept as the last option. As long as they are well within the child bearing years and they are reasonably healthy, going through another pregnancy could help cope with the loss of a child.

Couples that hope that the new child would completely make their grief and sorrow disappear would be entertaining unrealistic hopes. First of all, it is not a wise thing to expect a child to fill the gap or void left by the other child. This might make the parents transfer their expectations unconsciously to the child and as a result make it difficult for the child to express its own individuality. Growing up in someone else’s shoes is always never healthy for personal development. The child might grow up to have many complexes when raised under such pressures. It is therefore important for parents to realize that one child cannot effectively replace another. Although their time and attention would now be more focused on raising this child than on grieving over their lost child, they will still have to deal with the void left by the loss.

Parents who are contemplating adoption after losing a child can first consult with a reputed counselor to determine whether they are emotionally prepared to take on the responsibility. Learning more about their own emotions would go a long way in making the most of the joy and happiness that the new relationship would bring them.

The loss of a child can be a devastating experience for any family. Parents would remember all the tiny regarding their child’s favorite clothes, food, TV shows and many other things which no one else might know. Whenever they encounter these things, all the old memories would come flooding back making it extremely difficult to cope with the loss. And there are so many things that could act as reminders to parents about their child. It is very difficult at times to cope with these situations. Some parents even wonder whether they would ever be able to get back to a normal life where they can be like everyone else. While time definitely heals the intensity of the pain felt during the initial days of the loss, a lingering vacuum would definitely be felt by almost all parents which is difficult to fill. Especially if their child has spent a number of years in life, the loss could bring back so many memories of the nice times that they had together.

While a lot of focus and attention is given to parents of the child, not many people are aware of the pain and grief felt by the grandparents of the child. Most grandparents develop very close relationships with their grandchildren. For most grandparents, their grandchildren often remind them of their own children when they were small. They also most often make them feel younger. In fact, they were once young when their own children were small. But after they had grown up and left home, they began to feel like they have grown old. Once grandchildren are born and start interacting with them, they once again feel young as they play around with them. As a result, grandparents too develop a deep emotional relationship with their grandchildren. The loss of a grandchild therefore is extremely traumatic for them. While most people sympathize with the parents of the child, not many cater to the emotional needs of the child’s grandparents. Their grief is real too, and given their old age, their emotional needs have to be given special attention.

The loss of a grandchild might sometimes be very difficult to handle for grandparents as they not only have to deal with their own grief but also have to minister to the emotional needs of their own child as well. Seeing their own child grieving over the loss of their child could sometimes be too difficult to bear. When people get their children married, they hope for them to have a great family life. But when tragedy strikes in the form of the loss of a child in the family, their hopes get shattered. They now once again start caring deeply for their children’s needs as they try to cope with their loss and get on with their lives. People also need to be taught how to comfort and encourage grandparents during this crucial phase in their lives. When they are emotionally healthy, they can in turn effectively comfort their own child who has gone through the loss.

What exactly is Grief? Grief is a kind of psychological response to any kind of significant loss that we face in our lives. This can be the loss of a job, the loss of a marriage in the form of a divorce, the loss of a loved one in the family or any kind of loss that makes a significant impact on our lives.

We need to understand that grieving is a perfectly natural process that everyone undergoes during a loss. Based on people’s beliefs, their culture and various other factors, they would experience this loss in different ways. In the case of death, for people whose faith states that they would one day see their loved ones in the afterlife, there could be a sense of hope even in the loss. They would be able to comfort themselves over the fact that they would all be reunited together sometime in the future. Whereas those that do not have a belief in the afterlife would find it difficult to realize that they would never again be able to see their loved ones.

Society has considerably changed in the past giving way to changes in the way we interact with people. In the old days, there was more face to face communication and people we knew were not very far to help in time of need. Now in the Internet age, though people from distant corners of the globe are able to interact with each other, the sense of intimacy that physical proximity brings is sometimes lost. Especially in times of grief, this factor could become extremely clear as one tries to have people physically present with them to comfort them.

There is also a tendency predominantly in the west that men should not cry in public. This makes it very difficult for men to control their emotions when actually letting go would be the best option, as it is vital for the healing process. Bottling up emotions is never healthy and being able to express one’s grief through tears is a very good way to speed up the recovery process.

A funeral is also a good opportunity to get everyone gathered together in one place for this specific purpose. Although it might be a difficult process to let go off the person we so dearly love, the funeral helps people to come to terms with the reality of the person’s death. The warmth and comfort derived from people attending the funeral can also help people share their grief with one another.

The numbness felt for the first few days after the death of the loved one will usually linger for a few days until after the funeral. Then a deep longing for the departed person would sometimes replace the feeling of numbness. The void and emptiness would be equally painful to deal with at first. But grief is part of the emotional faculty that ultimately makes us who we are. It gives a sense of balance to our emotions and maybe even helps us to relish our moments of joy even more intensely.

You would first have to contact people close to you and let them know about the loss. Once you have a few people with you, you can delegate the task of informing other friends and family to one of them. In case you are at a loss as to whom to contact first, check your mailing list that you used to send greeting cards for the latest holiday season. This list might help you identify the most important people that need to be contacted at once.

Decide on the funeral undertaking service that you would want to take care of all the funeral preparations. A reputed funeral service would take care of all the arrangements for you, letting you focus on other matters. Since this is a more personal choice, you may not be able to delegate this particular task to anyone else. So take time to decide on what kind of service and assistance you would need from the undertakers and choose one according to your needs.

In order to inform the larger community, you need to publish an obituary notice in a local or national newspaper. You can inform the funeral timing and other details if those arrangements have already been made. You can also publish this information over the Internet. If you have a website or a blog, you can use that to let your readers know about the details. You can also send a bulk email to people in your email mailing list to get the message across instantly.

Make detailed plans about the funeral ceremony – you need people to lead the service and to give the eulogy. If you belong to a church, you probably know the details already. The pastor and the other clergymen in the church would be able to take care of the funeral ceremony. In case you need your own special order of service with hymns and songs of your choice, you can also get a few leaflets printed before the funeral date.

For certain kinds of deaths, legal documents might be needed for the funeral. Make sure that you know what documents might be required well ahead of time and make all possible arrangements to have them ready beforehand.

If close family members would be visiting from out of town, you might need to take care of accommodation at least for some of them. Find out if some of the people close to you would be able to accommodate them for a few days. People would generally be willing to help.

Go through the list over and over again to see if all the points have been executed as planned. Things that can be done before hand need to be completed early so that you can focus on things that need to be done on the funeral day. Even though it might be a difficult process to go through all this planning during a time of grief, it would help shift your focus from grieving over the loss to taking care of things that need to be done to give the person a dignified funeral.

Whether we like it or not, someday we would all have to face the prospect of losing a loved one in the family. If it happens to be your own child, it would be incredibly difficult to bear. However, knowing how to cope with the situation can sometimes help people going through this traumatic experience. Even if you don’t go through the experience yourself, you might still be able to help those grieving over the loss of their child, if you know how to deal with the situation effectively.

You have to understand that as soon as people face the loss of a child, they feel a kind of numbness that makes everything that is happening around them look surreal. This feeling of numbness can be very useful as it allows people to go on with life and take care of all the formalities that need to be arranged: contacting friends and family and making arrangements for the funeral. This feeling is similar to shock that people go through when they have a physical trauma. Both experiences help shield the person from the intense pain that they would otherwise have to deal with.

Many people feel that they would not be able to attend the funeral service of their own child. But on the other hand, attending the funeral could be a good way to come to terms with the reality of the loss. Even though it might be painful to go through the actual ceremony, it forms an integral part of the recovery process. The feeling of numbness fades away after the funeral and is replaced with a deep yearning for the departed person.

Some people might even feel anger after the loss of their child. This anger might be towards those who tried to help – friends, relatives and sometimes even doctors and nurses who were involved in treating the child if the child died from an illness. It is vital to understand that all these people only tried to help and were not in anyway responsible for the loss of the child. Of course, medical professionals are aware of this condition and do not take such sentiments to heart.

Sometimes parents feel guilt over their inability to save their child. They might even become extremely withdrawn and go into depression for a few days which might sometimes occur around a month or so after the incident. While people wish to go through this phase alone without being disturbed by others, it is best for them to interact with people and return to their normal activities within 2 or 3 weeks. Time does heal and it reduces the intensity of the pain felt. Although the vacuum can never be filled again, the acute pain felt during the initial phase would begin to slowly subside with time.

People need to realize that whatever happens, life goes on. If there are other children in the family, parents especially need to put on a brave front and get back to normal as soon as possible in order to comfort the rest of the children as well as other members of the family who share in the loss. With a lot of love, and sharing each other’s burdens, families can come through this difficult phase and become more mature people in the process.