Respond to your grief
When confronted with a complex situation in your career, once you understood what you were up against, you could strategize how to achieve the best outcome. The same applies with grief.
By knowing what you are facing, you can take steps for a path forward. This may involve learning the best ways to respond to loss and grief that don’t undermine your physical and mental health, and your relationships.
"Survival mode"
Sometimes how we’ve adapted in the past can become our greatest obstacle. If we coped by avoiding difficulties, confronting them is like learning a new language we don’t want to learn. There can be appeal to “checking out” by distracting or detaching ourselves for a time, like binge watching a television series or the Sports Channel, or online shopping for hours. We get a kind of vacation from our lives and our inner thoughts.
This may be how you learned to survive your career in the CAF and RCMP. Sometimes there is an accumulation of so many losses that we are simply overwhelmed. The invisible injuries caused by grief and trauma don’t go away: they tend to go underground and can often show up later in life.
We had a period of probably around 8 months where we buried 9 members. One because of a suicide, one because of a car accident, one had a heart attack, one from an accident, another was shot dead by bad guys, and then three others due to cancer. It was like, “God, how do you survive this?” - RCMP Veteran
The deep marks these events make and the memories they imprint are certainly going to remain with somebody. Whether they affect you dramatically at the time or not, their residual effect can lay beneath the surface for a long time. - Military Veteran
One of the ways that we can respond to trauma is to “freeze” - feeling numb or disconnected - that things feel surreal - like in a movie. These “protections” can help us temporarily manage the stress of the situation.
The "thaw"
So then, instead of numbing it all out by smoking weed and over-working, I started to mourn the fact that I have this injury... and that process is normal. - Military Veteran
When we start to “un-freeze” and are no longer “numb”, our emotional pain starts to surface. Our dreams might suggest that we are grieving and that our grief needs attention. Sometimes we get surges of intense feelings or physical symptoms like headaches or stomach problems that seem to come out of nowhere. We may feel like we are “losing it”. These “wake-up” calls can be very troubling, but try to remember that these are signs that our grief needs attention.
For more information, see Living with loss and grief.