Thanksgiving and Christmas without our loved ones can be difficult. I’ve gathered grief resources for the holidays. In this post I highlight 3 strategies to deal with grief. I also look at why it’s important to grieve and how we can meet people in their space of mourning. 

3 Strategies to Deal with Grief

I chose these 3 strategies because they emphasize the importance of being where you are, remembering your loved ones, and reaching out to others. They are also a few of the ways that I have seen my friends handle grief.

These strategies are from an article by Amy Morin, a psychotherapist turned author. She lists nine strategies and of those nine, I want to highlight three.

3 Strategies to Deal with Grief:

1. Allow Yourself to Feel a Range of Emotions

The range of emotions that Amy mentions are joy, guilt, and sadness. Amy encourages feeling whatever emotion you are experiencing without telling yourself you should be feeling differently. This might mean letting yourself enjoy something that makes you happy without feeling like you should be feeling sad instead. However, it can go the other way as well. If you aren’t up for the cheery event, it’s okay to feel sad. It is important to be gentle with yourself.

2. Find a Way to Honor Your Memories

Amy lists commemoration as a strategy because it reminds us that our loved ones are still with us. We might write a short remembrance of them or light a candle. Or maybe there is an object that they made or that was passed onto you that you can set close to you. However we honor their memories, we do it so that it can bring us comfort amidst the grief. When we honor the memory of our loved ones we are remembering how things were in the past, but also bringing the memory into our present.

3. Do Something Kind for Others

According to Amy Morin, doing something kind for others might remind you that despite your grief you still have things to give. If you journal, these might be things that you can write about later. Losing someone might make it difficult for you to embrace the love, joy, and peace of Christmas that I suggest as a journal prompt. However, if you seek out ways to be kind to others, you might add things into your day that help you embrace that love, joy, and peace of Christmas. It could also be that the love, joy, and peace that you write about are focused on memories of you and your loved one during the holidays. It might even be about how in your day you were able to embrace all the emotions that you had-the happy ones and the sad ones.

There are other ways to deal with grief, but the above three ways seem especially important to remember. They don’t ignore the emotions that you are feeling and they don’t rush you to move on. If you want more strategies for handling grief during the holidays, read Amy Morin’s full article here.

More grief resources for the holidays, and in general, include understanding why we need to grieve and knowing what we might be able to say to someone that is grieving.

Why it’s Important to Grieve

Amy Morin’s article begins by stating that the process of healing is to experience the pain of grief. It’s not in avoiding our feelings that we move on. We move on through healing and we heal by experiencing the pain.

I turned to my faith for more words of wisdom on the importance of grieving.

Here’s what Abbot Tryphon says about grief and losing a loved one:

“We need to mourn…We need to embrace the grief, and honor the bereavement process. Grief is confirmation that our loved one was a person of value, a beloved son or daughter, a cherished brother or sister, a treasured friend. Grief is how we honor a well-lived life, for the death is grief-worthy. In grieving, we do their memory justice, and follow in the example of Jesus, who wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus.”-Abbot Tryphon

This is strategy 1 and 2 that I mentioned above. Letting yourself grieve and feel both the sadness and happiness (or whatever emotions you feel) is the beginning of the healing process. It’s in the midst of that, and even through that, that we honor our loved ones.

I encourage you to read the rest of Abott Tryohon’s article on mourning our loved ones and embracing grief. He writes about how death doesn’t separate us from our loved ones.

Meeting People in Their Grief

People have a variety of ways to deal with grief. For someone that is observing, it might be difficult to know what to say. We might be a little fearful or uncertain of what to do if we are witnessing a way that someone expresses grief that we are not familiar with.

In my own journey, I’ve realized that it’s not the words that matter. Show up. Offer hugs. Do something to lighten the load of everything else that needs to get done.

If you want a best and worst list, I’ve got one of those for you too.

If someone you know is grieving here is a helpful article on the best and worst things to say to someone in grief:

10 Best and Worst Things To Say to Someone in Grief:

Grief Resources for the Holidays

I hope this article was helpful in offering ways to deal with grief. I also hope it helped show how important the grief process is and how we can be there for people that are grieving.

For more tips on dealing with grief during the holidays read grief.com’s article Grief and the Holidays. There are tips for other holidays besides Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Remember Your Loved Ones

I encourage you, if you are missing someone you love, to remember them with gratitude.

Think of the loved one(s) that you no longer with you this holiday season. List 3 things that you would want to tell them that you think they would be proud of about you. Or, list 3 things that you remember about them, that even though they are gone it brings you joy to remember.

I find that writing things down is especially helpful when I want to process or remember something. If you are open to journaling about it, write it down.

Behavior Challenge: Be kind to others. This gives us something to reflect about at the end of the day, or helps us engage with the world around us even while we are grieving. It does more than that though. It also helps us become better people.

Do we need complete clarity before acting on something? This way of thinking seems smart. If we think of everything we are prepared for anything. Yet, this need to have everything figured out can actually hold us back.

From discouraged to coping.

When thinking about my career path, I used to think in the way mentioned above. I wanted to have a crystal clear path towards a perfect for me career, but I could never picture it. “What do you want to do?” was an incredibly frustrating question.  I was trying to answer with the end goal in mind. When I didn’t have a clear end goal I ended up discouraged.

Now when people ask me what I want to do, I have several possible answers. While the steps are not 100% clear, I am hopeful. Even though I don’t have it all figured out, it’s okay. I am learning to cope even when I don’t know the end goal.

Instead of feeling discouraged because I don’t have it all figured out, I am learning to see each career related decision as a path that opens my vision to where I should go next. I take each step in hopes that my clarity grows. I found Jenny Blake’s book Pivot helpful for developing this focus on one step at a time (you can find great pivot resources here).

I am learning to use 2 coping skills for a lack of clarity.

2 ways to cope when you don’t know the end goal:

Be where you are. It is very easy when you dream of doing something else to focus on that dream, or to focus on anything other than where you are. This makes things worse. The most depressed days of my career search were those days where I let myself get caught up in the struggle of not wanting to be where I was, but not knowing where I wanted to be.

The first thing I would tell someone who is struggling with clarity and not liking where they are is to focus on what is good about your current job and how you can enjoy it while you are there. If you want help navigating the change situation while still showing up where you are, read Jon Acuff’s book Do Over (you can find his books here).

This is a great resource even if you aren’t currently struggling with clarity. Do Over has great information on how to build what Jon Acuff calls a career savings account. We are all going to need to change jobs sooner or later for any of the reasons he talks about in his book. He is also really good at reminding his reader that it is important to show up where you are.

Talk about it.

When I lacked career clarity I really didn’t want to talk about anything related to my work search, because it put me face to face with my lack of clarity. Yet a common theme in the books I read to improve myself was that we need input from other people.

Sometimes others help us process a decision we are considering to see if our decision fits our goals. Sometimes others help us figure out what direction we need to go, simply by listening to us talk it out.

Talking about your lack of clarity can be freeing. The more I shared with people that I didn’t know what to do, the more I found that I was not the only one struggling with a lack of clarity.

Remember the 2 Coping Skills.

When we’re tempted to focus on the end goal at the expense of looking at what we can do where we are, let’s stop and refocus. Let’s be where we are.

When we’re tempted to hide behind our unknowns at the expense of feeling like we’re the only one’s struggling with clarity, let’s share our struggles with those we trust. Let’s stop and talk about it.

Read my post How to start creating a career plan when you lack clarity.

Do you find it easy or difficult to share your lack of clarity with others?

What do you think? Leave me a comment.