your health
Are you or a loved one still struggling to process a loss?
If you’ve ever experienced losing a loved one, you may have thought you had coped at the time, but years on, you’re suddenly suffering with bouts of insomnia, anxiety, illness or having irrational outbursts of anger, and you don’t understand why.
Experts believe that millions of us experience what is known as delayed grief, where our feelings of grief don’t come for months or even years after our loss. Often, if there’s a period in our life where we become less busy, this can also trigger delayed grief.
“Delayed grief is increasingly common,” says Nicola Reed, director of client services for the charity, Cruse Scotland Bereavement Support. “There is no timeline around grief and it’s not uncommon for things to get in the way of our space to grieve. The problem is, when we try to suppress our grief it often comes up like a volcano further down the line, and this can take its toll on our health.
Meet the expert
Nicola Reed joined the Cruse Scotland staff team as an Area Manager in April 2019.
“People with unprocessed grief may be more prone to physical symptoms like headaches and pains. It can cause interrupted sleep, fatigue and impact cognitive capacity.
“Anxiety is also quite common in grief, because the person becomes fearful they will lose another person they love. They may even start to worry about pains linked with their loved one’s loss – for example, if someone has died from a heart attack, we may think we have physical pains in our heart.
“Of course, it’s always important if you’re suffering with any physical symptoms to see a GP to get anything serious ruled out, but any suppression of our emotional wellbeing impacts our body, and grief is no different.”
And it’s not just physical signs that can suggest we’re suffering from delayed grief. “Having strong unexplained emotional reactions to unlinked events years on may also signal to us that we’re struggling with delayed grief,” explains Nicola.
“And the trigger for that grief that can be anything. It might be a geographical location that we associate with that person, anniversaries, or being at an important occasion like a wedding years later, where we feel that person ought to be, even years after our loss.”
However our grief manifests, be it physically or emotionally, taking time to attend to it can help. Nicola says, “When delayed grief emerges, there is a whole raft of stuff that has never been processed before, and as soon as you start unpicking that and allowing yourself the time and space to grieve, that will help your grief move forward.
“In fact, it’s really common for people to notice through their grief work that physical symptoms dissipate. Of course, what that
