Shelley Ramsey, Eight Tips to Help Heal Your Grief

Eight Tips to Help Heal Your Grief

Consider these eight tips to help heal your grief and to keep you focused when you feel as though you’re losing your mind.

Grieve

Don’t resist grieving. Don’t try to be strong. And don’t be afraid of emotion. Let your grief envelope you. Yell. Scream. Cry. Purge your grief. Please give yourself ample time, space, and permission to embrace and express it.

Accept the Help of Others

Allow your family and friends to be the hands and feet of Jesus. You cannot heal without Christ, and He often chooses to make himself known through the love and service of his people. He embraces you through the touch of family and friends. When loved ones offer to make dinner for you, accept their hospitality. Don’t deny them that blessing when they show up to clean a bathroom or throw in a load of laundry. Should friends tell you to call if there’s anything you need, consider allowing them to take the following burdens off your plate so you can sit in your grief:

  • Drive children to/from school or practice
  • Pick up your groceries
  • Cook meals, clean your house, do your laundry
  • Mow the grass/remove snow from the driveway
  • Sit and listen as you talk about your loved one
  • Accompany you when you select a gravestone or tend to legal matters

Give Each Family Member an Extra Measure of Grace

Your relationships with the one who died were exclusive, so each family member lost someone different. Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. Allow one another an extra measure of grace as you figure out how to survive family life with one man down.

Consider a Grief Support Group

Consider short-term grief support groups such as GriefShare. If needed, seek a professional grief counselor.

Journal

Reading the journal entries you keep during the grief process helps you see a constant pattern of God’s faithfulness as you advance your walk along this unwanted journey. Record everything you’re feeling – anger, depression, loneliness, etc. Purge your grief on paper.

Looking back, you might notice that you walked in dark clouds of gray. As your journey progresses, you will begin to see color slowly enter your world again. Record, and later be amazed at how God sits with you in your grief and then brings you through the worst time of your life. 

Pray

God is a big God. He can handle your honesty, anger, and despair. If you can only pray “Help!” that is okay. God knows your name. He hears you when you call.

Consider these last two only after purging your grief on the mourning bench.

Serve Others

Do something for someone else to help you look forward, find purpose, and shift your focus from yourself onto others. Begin by comforting others in the same way God has comforted you. Make a call to ask someone else how they are doing. Offer a hug to one who is hurting. Make a pot of soup and share it with a friend. Look for ways to use your gifts and talents to glorify God by loving others.

Choose Joy

As you slowly put one foot in front of the other and walk the long, arduous path of grief, you will eventually reach a crossroads. You will have to choose the path of bitterness or joy. Even though you have been stung by death, you can have peace that passes all understanding at a time. It makes no sense to know peace.

Choose joy every day. Be joyful because God will use your suffering! Be joyful that the land of no more goodbyes is in your future! Be joyful because God has overcome death!

(For other tips, read It Came to Pass, Not to Stay.)