Understanding Your Emotions

I came across the following some time ago and somehow it helped me make sense of what I have been going through since Hannah died. I thought I would share it with you in the hope that it helps some of you in the way it has helped me. There is also a breakdown of various emotions which I found helped "rationalise" the emotions I feel.

Jen

When your baby dies, you grieve for them. Your grief is the journey from how things were to how things will be. In this journey, you may experience powerful and possibly unfamiliar emotions.

These emotions are part of the natural process of grief. Remember that an emotion is neither good or bad, nor right or wrong, it is just an emotion. Emotions are not rational, but they are very real responses. You feel emotions in your solar plexus, your gut and your heart. This is why expressions like ‘heart-felt’, ‘butterflies in my stomach’ and ‘gut-wrenching’ are common. Emotions or feelings can be uncomfortable but they are not harmful.

You may not be used to feeling the amount of emotion that your grief has triggered. Some manifestations of emotions, such as tears, sighing, or nervous irritation, may be distressing and embarrassing to you. You may also experience deep feeling without outward expression.

In the normal process of grief, you will work through emtions in layers. Perhaps you hope that once you experience an emotion, it is over. Then the next layer shows up. You are not back where you were but facing a new level of the same emotion.

You might try to control or suppress your feelings with varying degrees of success. You can learn to work with your emotions, at least to some degree, so that you are not entirely at their mercy. To begin, take things a little at a time and deal with each emotion as it comes. Let yourself be in the experience, be curious about it, attend to what it is like in detail, and allow the feeling to move through you and out. With practice, you can choose where, when, and for how long to feel your emotions. They become something you journey with rather than wish to avoid.