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In this episode of the Recovery Rebirth Podcast, we share our experiences with death of family members..Jillian talks about the death of her brother and Dominick discusses the death of his parents. Death is the ultimate loss and many of us in recovery can struggle with complicated grief when an addicted loved one dies. Oftentimes we’ve had to have very strong boundaries to protect ourselves and to prevent damaging our relationships. While boundaries are necessary, we can feel crushing guilt for having had such strong boundaries at times and wonder if they felt more like walls to our loved ones who have passed.
We’ve both had experiences dealing wtih difficult relatives while grieving the death of our loved ones which enflamed our anger. Those of us in recovery often have difficult family dynamics. We both know the agony of waiting for our relatives to die after they were taken off life support. And we both felt the peace knowing our loved one was no longer suffering, even in the midst of our grief.
We touch upon grief-induced anxiety and coping mechanisms we’ve used when our grief is acute. Some effective strategies were reading affirmations, connecting with others in recovery, and practiing gratitude on the days where we start to notice progress. We also talk about the maladaptive coping mechanism used to distract ourselves from grief.
If you have lost a loved one to addiction, we offer our heartfelt compassion, comfort and support. We hope you will find some solace in our stories. Whether in recovery or not, people are rarely taught how to grieve–death remains a fairly taboo topic in our culture.. We encourage you to explore the resources below. We have found support groups to be particularly powerful in recovering from grief.
If you’re still hurting years later, you’re not alone. Griief has no timeline and we each experience it in our own way. It is possible to move through the stages and finally arrive at acceptance. It is our hope that you move closer to acceptance and peace with each passing day. Like everything else in life, we have found that moving through grief is done One Day at a Time.
Resources
Support Groups
Books
On Death and Dying–Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
On Grief and Grieving–Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler
Websites
https://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/
https://www.psycom.net/stages-of-grief
TED Talks
The journey through loss and grief
How to support yourself (and others) through grief
