How to Deal With Grief During a Divorce Separation

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's John Bosworth. I'm a licensed Mental Health Counselor. I want to talk a little bit about how to deal with grief during a divorce or separation. What people usually mean by grief... Let's define some things so we can get on track. Grief is usually a feeling of sadness, okay, and the feeling of sadness associated with grief is there's usually some type of loss in our lives, okay. And on this clip, we're really talking about the loss of a spouse or a partner, okay. And what a lot of people don't realize is that it's very appropriate to feel sad or upset, you know, if you've had a relationship and you really love that person, and now, that relationship is no longer. I have people that come to my office and say, well, I feel really sad about this. And, I kind of jokingly, if I get a good vibe from them, will say, well, so what's so bad about feeling sad that you lost something or somebody that you love? And they'll say, well nothing, I guess. So, I try to differentiate between sadness and depression, and when you're sad, that's an appropriate negative feeling to an event that, you know, is very unpleasant to you, such as losing a partner, or a spouse, or a girlfriend or boyfriend, or a loved one, an aunt or an uncle. That's very appropriate. That's, we have evolved to develop appropriate feelings. We love something, we've lost it. It's appropriate to feel sad. Where we get into trouble is if you start to, six months down the road, say well, I can't go on living, and life is not worth living. It's going to be horrible to try to go on without this person. Those are some of the irrational beliefs that I try to identify and help people identify to make the grief less toxic, less intense. And what we mean by that is it becomes toxic when loss over a relationship, or a divorce or separation of a relationship becomes a problem at work, or it becomes a problem with other areas of your life. That's when we really want to go, okay, we've probably gone from normal, appropriate grief to depression. And usually, with depression, people have a need. There's a thought process that goes on that they need that person in their life in order to be happy; which we know is not true. Although we would really like that person in our lives, we definitely don't need that person. Very hard to tell somebody that when they're feeling, you know, grief stricken. But, the need is a perception, because people who survived usually were very happy before they met the person that they're separated from, and they will probably get back to that after a reasonable period of time and dealing with it, and starting to think about it in a more rational way. My name's John Bosworth, and we're talking about how to deal with grief during separation or divorce."