Many people diagnosed with a chronic illness find themselves grieving for their health and changed future. Experiencing grief can result from major life changes and affect emotional, mental, or physical health.
When diagnosed with a chronic illness, the type of grief people experience is different from that we associate with traditional losses. This type of grief cycles through our lives as we experience new symptoms or medications stop being as effective.
The five stages of grief, defined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, take a different slant regarding living with chronic illnesses. The stages exist, but they are applied to our bodies and thus ourselves.
Let’s look at some of those stages as they relate to those of us living with chronic illnesses.
Denial
In basic terms, this is the stage of our minds processing the information. Naturally, a part of this is rejecting the new reality. When we experience new symptoms or flares, we often try to pass them off as something else or minimize what we are experiencing. Logically we know things are changing; our disease is becoming active or changing.
Denial helps protect us from emotional and mental hurt while we go through the processes. But, of course, it also means we downplay the severity of things like our pain, struggles, and doubts. We may even push through things to act as if nothing is wrong or hide things from those who care about us.
When the disease flares up, or we discover new symptoms, it can remind us that there is no cure, so we go back to denial while processing what these changes may mean.
Anger
This strong emotion normally comes to play when we acknowledge the reality of our condition. We may feel angry at our doctors, others, or even ourselves. Lasing out sometimes makes things more manageable or easier.
Blaming medical professionals for not finding our condition sooner or for taking a conservative approach to managing our diseases is a way of rationalizing the emotion we feel.
Blaming ourselves for overdoing things, not taking or reporting our symptoms sooner, or even missing a dose of medication is a game of what-ifs. Unfortunately, this commonly happens when we spend more time in denial and, in turn, can create feelings of self-loathing.
Whenever I feel that white-hot sear of anger, I remind myself that this means I’m ready to move forward.
Depression
It’s not uncommon for people with chronic conditions to be depressed. Chronic pain can make depression worse, and depression can make the pain worse too. It may be hard to determine if the depression we feel is true depression or something else, such as the aches and pains of our conditions flaring up again.
Recognizing the cyclical stages of grief that come with chronic illness allowed me to design a process to take control back control of my life.
If you are struggling with grief or other challenges from living with chronic conditions, let’s connect and get you back to living life beyond chronic illness.