Ask HN: How do you deal with grief? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you deal with grief?

9 pointsfoota17 comments

(I'm assuming you mean grief about losing someone)

One thing that I have found to be very important is: don't fight grief.

I've realized it's a normal feeling, you should let yourself feel it, it's only worse if you try to fight it.

Remembering "the good times" with common friends/relatives/??? instead of racking your brain with the "why" also seems to make it a bit better.

Other than that, only time will fix things.

Sorry for your loss.

My answer was going to be "curling up in a ball and crying for 3 days", which is what I did. And the thing is, that's okay. You're absolutely right. Don't fight the grief, and realize that grieving is normal.

Read A Guide To The Good Life: The Ancient Art Of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine! It is a modern summary on the stoic techniques to overcome negative emotions. It handels also grief. Or read the letters of Seneca to Lucilius (nr 63).

I found too many of the contextual references to be about war and death. Translating that into a modern context didn't come naturally to me. I found the best part of the book to be the analysis by William Irvine, not the rest of the content.

I'll give the letters of seneca to Lucilius a glance.

Thanks everyone. My mom suffered a massive asthma attack and is in the hospital on life support. She was without oxygen for too long and lost all brain function. I'm 22 and this is just so unexpected and hard.

I'm sorry for your loss. Losing a parent is hard. It changes you.

Like another commenter said, don't fight it. The feeling will crop up at some very unexpected times, and reasons. There will be odd moments it returns when you thought you'd dealt with it. Only time will help. Even then it doesn't so much heal, but let you look back without the pain.

Losing my father young led me to make efforts to find out more about other relatives lives. Until he got sick I had, like many, just acted like he'd always be there.

It was so unexpected. I was talking with her on the phone just last Monday about how my interview had gone. I'm away at school most of the year so I haven't been here much. It's hard being home and seeing all these things about my mom. She had pictures of my brother and I hung everywhere, she cared so much about everyone.

I'm sorry to hear about your loss. I'm going to try to be closer to the rest of my family. Thank you for talking.

Cry every night for weeks if you feel like it. Look at some old photos and cry some more. Let the pain blow through your heart but don't hold on to it as it passes through. I did this for my father.

One thing that I have found to be very important is: don't fight grief.I've realized it's a normal feeling, you should let yourself feel it, it's only worse if you try to fight it.

Don't worry that you can't see a solution right now.

Take your time to actively process your feelings.

Leave your daily routine for some time and give your brain room to work undisturbed. Do something that keeps you physically active all day. Do something creative.

Explore your feelings and try to find out where exactly they come from. Don't give up just because thinking about it hurts more. It will help your brain to cope. Actively think about the countless positive memories you have. Bad emotions are much more powerful and tend to overshadow everything else.

Learn to accept.

Get plenty of sleep, it helps a lot.

Be strong.

Many people have found grief counseling and support groups helpful. Frequently, there are local faith based groups that are quite good.

GriefShare is interesting, they have a registry of meetups for those dealing with loss of a loved one > http://www.griefshare.org/findagroup

Condolences-

The pain you feel might be from the part of you (it might feel like a part of your soul) that is now missing - that is the reason it hurts so much.

Realize that this part of you is with your friend as you had shared time, life and love together.

But in all that hurt and pain due to the loss also realize that there is a part of your friend still with you. Find it. Your tears will lead the way.

That might be a way love bridges even death.

Give a listen to some of Alan Watt's lectures. They are on youtube, and there are shorter (<10 min) clips on specific topics. He's not going to help you get over grief, but to learn to accept it as part of life.

Might take a dozen listens to internalize half the content, but it'd be adopting a different perspective on life. Won't come easy

In the later stages it has to be understood that things aren't going to go back to 'normal'. Life will go on but it will be new reality, a new era and you will always miss that person but it won't be as painful all the time.

once, in university, I worked really hard coding a homework for an OS class (spent around 2 hours or so). It was modular, well engineered, had inode stuff all taken into account, it was efficient and I was feeling very nice. I then lost it all.

I felt grief.

I started again but was infuriated.

Lesson: ALWAYS MAKE A COPY OF YOUR WORK!!

(You did not specify what kind of grief)

Dulling psychic pain with physical pain seems to help me. (I mean working out, getting a tattoo, etc, not self-harm.) Treating the body brutally backgrounds your mental processes for a while, and gives you time to process things subconsciously.

I reflect that the mercy of God is like an infinite ocean.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com