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Recently, almost all of us have lost something — jobs, long-planned trips, favorite food, friends who have left … Our reader shares the story of his loss. And the psychologist explains how it is worth living and why it is impossible to call any losses unimportant.
“One day you wake up in some kind of nightmare and think that you will fall asleep again and everything will be fine”
Valery, 36 years:
“I can say this about myself: I achieve everything in my life myself. He himself entered the budget department of the university, mastered several specialties himself, opened his own business and earned his first apartment. My family is from a small town, so when I went to Moscow, I had a goal — to prove to everyone that everyone can get everything they dream of.
I got everything and more. First of all, I have my close people: my family and friends. I am running a business that I built from scratch. Until some time, I considered my life absolutely happy. Of course, these are words. There were a lot of frustrations over the little things. A person is never completely satisfied, but on the whole I considered my life quite successful.
What happened next? And then I lost everything
This happened in connection with the latest events in the world. My business can no longer work — it is tied to the sale of goods from countries that, on the one hand, have announced sanctions, and on the other, are recognized as unfriendly. The stocks of the companies I bought have dropped in price. I’m not talking about temporary difficulties, but that I really lost a lot of money.
I had a hope that my two apartments, which I rent in Moscow, would bring at least some small income, but both landlords terminated the contract with me ahead of schedule, as they hastily decided to leave Russia. I understand that my investment in real estate has not paid off. Of course, I will find tenants, but most likely it will be completely different money.
And it’s not even that, but the fact that everything happened in an instant
It was like I woke up naked. I don’t think I can somehow rebuild my company, and even if I can, it will take some time. I do not have additional funds for this, I did not put them into risks. My work for me is first and foremost a way of life. I can’t imagine how I can now go as a hired worker at least somewhere. After all my life, I actually did not depend on anyone.
Almost all of my best friends are preparing to emigrate. Someone left in the first days, being afraid of who knows what, others are planning to do it in the very near future. Some of them we have been friends with for decades. For me, this is a real loss of loved ones.
To be honest, for several days I was in a state of complete horror to complete apathy, because I do not know what to do next. How do I pay off the people who work for me? How to try to feed the family in the future? There are no ideas and, apparently, no prospects. I understand my responsibility to other people, but I have absolutely no moral strength to begin to get something out of this ashes and start all over again.
It’s like the end of the world. As they say in bad stories. One day you wake up in some kind of nightmare and think that you will fall asleep again and everything will be fine. But here you get up day after day, and one problem is added to another and another. I understand that I am not the only one in the world so lost. This is felt by many people who are in a similar situation with mine.
“Losing a roof over your head, a business, or the opportunity to eat your favorite fast food — the process of mourning will be the same”
Polina Song — psychologist, hypnologist
The most important piece of advice that can be given to anyone who has lost something important due to the current situation is to give yourself time to adapt. The desire to stop experiencing mental pain as soon as possible and, in general, “to return to duty and live on” is understandable. But, unfortunately, our psyche is arranged in such a way that this is impossible. There will be an extreme reaction to an extreme situation (and now absolutely everything is in it). This is fine.
The situation of loss is painful for the psyche just as the loss of an organ is painful for the body. If your arm is torn off, it is useless to try to quickly glue it back so that you can work as before. It takes time for the body to recover from the shock.
If we are experiencing a loss, the psyche must perform the “work of grief” — this is a rather long process of processing all emotional experiences associated with the loss and adapting to a reality in which there is no longer any significant value. Only after its completion can we accept what happened as an experience and find new meanings and joys in life.
It is important to remember that the work of grief will go on regardless of the “size” of the loss — the mechanism will be absolutely the same.
Losing a roof over your head, a business, or the opportunity to eat your favorite fast food — the process of mourning will be the same. Only the intensity of feelings and the speed of adaptation can differ, but this depends solely on the internal significance for a person of what he has lost. Therefore, for someone, the loss of the opportunity to eat their favorite food can indeed be as hard a loss as for another person — the loss of a business.
For the grief of loss to be fully lived, you need to be in stable conditions and in safety, because this is an incredibly energy-consuming process for the psyche. And if all the resources are spent on coping with daily stress, then they simply will not be left for the integration of negative experience.
Therefore, it is important to understand that in the current situation, when there is still a lot of uncertainty and it is not clear what will happen next, it will not be possible to fully and quickly recover
To do this, you need to wait at least for the stabilization of the situation. All that you can (and really need) to do for yourself now is to switch to the maximum power saving mode, so that by the time everything settles down, you will not come to a state of complete exhaustion.
How can you support yourself?
1. Review your list of goals and current tasks. Leave only what is really necessary to do in order to “stay afloat”. It is in your interest to wait out the moment of shock so as not to mess things up.
2. Make a list of what you love to do. It is desirable that there are simple actions that you can perform every day. Replace actions from the category «moving towards goals» with actions from the list of what you love — this will give your psyche the strength to cope with stress.
3. Find an opportunity to express those emotions that overwhelm you. Ask for support from loved ones, contact a psychologist, break a dinner set, anything that will help you “let off steam” without harm to others. In the end, as the now popular meme says, “every Russian should get a free hectare of forest to go there and yell.”
4. Now more than ever, health care matters. — Be sure to get enough sleep, do not skip meals, engage in feasible physical activity. Physical activity helps eliminate cortisol, the stress hormone, from the body, and this is what will help improve your condition almost immediately. Walking at a brisk pace for half an hour is enough.
Everyone has every right to the feelings that he is experiencing now. Everyone is losing something, and these losses are growing every day. Now is not the time to find out who is worse off — because absolutely everyone is bad, and everyone is bad in their own way. Only we ourselves know how valuable what we lost was for us, what it gave us and whether anything can replace this loss for us. It takes time to realize and accept everything that has happened to us, and it is very important to give it to ourselves and others.