Losing important emotional baggage – Objects that represent you – can be painful to those people. Going through disasters Those who destroy houses. Some tips on how to get through this emotionally and practically:
Calm yourself down, and be patient.
Mary Frances O’Connor, professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and author of “The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Become an Opportunity for Healing,” says grief can be hard on the body.
Go get a good night’s sleep, but accept that you may have insomnia. Establish new routines to replace old ones.
“Our body is reacting to the lack of habits, the uncertainty,” says O’Connor. “It also takes time for our bodies to absorb the shock.”
O’Connor says that recovering from loss “requires understanding the impact it has. Be patient, she says.”
Document the memories, let the material things go.
“You have to write the stories. Document the stories,” says Matt Paxton, a decluttering expert and author of “Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff.”
Represent those lost treasures. Grasp their meaning for you and future generations. The real things themselves are, in the end, just things.
“The old adage that you can’t take it with you is true,” he says. “It’s not the things, it’s the stories they tell.”
Save and document what you still have.
Use technology: Photograph, scan, and digitize your emotional belongings. Paxton suggests starting with the top five most important things, sayings, and the 20 most important images. Use apps that help you list things and documents. (Paxton’s company is cluttercleaner.com, and he recommends Fairsplit.com, Trustworthy.com and the Artifcts app, among others.)
Offline, label things so that the next generation will know their sentimental value.
In many cases, friends and acquaintances will have photos and meaningful things to share.
Be open to help from friends and community
Friends and acquaintances may want to recover or send items. Let them go. Share stories and talk.
Disasters and traumas often affect entire families, communities, “even an entire state and country,” says O’Connor. So it helps to remember that “our collective response creates meaning and creates memories, and it is often by turning to others that we find the strength to carry on.”
Look forward to a purposeful future.
Destruction and restoration will create new precious memories, and new photo albums full of photos. “Choose to live and create new memories and record old ones,” says Paxton.
In addition to mourning the past, O’Connor says, another aspect of healing is “recovering a meaningful life: In this new chapter of my life, who am I now? How does this change my interactions?”
“Restoring a meaningful life is also stressful, but what we see in research is that being able to go back and forth between coping with loss and dealing with recovery is a sign of mental health,” she says. “Accepting that both are part of the process.”
