Rebuilding Yourself After Grief: How Can You Show Compassion to Yourself?

As seen in our articles on grief in the context of caregiving and the factors that complexify it, the loss of the person being cared for involves an important process of adjustment. Self-compassion can act like a balm during this difficult time. We invite you to take a moment to better understand it.

Defining self-compassion

Considering that there are many interpretations of this popular term, it would be interesting to go back to its source. Self-compassion finds its main etymological roots in the Latin terms com ("with") and pati ("to suffer"), meaning "to suffer with". It refers to "feeling for a person who is suffering and being motivated to act to help them". With the added prefix "self", it more specifically means to connect with our own suffering in an understanding, nonjudgmental, way, through offering ourselves kindness, perhaps even forgiveness. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/handbook-of-compassion-in-healthcare/selfcompassion/3246FDD68F2E56A45EF80BBD52ED4566)

Putting it into practice during an active period of caregiving

Integrating self-compassion into your caregiving journey can help reduce the complications of grief after caregiving. Here are a few examples:

• Continuing to nurture other areas of your life (beyond caregiving)

By avoiding having our identity rest solely on caregiving, we have more anchors, so when that role disappears, our identity will be less shaken.

• Taking time just for yourself

These moments help preserve your energy and can allow you to experience the shock of losing the person you cared for a little more gently.

• Reducing expectations of yourself

Often, as a caregiver, it is easy to ask a lot of ourselves and do more than our capacities allow. By reducing the expectations we may have of ourselves, we prevent the buildup of frustrations and disappointments that drain energy.

• Being more lenient with yourself after making a mistake

By taking the pressure off having to do things perfectly, we allow ourselves to reduce our stress and emotional reactivity.

It is normal for some of these actions to require a short-term effort, but they offer long-term benefits.

Putting it into practice after caregiving, during the grieving process

Referring to the previous paragraph, the ideal is to offer ourselves self-compassion when we are caregivers. However, it is possible that you did not integrate as much of it as you would have liked during your caregiving journey. No need to be hard on yourself; it is never too late to offer it to yourself.

Thus, during grief, considering that this period is unique to each person, it is important to remember that self-compassion can take many different forms for each person. What confirms that an action is rooted in compassion is when it is grounded in an intention to offer good to oneself or to others. An act of self-compassion for one person may not be for another. For example, a former caregiver may go for a run every morning to work through their emotions. For another person, on the contrary, that would be exhausting. It is therefore important to notice what the action brings us in the short term as well as in the long term.

Here are a few examples:

• Not expecting to always feel good or always feel bad.

• Allowing yourself to experience a fluctuation of emotions.

• Asking loved ones for support.

• Sharing with other former caregivers.

• Responding to your needs and desires.

• Trying new things.

• Recognizing when the emotional burden is too great to see clearly and reaching out to a professional resource such as GASO.

Making it your own exercise

To give you the opportunity to transpose self-compassion into your own experience, we invite you to answer this question:

What would it look like if I were, right now, to give shape to my intention to offer myself compassion ?