(Bereavement) to ask how long for the "what's the point" feeling to go?

[emptyempty]

Just that really.

If you have been recently bereaved, roughly how long does it take for that "what is the point of anything?" feeling to lessen?

I'm not talking about completely getting over the sadness and grief - but that base feeling of absolutely everything in life is pointless and not wanting to do anything including go to work or go out or anything really.

For me, it has been 18 months since the last of four losses in a seven year period, all in my immediate family, and I'm only now feeling like myself again. I don't think it's good to set yourself a time limit though, as it's all dependent on the individual circumstances. Be kind to yourself, don't expect too much too soon, and let your mind and body recover naturally.

oh dear. I was hoping you'd say a couple of months. :(

In terms of planning a future again after the death of my DH, it was around a year. But feeling a bit better about things, eighteen months.

My Dad died last year.

This is very personal to me but my grieving went like this.....

I started grieving before he died (cancer). I was waiting for it. I wanted his suffering to end and I wanted the awfulness if loosing him to arrive so I could start dealing with it as reality. My work suffered (Im self employed) and my standard of work diminished.

The first few days after he died were a mixture of shock and calm. Being with my family, all of us spontaneously crying, then stopping, even a bit of laughing in between.

After the funeral and the few weeks after I just felt physically exhausted but ok.

I took 2 months off then told all my clients I was returning to work. I felt ready.
I struggled to concentrate on anything.

8/9 months on I was often staring at walls or blank paper when I was alone. Often lying to people how much work I'd done.

Over 12 months on I'm still not right. I feel very disheartened in my work. Feel very insecure, and feel everyday that there's no point and I want to jack it all in and find a totally different job.

I have no idea if this feeling is connected to grief of may have happened anyway.
I still find myself crying very suddenly to myself. Mainly in the car for some reason. Songs in the radio or traffic lights are a flashpoint. I don't let myself cry for long.

I have a slight 'fuck it' attitude to everything and it's doing me no good. I've spent 24 years building my professional reputation and I just don't care.....

I'm hoping I'll snap out of it soon.

It would depend on who it was, OP, and whether their death was expected or not. My dad died at 92 and his death was expected - I think all of us including my mum recovered quite quickly. It's two years on and my mum doesn't cry often about it, though she loved him dearly. On the other hand if you have lost a child I can't imagine that feeling would ever go, particularly if the loss is sudden.

I'm so sorry for your loss.

I have a slight 'fuck it' attitude to everything and it's doing me no good. I've spent 24 years building my professional reputation and I just don't care.....

Trampire - this is exactly how I feel. You have encapsulated it perfectly. I am guessing this feeling will go eventually otherwise half of the world would be operating in a "fuck it what's the point" state.

I was hoping this was more a temporary short term state but sounds like not.

What is the point of working or doing anything? I mean who cares really. The working world is almost all bullshit.

Empty, I'm glad I'm not alone in a way!

Last year I thought I was going slightly mad. My thoughts just flitted everywhere and nowhere. My career is all encompassing and highly creative - I have to come up with ideas constantly and operate in a very competitive world. I really can't be arsed, although I need to do it.

Sometimes when a deadline is due I force myself and the adrenaline kicks in. At these times I feel ok because I haven't got time to mess around.

I just want my drive back.

Day to day life, I'm fine. Happy enough, have good laughs with friends. However during those 8-10 months after I felt very detached from people. I felt like I couldn't contribute to many conversations, almost like I didn't really understand what was being said. Very strange.

Just to maybe put another side of it, whilst I was grieving my Dad soon after he died, a woman I was working closely with on a project lost her mother very suddenly.
She responded in a very different way and^ was desperate^ to get back to work after 4 weeks. Obviously I don't see her behind closed doors but she seems fine. She says she drank a little more booze in the few months after but nothing crazy. She's very much back on track by the looks of things.

It's nearly 3years since my dd1 was killed. I will be totally honest I'm surviving because I was 7mths pregnant with dd2 when she died I had to keep going for her. My life changed forever that fateful day. I do live and carry on because I have dd2. If she wasn't here I would have gave up completely.

Parkhead

My best friend lost her two daughters. The first was 4yrs old and died the day after her third dc was born. The second daughter died 3 months later in a totally unrelated incident. It was unbelievable and still is.

My friend went on to have 2 more dc and so now has 3 surviving children.

Very much like you said, she says she literally could not give up because of her new baby. She does not feel brave (people call her brave all the time)....she just carried on.

to everyone on this thread, particularly those who have lost children.

I hope it's not presumptuous of me to post - my DM is still alive but in pain and severely disabled after a massive stroke two years ago. She isn't going to make any improvement. Since it happened I have felt numb and like nothing really matters. At the same time, I function completely normally.

What is the point of working or doing anything? I mean who cares really. The working world is almost all bullshit

Lol,I still feel like this, 3 years on. But of course there is a point, you need to continue to exist. Grief does change people completely and I don't think that ever goes away. Having said that, I am happy, very happy. I've moved on in my life and I have a lot to be happy about. But that of course sits alongside the past. And whatever happens, it always will.

I guess the first year I was trying to survive. The second year was harder than the first, although thankfully I couldn't really see that until looking back on it. And the third year was a time for reflection and new ways of being. And it is all ok. Hope you are too op.

I can honestly say that after my son was stillborn, it took me around 3/4 years to start to feel pleasure again and there was a point to it all. I'd carried on, kept on living but it was like being a robot. I did it because I had to, not because I was feeling anything.

It does get better

It such a personal thing, grief, and varies so much for everyone.

I would say though, that just because someone looks fine, it doesn't mean they are. I cried every single day for well over a year after my Dad died. Nobody know this though because I'm quite a private person and only really cry when I'm on my own. I felt I needed to be strong for my Mum and I had young children who needed me and a job which kept me busy. From the outside I probably seemed fine too. It was only when I got into the car to drive home for example that I'd find myself in floods of tears.

You never get over a loss but you do learn to live with it.

I would say though, that just because someone looks fine, it doesn't mean they are

This is very true. I went to great lengths to appear fine, and I think most people believed me. I even managed to fool myself for a bit, quite a while really. But I really wasn't fine at all, and I'm still picking up the pieces from that.

Thank you all for your replies and sorry for your losses (and haverhill for your own situation).

Trampire

Last year I thought I was going slightly mad. My thoughts just flitted everywhere and nowhere. My career is all encompassing and highly creative - I have to come up with ideas constantly and operate in a very competitive world. I really can't be arsed, although I need to do it.

Sometimes when a deadline is due I force myself and the adrenaline kicks in. At these times I feel ok because I haven't got time to mess around.

I feel so like this but am struggling with the deadline situaton - normally a deadline activates me but I feel like I'm a hair's breadth from just chucking it all in. Like you it's been a lot of work to get here - but really what's the point? We could all die tomorrow and unless you are a surgeon actually saving another life - little of what most of the rest of us does matters a fig.

Noqont put it beautifully - you exist. That's all it's about, in the early days, months and years. I've experienced a very unexpected and sudden bereavement of someone young, and that was life shattering. I also lost my Dad 5 months after a massive stroke which left him utterly debilitated, and it was actually a relief that he was no longer in pain and unhappy. Both haunt me equally.

I did chuck it all in. Quit my job, took a year off, intending to retrain in something else. It wasn’t very smart really, but I also don’t regret it.

I have been having bereavement counselling recently to help me move on with stuff. I still am a bit inclined to the “fuck it, life is too short” approach. It’s been about 18 months since my dad died.

This thread has made me feel better in that I've found people who feel like me. Dad died just over a year ago very suddenly, and I was numb with shock for months. Tears come nearly every day ( usually private ones) but if I feel happy, I stop and wonder if I should be, which is ridiculous I know.
to everyone who's had tough times.

My grieving went like this:

When my mum died I felt okay. I went back to work three days after the funeral (ten days after the death). Pretty sad but alright. I was 22.

Six months later it hit me HARD when I started realising that I hadn’t just lost the sick, poorly mum she was at the end, I’d lost the funny healthy beautiful mum I’ve had the rest of my life, forever.

The next eighteen months were horrible. Absolute hell. Just, feeling inside out. Definite periods of happiness too but interspersed with random crying fits and physically feeling the pain of missing her almost all the time, lots of nightmares. I never felt ‘what’s the point?’ though as I had my life and job and volunteering and friendships to focus on.

About two years after she died I started feeling myself and okay again.

It’s been eight years now and I’m largely fine with it but every few months or so there’ll be a few days where I just miss her so so much and listen to our music and think about how sad it was to lose her and how thankful I am to have had her as my own mum.

It’s so personal. Counselling helped me but only after the first year. Within the first six months to a year it’s pretty futile other than venting/support, as you’re still going through the normal grieving process and so the counsellor can’t really do a lot of real work, you’re gonna feel your feelings and process it however you’re processing it whatever the counsellor says.

For people who have had bereavement counselling - would you recommend it?

What do they actually do? I mean is it just talking yourself about how you are feeling? Or do they "do" anything that helps - like hypnosis or meditation or anything?

Yes it really helped me, though like I say it’s not indicated if the loss has been shorter than six months to a year.

We talked about my mum. Memories. How I felt about what happened. We did a couple of ‘technique’ related things, one time I wrote a timeline of my life and the good and bad things that had happened on either side, the other we looked at a series of pictures of things and I picked out ones that spoke to me and talked about how they related to my grief.

I went to cruse, a proper bereavement trainer counsellor with qualifications is crucial as anyone can call themselves a counsellor it’s not a protected title. If not cruse, check the register for the BABCP to ensure the person has had proper training and supervision, as a charlatan can do real harm.

It helped me but counselling is by no means necessary or for everyone. I suspect I’d have continued how I did with or without it. It’s just at the time I really enjoyed that one hour per week to focus on my mum so I could just carry on the rest of the time. It was important to me to be able to talk about her as when someone dies you often feel they’ve just vanished but she was real, and she was mine.

Also it was a bit complex as she died from an addiction so there was stuff to unpack there too.

I didn’t know anyone at the time really who’d lost someone so close to them in a traumatic way young, so it was good to talk to someone who’d also experienced loss :)

Meditation and hypnosis might be some tools used by some counsellors but probably not the properly trained ones as it’s not part of their training and counselling is an evidence based therapy.

I’d have been out of there in a shot if she’d tried to use any woo on me actually! I needed and wanted to talk about my mum, not be made to feel better if that makes sense.

I'm feeling similar recently, just had awful news about a family member with cancer and I just keep feeling what is the point of this world where such things happen and there's nothing can be done...and it's such a negative way to be and have tried CBT type things to try and talk myself out of it but it's not working. and then get cross with myself for doing it.

I'm trying acceptance that it is valid to feel that way and acceptable and not feel guilty about it, but it is really hard.