Grief
An essential part of the mindfulness and acceptance-based approach to chronic illness and pain management is the existential perspective. Being affected by chronic illness and pain often brings with it a loss and grief that needs to be processed. For many people, there is a loss of the life they knew and had and a loss of opportunities. Many things change, and it can therefore become a goodbye to the life you had before the illness and pain.
Grief is not only linked to the loss of a loved one, as many might think. Emotional grief can also be experienced with other types of losses. It can be the loss of the ability to work, loss of full bodily function, loss of identity, or the loss of future dreams and goals due to chronic illness and/or pain getting in the way.
Many women with endometriosis, especially younger women who experience the disease and pain as very dominant in their everyday lives, experience various forms of loss over time. Here it is important to allow yourself recurring grieving processes where you allow yourself to enter into the grief and accept its presence.
The process of processing the grief that chronic disease and pain can cause often involves first acknowledging the loss, meaning that you must first realize and understand what it is you have lost - both on an intellectual and emotional level. The process also means that at times you may be faced with intense emotions that need to be dealt with.
It may be necessary to let go of what was in order to fully re-enter life with its new conditions and to begin to see new possibilities in life. It is important to come to some kind of acceptance of the disease and the pain as a life condition so that life can go on with something other than illness and pain.
