Be grounded and fight blues during holidays!

We all experience grief at various points in our life. But dealing with a loss can be particularly difficult during the holiday season.

It’s a time when days are colder, darker and bleaker — and we’re meant to be cheering ourselves up with festive, family rituals.

You can never predict your reaction to losing a loved- one, even when you knew it was coming. Your fluctuating emotions can seem nonsensical, and that in itself can feel unnerving.

But there are ways to feel grounded and secure, and to find some solace during this period.

Speaking to DailyMail. com, two grief therapists give their views to cope with the menace.

Holidays can be even more painful when you’re grieving, they said.

“The nature of human existence is that people get attached and when our attachments are severed, we hurt, we grieve,” R Benyamin Cirlan, a grief psychotherapist at New York City's Center for Loss and Renewal, said.

“It’s true in the animal world as well. To be grieving ◗ is a natural response.”

You can’t put a time limit on it, but Cirlan says in general up to six months of intense grief would not be unsurprising.

Claire Bidwell Smith, a grief counsellor who authored the book Anxiety: The Missing Stage Of Grief, agrees.

“One of the first things to think about is to recognise that it’s difficult,” she told DailyMail. com.

Wherever you’re spending the holidays, doing something charitable can help you feel a sense of meaning.

“Loss is, for many people, a crisis of meaning,” Cirlan explains.

“The people we attach to give our lives meaning. Nobody has a 100 per cent positive relationship but those relationships give us a sense of meaning.”

It takes time to reconstruct that sense of meaning, to reflect on who you are now, and how the person you lost gave you meaning.

Bidwell Smith says taking action in a roundabout way can give you a feeling of agency and goodwill that helps you on that journey.

“I think one thing that’s really great to do is do something meaningful, like donate or volunteer, or collect presents for underserved families, or make a cash donation in the name of your loved- one,” suggests Smith, the grief counsellor.