Hospice: Los Angeles Palliative Care – How Journaling Can Help Cope with Loss

Losing a loved one to a life-limiting disease is stressful and emotionally exhausting. You undergo a lot of emotions all at once, unable to figure out which one to focus on first and how to deal with the loss. Grief, shock, anger, humiliation, sadness, confusion, and denial—all hit you at once. Still, experts in palliative care suggest that journaling can help you deal with those emotions and the aftereffects.

Palliative care in Los Angeles does not only focus on providing quality care for hospice patients. They also care for the families and help them deal with the loss. One of the effective ways to deal with grief is journaling and releasing emotions to process them in a healing manner.

How Journaling Helps Cope with the Loss of a Loved One

Journaling to cope with grief is not like regular journaling. You do not have to sit down daily to write your thoughts on paper. You can keep a notepad app on your phone or carry a notebook to jot down your thoughts and feelings.

Whenever you feel overwhelmed with emotions, you can journal and write freely. There’s no need to worry about being creative or making sense of words. As you express emotions, you are helping yourself cope with losing a loved one.

Following are a few journaling prompts that can help you get started if you don’t know what to write:

●        Write directly to the person you’ve lost.

●        If there’s anything worth apologizing for, tell them about it.

●        Share any good or bad news with the person you’ve lost in your notebook.

●        Write about your problems and imagine what advice they’d give you.