Completing our grief cycles

Either you bump your head somewhere, or someone scratch your car, or you see garbage on the road, or your favourite sports team lose a match, or a dear one leaves this world, or your property is demolished on accusation of illegal encroachment and there is no one to give you justice, etc. etc., unpleasant events push us into grief, minor or major, but some level of grief is generated ... if so then there are five levels of grief: 1) Denial, 2) Anger, 3) Sadness, 4) Sense making, 5) Acceptance ... in case of major grief, we even move back and forth on these stages many times over the period of months if not years, and may pass them within a few minutes if the incident is small ... 

The common mistake here, which is almost become a cultural phenomenon, is to jump on to the sense making stage without completing the anger and sadness stage. This i believe could be because of western antagonism against eros (our emotional side) and glorification of logos (our rational side) ... whatever the reason maybe, we end up accumulating grief in our system, which makes us reactive in the long run, and then we stress out ourselves while suppressing the accumulated grief as no one wants to see our ugly outbursts. But this suppression  just make it worse eventually. 

People then instead of looking at the root cause keep using some distraction strategies to keep calm or motivated, even use medicines to numb themselves ... Sense making is a necessary part of the process but can be best used when we fully allow ourselves to pass through the 2nd and 3rd stages ... so as Stephan Covey says 'first thing first' ... Sad part is, our modern lifestyle doesn't give us enough space for this purpose, so creating such a space need to be a necessary life goal and a mandatory act of self-care we need not ignore ...