Grief is an natural human emotion. When we mourn the death of a loved one, we experience intense emotion and that emotion is typically grief. We experience grief in our behavior, as many people dealing with grief lose interest in things, find themselves unable to smile or laugh, have trouble sleeping, and lose their appetite.

The most familiar approach to experiencing grief was expressed over 50 years ago by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of hospice care and the study of death, dying, and grief. Kübler-Ross wrote the seminal 1969 book "On Death and Dying" and the 2004 book "On Grief and Grieving," co-authored with David Kessler, who founded grief.com, a resource aiming to help people deal with grief. Kübler-Ross proposed that there were "Five Stages of Grief." Those five stages, experienced in no particular order, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But there are many other theories about how humans cope with grief.

In the book, Your Creative Brain, psychologist Dr. Shelley Carson (a teacher and and researcher at Harvard on the topics of creativity and psychopathology) points out that strong emotions including joy, fear, love, anger, and grief, among others, and are something that we are almost always consciously aware of, and that these emotions directly affect our behavior and how we function. For example, when we feel joy we want to celebrate and when we feel fear we want to run and hide. When we feel grief, we typically feel some of the things described in the introductory paragraph, and these feelings and associated behaviors over time can be unhealthy and not do much to facilitate healing. Time is one way to heal from grief, but there are other creative and non-traditional methods to process grief, find peace, and promote health and healing.

The Importance of Exercising Creativity in Response to Grief