How to deal with sudden lost of best friend/fiancee due to covid 19

I am so sorry for your loss.  Sudden death of a young person is tragic, and often leaves those who loved that person feeling confused, anxious, maybe even angry.  When the grieving reaches the level of incapacitating your daily functioning, you could be experiencing prolonged grief disorder (PGD).  This disorder has characteristics such as an inability to stop thoughts about your loss, which results in you experiencing a chronic state of mourning. Living with the constant mourning impacts your ability to lead your daily life – taking care of yourself, working, interacting with people who are important to you.

I understand you describe feeling paralyzed and not wanting to be around people. Depression and anxiety interfere with your desire to participate in daily life activities.  Your desire to isolate, withdraw from life is your brain’s response to the trauma of sudden loss.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a recommended treatment approach to help work through PGD. In this therapeutic strategy, we look at how what we think directs how we feel and how we behave. For example, with grief, common thoughts are mourning the loss, thinking about how life won’t be the same, wondering if we will ever have someone that special in our life again.  These thought processes contribute to the brain producing stress hormones. Stress hormones interrupt the brain’s ability to shift to happier thoughts.  Because the brain has activated the stress hormones, physically we feel anxious, less motivated to interact with life. Based on those physical reactions, we tend to isolate, not desire social interaction, and may even become angry if someone tries to reach out to us.

With CBT, we work to redirect what we are thinking – shifting perspective, if you will, so that we think about the situation in a different way.  For example, when I was in severe grief over a friend’s death, I thought I couldn’t go on, felt lost, and tried to avoid life and people. However, I was able to redirect my thoughts toward how much I had learned from that friend, the laughs we had together, the silly things we did to have fun and pass time.  When I thought about the loss from that perspective, I felt less sad, and was able to motivate myself to re-engage with friends, family, and activities of daily living.

It could be helpful for you to set personal goals so that you can experience a sense of hope, enthusiasm and purpose. The goals can be simple and small. Yet the goals can motivate you to slowly increase engagement with daily life activities.

Individual therapy and group therapy could help you talk through your thoughts, and gain other perspectives.  Perhaps a therapist with BetterHelp, or a therapist in your community, could help you work through your grief.  BetterHelp also offers groups and groupinars about coping with grief and loss.

The intensity of your grief is a testimony to how much you cared for your friend.  Talk therapy can help you honor your friend’s memory, while also helping you move forward and look to healthy opportunities in your present and your future.