Adapting To Being Alone

Soon after our spouse dies and the funeral is over and the family has gone back home, we find ourselves facing the awful reality of being alone. Awful not only because we don't want to be alone, but also because we aren't ready to be alone. We still think like we're married, and we have hundreds of habits that are appropriate to our past life as a husband or wife. Throughout those early days and for months after, reality is constantly scraping against these thoughts and habits, harshly reminding us that we are alone.

A good example: you get out of the house for the day and come home to a dark, empty house. As the silence envelops you, you think again that this is now how it is — you are alone. And that isn't going to be changing anytime soon.

Understandably, this can often cause a great deal of anxiety and fear. As I've posted about previously, we can respond to anxiety actively by facing our fears, or we can respond passively by avoiding them. It is quite common for widow/ers to avoid fears early on by plunging into work, physical activities and exercise, or projects. Anything to avoid confronting this reality of being alone. But if you're still avoiding being alone as you approach the one year mark, it's maybe time to ask yourself why.

Chandra Alexander has posted a great article about this avoidance of being alone, and I think it speaks directly to those of us who have lost our mates:

Avoiding Being Alone

Are you afraid to spend time alone and will you do anything to avoid it? If you are constantly avoiding alone time, here are some things to think about that just might help in setting you free.

1. Is doing “anything” better than being alone?

• If doing anything feels better than being alone, you need to deal with this issue, because doing “anything” is not better than being alone.


• When we run from something (being alone), the focus remains on the running and not what we are doing.

2. Do you feel anxious when faced with the prospect of being alone?

• The feeling of anxiety lets us know that the feelings we are running from are beginning to rise to the surface; that’s what happens when we spend time alone.


• You will always feel anxious when you enter unknown territory. You are used to being distracted. When you are alone, many of those familiar distractions are removed; as a result, you will initially feel anxious.

3. You must face your fears or you will always be running.

• Running becomes very tedious, very tiring. The only way you will ever be able to stop running, is to turn around and invite the demons in.


• When you face your fears and refuse to run, the chase stops!

4. Spending time alone is the ONLY way to really know your SELF.

• It is only in the quiet moments that we are able to KNOW the depths of who we really are.


• Can you not answer your cell, turn the TV off, and sit quietly?


• Can you bear the anxiety that comes from not being distracted? If you can, you will be rewarded with an expanded sense of Self.

5. Enjoying your own company is the reward.

• To be able to have a solid sense of Self - whether you are with people or alone - is what you want to happen.


• There is NOTHING better than enjoying your own company!!!

In my case, after working hard on getting used to being alone, at 20 months I decided to be really alone. I felt I was mostly ready to confront myself fully and completely, so with much trepidation I attended a free 10 day silent meditation course. It turned out to be the major key to my healing. I highly recommend it.

The Only Way Out Of Anxiety

I've been sharing some valuable information from Dr Paul Dobransky's ebook called MindOS™ - "The Operating System of the Human Mind". I originally shared his work in my series entitled The Rollercoaster, and the last two posts have dealt almost exclusively with anxiety. In Avoiding Grief, we looked at how avoidance is a passive response to anxiety, and in Dumping Your Anxiety, we saw how worrying and complaining is a destructive, active response to anxiety. I also clarified that, as widow/ers, we need to express our worries and complaints, and that support groups are a more appropriate outlet for "dumping" than our friends and acquaintances.

Tonight I'll wrap up this series with Dr Paul's way out of anxiety: courage.

[from pages 196-205]:

Courage IS the only way out of problems with anxiety, victimization, impulsivity, addictions and lack of confidence. Interestingly, the film, "Saving Private Ryan" defines courage very succinctly: "Do the Right Thing."

Consider that knowing that "the Right Thing" to do comes from your two inner decision-making resources, conscience and intuition! Courage then, is not bravery, not fearlessness or any other thing we lack or acquire — it is a DECISION!...

We have no excuses. Courage is a decision, and if we are alive, we are capable of decisions, by definition. Every time we make a decision, we have to be in the "present moment," and therefore also have access to Observing Ego at those times. Courage is a constructive way of thinking before acting, done in a WIN/WIN way that sees the world as a place of ABUNDANCE.

This is where the notion of faith comes in to intertwine with courage.

To have FAITH in something, we need to have some degree of BELIEF that our actions in the future will work out, even if we don’t have conclusive proof they will. That takes some Observing Ego first off — a "bird's eye view" of our abilities and function. But then we have to DECIDE to think and act according to that faith. Imagine it — if you have poor Observing Ego ability then you don't have the "bird's eye view" on life. You only see the challenges in front of your face. So you tend to THINK in childlike ways—destructively. But with the "bird's eye view" of Observing Ego, you can see ALL the options available to you, now and in the future, and so you are a bit less distressed. You can do it, with some smart planning. You can do courage, the "Right Thing" to do.

Interestingly, we are most alone in the world when we do courage, but after the moment we do it, the WHOLE WORLD wants to join us. If our beliefs are composed of some part emotional evidence and some part intellectual evidence for the belief, then the emotional part can be used as energy to nudge us into action, and the intellectual part can guide the way. The emotional energy of courage then can then be joined by faith and belief so that we don't have to feel so alone in that moment that requires courage...

If you saw the film Saving Private Ryan or you yourself served in heroic capacity in the military, then you know what courage is and how it works. The soldiers storming Normandy Beach WERE afraid, nervous, jittery, peeing their pants, and calling for their mommies. But they were still among the most courageous men of the last century simply because they DECIDED to do what is right, regardless of the amount of uncomfortable feelings they had at "the moment of truth."

This concept of courage is one of the hardest character skills to build in psychiatry, because it doesn't involve too much thinking and analyzing — one simply has to think of the "Right Thing" to do, then go DO courage. That is an act that almost never can take place in a therapist's office. It has to happen out there in the real world, where one is ALONE and without a psychiatrist to chat with about it...

If courage is constructive, then just as any WIN/WIN behavior that sees the world as a place of abundance, it takes time, patience and discipline to do. Courage is about the long haul, not the quick fix of wishing you were something you're NOT.

The bright spot of this all is that you CAN become something that you aren't right now. You can become a little more like your heroes every day through Observing Ego, just like the main character in a great film — but only by the slow, patient discipline that adults use.

When you do courage, You have a 100% guarantee of reaping an EQUAL amount of confidence in ratio with the amount of courage put in. But we all have more or less confidence about SPECIFIC fears. If you list those fears, then you know the most logical targets for your courage, things to make goals out of. List your fears, then fly your "airplane of success" toward the goal of beating those specific fears through courage! It is a sure-fire way to build confidence in exactly the areas of life you need it.

Now you can see every kind of behavior to do with anxiety. This is important because we all do all three methods of anxiety all the time. Impulsivity and victim behavior get us NOTHING, but only courage wins confidence — it is EVERYTHING.

I'll just close by mentioning that I've previously described a great tool for getting that "bird's eye view" in my post titled A Wider Perspective. And I'll also mention that, since incorporating the above anxiety diagram into my life, I have more than restored all the confidence that I had lost when Deb died.

I hope that deciding to "do courage" proves fruitful in your life as well.

Dumping Your Anxiety

In my last post, I shared some very interesting information from Dr Paul Dobransky's ebook called MindOS™ - "The Operating System of the Human Mind". I love the way he explains complex emotional behaviour in a logical, straightforward manner. He showed how avoiding anxiety in our grief is really a passive response to anxiety. While avoidance can be helpful in the first few months after our spouse dies, eventually we need to actively deal with our anxiety if we ever want to heal.

In tonight's post, I'll continue Dr Paul's teaching about responding to our anxiety "signal." As he already explained, anxiety is a signal that we have fears, challenges, change or risk to face, and there are only three ways to respond to anxiety. In my last post, we covered the only passive response, namely avoidance or impulsiveness. This post will look at one of the two active responses to anxiety: worry and complaining.

[pages 188-189]:

When we think destructively with anxiety, Mind OS calls that "Victim-thinking", "martyr-thinking", or masochism, where you take on a "poor me" attitude, erroneously believing that you are truly hopeless, or helpless. You worry about the future and complain without offering solutions. You regret the past, and essentially are WISHING you controlled the uncontrollable, "dumping" your anxiety into someone else's boundary.

Doing all this may seem harmless, but it is NOT. You are dumping your anxiety into someone else to let them worry about FOR you. It is childish, WIN/LOSE behavior, where you WIN relief but someone else LOSES their sense of peace, by absorbing your negative energy.

Is an adult person who walks and talks and can do adult things ever truly hopeless or helpless? NO! Never. Sure, a CHILD can't just go out and get a job, or buy a home to fix their problems, but adults CAN. To think otherwise is an illusion. When we get masochistic, victim-like beliefs about the world, it forces others to participate in the mechanics of OUR illusion. This is where anxiety connects to depression.

[pages 191-192]:

When we decide to take the destructive, immature "quick-fix" of immediate gratification, we find that others can sometimes be convenient "dumping grounds" for our complaints and worries. This happens especially if they have holes in their boundary where we can "push their buttons," shame and manipulate them into accepting our anxiety FOR us. We then "WIN" and they "LOSE."

Note that all the traits that go with playing the victim are also characteristics of nonbiological depression, and they are an illusion. We complain to the boss, we whine and moan about how helpless we are, we allow ourselves to believe there is no hope, and finally find ourselves winding into masochistic depressive thinking.

When we do this attitude long enough, people will get sick of it and turn on us, abandoning us and leaving us with even more loss than before. Complainers, whiners, moaners, and masochists attract the attention of soft-hearted friends in the short run, but tire them out and lose those friends in the long run. So a negative feedback loop occurs where we get negative momentum for our personal growth. We started to make a "mountain out of a molehill" that drives friends and solutions away...

Now you're probably reading this and thinking, "uh, HELLO!!! My spouse is DEAD. This is NOT a molehill. It is a thousand Everests!!!" And I agree. It is probably the most painful, agonizing ordeal we ever have to go through in our whole life.

Keep in mind that this ebook was not written for the bereaved, so it can come across as a bit harsh and uncaring. Yet the phenomenon of dumping our anxiety into someone else's boundary is all too common. Why do you suppose "friends" and acquaintances vanish after the funeral? They cannot deal with our immense sorrow, so they avoid us, adding to our losses.

But to grieve, we absolutely must get our feelings out by talking! We need to talk about our anxiety and fears in order to heal, but if we tell our friends, they can't deal with our hopelessness and they leave! How unfair is that? And how do we resolve this paradox?

Well, you've probably already guessed the answer: bereavement support groups. Try to find a support group like Bereaved Families of Ontario, one run by volunteers who have themselves suffered a similar loss. The primary reason to attend these groups is precisely to express your sense of "poor me," hopelessness and helplessness, worry about the future, complaints without solutions, regret about the past, and wishing you controlled the uncontrollable, all that unflattering stuff in the first quoted paragraph above. The major difference here is that support group attendees can relate to you and support you, unlike your friends and acquaintances.

You are not expecting these strangers to worry about all this stuff for you — you just want (and need) for someone to listen. You need to get your pain and frustrations out. Keeping them bottled up inside is a recipe for lifelong misery. And when you are finished talking, you can be there to listen for someone else who needs you just as much as you need them. Sitting with someone else in pain is one of the most powerful gifts you can ever give another human being. And when you give this gift to someone else, you heal yourself in return.

Avoiding Grief

Avoidance.

You know what I'm talking about if you've been bereaved for any length of time. In our anxiety as a new widow/er, we often use avoidance as a common coping mechanism. We would rather avoid our anxiety than deal with it. And don't get me wrong — in the early months of grieving, grief avoidance is probably a good thing. In fact, it can often make the difference between getting through the next five minutes and totally losing it. But eventually, we need to stare our anxiety in the face if we ever want to heal. By avoiding grief, we passively let our anxiety run our body. Whatever direction it takes us, it isn't a healing one.

In my "rollercoaster" series, I quote from a great book called MindOS™ - "The Operating System of the Human Mind" by Dr Paul Dobransky. He does a fantastic job of making sense of our bewildering emotions. If you've ever wondered how to deal with anxiety, this is one post you'll want to pay close attention to.

To recap from The Rollercoaster III: anxiety is a signal to which there are only three possible responses — courage, worrying/complaining/victim thinking, or impulsiveness. Avoidance fits in to the impulsiveness response.


I'll let Dr Paul take it from here [pages 183-187]:

Anxiety is not good or bad. Just like anger, it is a SIGNAL. It tells you something is wrong and needs to be done. If you recall, anger signals you that you have unmet needs. Well anxiety signals you that you have fears, challenges, change or risk to face and rise to...

When we are passive with our anxiety and don’t like to make decisions, it likes to “go on autopilot” and is run by the “fight-or-flight” reflex. This reflex makes us either impulsive or avoidant of things we need to face. When there is an anxiety or fear to be faced, our “gut” tendency is to either want to RUN from it to avoid it, or else to attack it impulsively without thinking first.


We need this “fight-or-flight” reflex though for one situation, and one only: SURVIVAL! Yet most of the time, we are NOT under a real threat to our lives. So what happens when we are passive with anxiety? The reflex STILL drives us to be impulsive — to act without thinking — and we overeat, overspend, get addicted, and a host of other behaviors that ironically ARE a threat on our life if we do them enough!

...We overeat, overspend, get overworked, get addicted to drugs, alcohol, or medicines of abuse as unconscious ways of lowering our anxiety through spending it on these physical activities. They are all temporary fixes that lower our anxiety, but if the original sources of that anxiety are still present — loss or fear of loss, or lack of confidence about a particular aspect of life, then we see a rise of anxiety again soon after indulging our addiction....

Allow ourselves to feel the anxiety and then THINK about it. Feelings CAN’T hurt us or cause us more loss, only real threats can...

If I STOP to THINK BEFORE ACTING, I can get in touch with this valuable signal called anxiety — turn the arrow UP. Notice how the Anger Map and Anxiety Map have some opposite properties — anger turned inward causes depression, but anxiety turned inward instead of into immediate action leads to personal growth!

Actively dealing with our anxiety leaves us with two options: courage or worrying and complaining. In my next post, I'll explain what's really going on when we worry and/or complain.