Withdrawal

I was recently asked to provide a source for a comment I made about how intense grief can be eerily similar to heroin withdrawal symptoms. As it turns out, I wrote about this back in November in a post titled A Bad Trip. I figured it wouldn't be too hard to find another good reference in Google, and sure enough, I found another neat resource in the form of one Susan Anderson, author of The Journey from Abandonment to Healing: Turn the End of a Relationship into the Beginning of a New Life.

She has a website called AbandonmentRecovery.com, and she explains a bit more about this physiological phenomenon:

WITHDRAWL - painful Withdrawal from your lost love.
The more time goes on, the more all of the needs your partner was meeting begin to impinge into your every Waking moment. You are in Writhing pain from being torn apart. You yearn, ache, and Wait for them to return. Love-withdrawal is just like Heroin withdrawal — each involves the body's opiate system and the same physical symptoms of intense craving. During Withdrawal, you are feeling the Wrenching pain of love-loss and separation — the Wasting, Weight loss, Wakefulness, Wishful thinking, and Waiting for them to return. You crave a love-fix to put you out of the WITHDRAWAL symptoms.

She also wrote a very good paper on Suffering the Death of a Loved One, and I'd like to quote a few more sections that help to explain these withdrawal symptoms a bit better.

As the Novocain wore off, the acute pain of loss began to break through, and we went into withdrawal. We were in painful withdrawal from our partner, just as if we were in withdrawal from Heroin (and it involves the body’s own opiates). We began craving and yearning for a love-fix we could not possibly get.

Week by week, our emotional needs – the ones that had been met by our partners – began to mount. We grew to miss them more and more. We missed having someone in the background, someone who cared, someone to care about, someone to come home to, someone to bring us that cup of coffee, someone who would know if we fell in the shower, someone to serve as a focus for our lives. As these deprivations reached critical mass, the intense grieving could become nearly unbearable.

Weeping:

We found ourselves weeping – a kind of crying specific to early bereavement, characterized by sighing and flowing tears, different from our usual crying . Our emotional brains were automatically scanning our memory banks (searching for the lost object) – an involuntary function of the brain which is part and parcel of our stress response to crisis – flooding us with scenes from all the way to the beginning of the relationship. Our coupled histories passing before our eyes in a blur of tears. We remembered them as they we (and as we were) when we first met them, the initial romance. These memories (along with the intense yearning and pining) caused us to fall in love with our partners all over again and want them more than ever before. We became walking memorials to them...

As my group mates and I cycled through the tugging, craving, helpless feelings of withdrawal, we helped each other realize that we weren’t alone feeling this pain. We served as reality checks for one another – maybe we weren’t going crazy after all – our emotional excesses were an ordinary part of grief. We could see each other surviving through the worst of it and felt reassured that we too would make it through.

We cycled through withdrawal during all different timeframes. For some, this phase of active grieving was delayed for a long time. Several members remained in the numbing fog indefinitely. "I know I need to cry, but I feel detached and remote, like I’m not really here. Other people’s tears don’t seem real to me, but I know they mean something."

Waves of grief:

Grief proved to have a mind of its own – its own rhythm. It came in waves which washed over us and sometimes swallowed us whole, leaving us beached and dazed, sending us back into the numbing fog to start the cycle over again.

Any sudden realization of the loss – as if realizing it on a new level – could send us right back into shock, and then the acute pain of missing the person would break through the Novocain, and we would resume a new wave of active grieving. We might wake up in the middle of the night startled anew by the reality that our loved one was gone, and cycle from shock to withdrawal in a matter of minutes. In fact this is another cornerstone of grief: the sudden re-realization of the reality of the death...

Wakeful and worn out:

The physiological symptoms of withdrawal included continual wakefulness, anxious wrenching in our guts (even while some of our appetites (unfortunately) began to return ). We felt overwhelmed, on edge, and entirely exhausted. Beneath the surface, the emotional brain continued working overtime “searching for it's 'other half' and learning to recognize the loss. Our cortical brains were also busy on the conscious level trying to come to grips with this reality.

On the positive side, the acute grief of withdrawal motivated us to dig deeper, reach all the way down to our untapped resources. We panned for our grittiest reserves and came up with survival skills and hidden strengths that amazed us.

The entire paper is well worth reading if you have the time.

Stressed!

When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found.
— Sufi Proverb

As a widow/er, to say that you're familiar with stress is something of an understatement. More likely, you feel it before you've even opened your eyes, and, like a strong wind on a bitterly cold February morning, it cuts through you like a knife all day long until you can finally doze off for those few fitful hours of troubled sleep. But have you ever thought about stress? Why it exists? And wouldn't it be nice if there was a Grief Recovery Tool that would evaporate all that stress forever?

A poignant example from my own life: about 5 ½ months after Deb died, I was in the last days of what many call the Denial stage of grief. Not denial that she was dead, but denial that my old way of life was finished as well. I had thought that the majority of my grieving had occurred throughout Deb's long illness, and I was determined to get on with my life and do all the things I still wanted to do. I still wanted a family, and I wanted to live internationally. So in the first few weeks of September, I was trying to begin a new relationship while simultaneously putting my house up on the market so that I could move with my son to Central America. And right about this time, all those lovely brain opiates the mind excretes during the shock phase were finally starting to dissipate.

Life started getting real ugly, real fast. I knew, just knew, that the relationship I was trying to start was totally the wrong thing to be doing right now. And I knew that moving to Central America right now was also a boneheaded thing to do. Because of my stubbornness, though, I plowed recklessly forward. And my body fought back. Me, a person with normally low blood pressure, could feel my blood pressure rising. Still I persisted. And the next day, I thought I was soon going to have a heart attack. So, I made the very difficult decision to drop all my plans. I broke off my fledgling relationship, and I called my realtor and told her to forget listing my house. And I dropped all my other plans as well. I did not want to wind up in the hospital. I didn't know what was going to replace my plans, but life was right there with the solution. The last of the shock drugs wore off, and I was plunged headlong into the despair phase of grief which was to last for many months. I needed to heal. What I didn't understand, going into acute grief, was that I would heal so much else in me that was broken.

So it was with some humour that I recently read what Guy Finley has to say about stress in his book The Secret of Letting Go [pg 114]:

Stress exists because we insist! It's really that simple. It is our mistaken belief that we must push life in the direction we choose that keeps us in a strained and unhappy relationship with it. Our wish to have power over life comes from this wrong relationship with life. Reality has its own effortless course, and we can either embrace its way or struggle endlessly with our own. We do not need power to flow. In other words, why push when we can learn to ride?

Looking back on my early days of grief, I can of course now see clearly the folly of my persistence. And I also recognize that the moment I simply let go of wanting to continue with my old life, that stress immediately evaporated. I never had to go to the doctor to have my blood pressure evaluated. It returned to normal that day. And something deep within me knew that would happen as soon as I let go. I just had to decide that what life had to offer was more important than what I wanted to happen.

So, I share this intimate part of my history with you in the hope that it will save you much pain and suffering. It took me many, many months before I could start applying this same principle to other areas of my grieving, probably because I wasn't consciously aware that this was a powerful tool that I could use at any time. Since I've started applying this multiple times a day, I have never been so happy and at peace. I wish the same for you also.

My Experience With Despair

I am normally a pretty optimistic person, although I've had my share of disappointments and frustrations in life. Still, nothing could really prepare me for the full-on despair that comes with grieving a spouse. In How To Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies, Therese Rando does a good job of describing what awaits the new widow/er:

Besides feeling abandoned, you may feel sad, low, or blue. Pleasurable activities may no longer be enjoyable, and you may become apathetic and slowed down, with no energy or motivation. You may brood about the past and be pessimistic, if not hopeless, about the future. You may lament about your situation and how you have been victimized. Tearfulness and crying are not uncommon. On some occasions you may desperately want to cry, but find you are unable to do so. In your intense grief and depression, it will not be at all unusual for you to feel out of control, helpless, deprived, depersonalized, despairing, lonely, powerless, and vulnerable. You may feel that your life is meaningless and even that you, yourself, are worthless. Self-reproach, shame, and even guilt can occur. Feeling so inadequate frequently causes you to feel, in turn, childish, dependent, and regressed. While this is understandable in light of the major loss and the profound psychological injury you have sustained, you might begin berating yourself for feeling less than competent. This can cause you to become inappropriately angry at yourself. If you are like other mourners, too often you will underappreciate just how much you are affected by this traumatic loss. It is bound to set you back emotionally, physically, and socially for quite a while. [pg 38]

In my case, many of these points played out over the weeks and months following Deb's death. Here's an especially poignant example:

I have a really annoying klaxon-style alarm clock. It has to be, or I won't get up. I've tried waking up to the radio, but my subconscious seems blissfully happy to sleep right through any music or talk-shows ;-) So, like many, I've settled for a rather obnoxious-sounding, very loud electronic beeping. Usually it never fails to get me out of bed, just so I can turn the darned thing off (it is purposely set up across the bedroom ;-).

I think it was one morning about three or four months after Deb died that the alarm went off at 08:00 a.m., and I woke up, but I didn't turn it off. I just listened to it. For the next three and a half hours! I just lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, listening to this jarring alarm, and thinking, "life is pointless."

If you are newly-bereaved and reading this, you might become a little apprehensive about what you could be in for. Here's what's important to understand about this: it wasn't the low point of my grieving. In fact, I wouldn't even say that the full gravity of my situation had hit me yet. The low water mark was still months away.

As you read books on grieving, you'll quickly find the "steps" of grief, and denial factors in prominently as step number one or two. This always really bothered me. How could I be in denial of Deb's death? I held her hand as she breathed her last breath. I sat in the front row at the funeral. I was last to leave the casket before interment. My bed was empty, her clothes were given away, and her spot on the couch was conspicuously vacant. How could I possibly be in denial?

What I have come to understand, looking back now over the last 21 months, is that I was in denial that my life had completely changed. See, even three or four months in, I was still thinking that I would get through this grief stuff and move on with my life and do all the things I still wanted to do. I didn't understand that grief is for life. A good analogy is like learning to live with diabetes or an amputation. Conditions like these aren't going to go away anytime soon. However, that's the point of the analogy — we can learn to live with grief. My goal in writing this blog is to give you enough tools to not only live with grief, but thrive with it. I now consider grief to be a friend of mine (not a very friendly one at times!), a friend that has a lot to teach me about myself, relationships, and what it means to live.