Understanding Grief

I wrote last month about memories from a western perspective. In that post, I referred to a great book by Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt called Understanding Grief. Tonight I'd like to quote a bit from the introduction to that book.

For the first six months after Deb died, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I knew there was this thing called "grief" that I was supposed to do, but, having no prior experience with the death of anyone close to me, I had no frame of reference for understanding what grief was. I remember distinctly wondering, "what is grief, anyway?"

Dr. Wolfelt does an excellent job in his book of explaining, in a clear and concise way, exactly what grief is and how to complete that process. If you are newly bereaved, this book may provide some much needed answers at this bewildering time.

[from pages viii and ix]:

What Is This Wound Called Grief?

"Grief Work" may be some of the hardest work you ever do. Healing in grief is not a passive event. It is an active process. Because grief is work, it calls on your emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual energy. You cannot skirt the outside edges of your grief; you must go directly through it.

Please do not try to embrace your grief alone. You need fellow companions who will bring you comfort and support. My experience suggests trying to do grief work alone can be overwhelming. A useful analogy is as follows:

When you go out on a sunny day, the bright sunlight on your unprotected eyes creates stress. It makes seeing difficult. Sunglasses help filter out the harmful sunrays. Maybe you can think of the stress of your grief in just that way. If you respond to the stress of the death of someone loved alone, or without sunglasses, you may be overwhelmed. But if you accept the help of other people, just like putting on the sunglasses, your work of mourning will be accomplished more easily, and with less damage to yourself.

[from pages 1 and 2]:

Perhaps you have already heard the statement, "With time, you will feel better." The feelings of grief you experience when someone loved dies are sometimes described as "emotions that heal themselves." Yet, time alone has nothing to do with healing. To heal, you must be willing to commit to learning about and understanding the grief process.

When forced to confront the death of someone loved, you must become an active participant in your own healing. But in this culture, you are often left to your own resources at the very time those resources are the most depleted.

Another disappointing reality is that you may have little, if any, preparation for a new life as a bereaved person. In the crisis of grieving, you may even fail to give yourself permission to mourn, and you will usually not receive that permission from other people...

Grief is not a disease. No "quick fix" exists for the pain you are enduring. But I promise that if you can think, feel, and see yourself as an "active participant" in your healing, you will experience a renewed sense of meaning and purpose in your life.

To be human means coming to know loss as part of your life. Many losses, or "little griefs," occur along life's path. And not all your losses are as painful as others; they do not always disconnect you from yourself. But the death of someone you have loved is likely to leave you feeling disconnected from both yourself and the outside world.

Based on my own experience, that last paragraph is especially true. Now that I have successfully passed through the desert of grief, I can see more easily and readily the many "little griefs" that I pass through on a daily basis. But now, I have a wealth of tools and skills to help me navigate through those losses with an ease that eluded me before I was bereaved. If you are in the depths of intense grief, it is helpful to know that the skills you are acquiring now will become extremely useful and helpful in the days and years ahead. The day will come when you will be very thankful to have these tools you are now paying for so dearly.

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.

Lingering Grief

As I've written about in the past, I'm a big fan of Dr. Lou LaGrand's work on grief. His articles are always relevant, accurate, and above all, extremely helpful. For tonight's post, I'd like to revisit a topic I hear widow/ers talk about frequently, namely, how long should grieving take? Specifically, if you are well into your second or third year of grief (or more), you may be wondering what is causing your grief to linger. Will this ever end?

In this article, Dr. LaGrand has written about five key concepts that may be holding you back from completing your grief work. If you are looking for an encouragement to help you get "unstuck," this great article may be what you are seeking. Enjoy!

Why Grief Lingers On and On

Grief and grieving is inevitable because we choose to love. And it can be argued that it lingers on and on because we refuse to learn to love in separation and complete a primary task: acceptance of the loss and the many changes demanded.

However, there are a number of old beliefs that we have learned about grief from the authority figures in our lives that have a major impact on the length of time we grieve and the amount of unnecessary suffering we endure. For example, some people believe you must grieve for a year, grieve for the most part in silence after a couple of weeks, and eventually find closure (often interpreted as meaning forget about the deceased) and get on with your life.

Still there are several things in addition to questionable beliefs that tend to prolong and exacerbate the grief process that you can immediately change.

1. You grieve without a goal. Make a full commitment that you will accept the death of your loved one and reinvest in life. Ask yourself the most important question about your grief: Do I want to be loss oriented in my life or restoration oriented? Without the inner commitment to heal—and the actions to back it up—each day will prove to be filled with pain and aimlessly long.


2. You are expecting to be your old self again. Yet you are different. We are all different when someone we love dies because a part of us that related to the loved one in the physical world has also died. We will grow from having known the deceased and build on what we were given, or we will regress and try to live in the past.


3. You are not aware that you are starting a new life. You may have to take on new roles and develop new skills. Your routines will change; some you will retain. Few of us like the new. We like the expected, the security of old routines, many of which have to be given up.


4. You don’t realize its okay to establish a new relationship with the deceased. Our loved ones die but relationships and love live on. There is nothing wrong with talking to or writing to the loved one that died to express your feelings at various times. Though physically gone, depending on your belief system, you can still speak to his/her spirit.


5. You have not found someone you trust to talk to about how you really feel. It is not unusual to have a confidant early in your grieving and months later feel you can’t say what you’re feeling to that person. You may believe you should be “over it” or sense that your friends feel that way. But each grief is one of a kind. You may need more time and someone to talk to.

Although the above five concepts may be behind your extended grieving, keep in mind that grief has no specific time boundaries. Its length varies with the individual. You will know when grief is lessening in your life. But one final awareness to consider: It is normal for grief to revisit. Something you see or hear can bring up a sad memory, even tears, or the wish that the loved one was with you. Perfectly normal. Allow the gift of grief to run its course at that moment.

Dr. LaGrand is a grief counselor and the author of eight books, the most recent, Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Encounters of the Bereaved. He is known world-wide for his research on the Extraordinary Experiences of the bereaved (after-death communication phenomena) and is one of the founders of Hospice of the St. Lawrence Valley, Inc. His website is http://www.extraordinarygriefexperiences.com

The Heartbeat Of Death

It has now been several months since I finished reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, but I found it to be a very, very interesting read, full of amazing insights from a very different perspective than my Western mind produces. I'm currently reviewing some of the pages I had tabbed for further reading, and I'd like to share one of these with you tonight.

Before I do, I'll just explain that this passage will likely make a lot more sense if you have had at least a little bit of exposure to Eastern / Buddhist thought. And just to clarify, I'm not a Buddhist, nor do I play one on this blog ;-) I did get a healthy dose of Buddhist thought when I attended a free 10-day Vipassana meditation course this past winter, and it was that (amazing!) experience that prompted me to pick up The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

I last wrote about a silver lining to grief back in March, but I want to take that concept many steps further tonight. If you are past the first year of grieving, this may give you a suitable foundation upon which to build your new life. I know for me this perspective colours everything regarding how I live my life now.

I think it was about the 11-month mark after Deb died, when the pain was at its most intense, that I decided that whatever lesson I was learning through this ordeal, I intended to learn it! I wanted to make sure that all this suffering and anguish I was going through was not in vain. Over the ensuing months, I learned that Deb's death had forced dozens of major changes on my life all at once, but the reality is that change is relentless, ever-present, and ongoing. The sooner we can come to grips with this fact, the sooner we can come to embrace it. It is this embrace of change that helps me to thrive as a healed widower, and it is my hope that you too will thrive again in your new life of your choosing.

[from page 33 of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying]

THE HEARTBEAT OF DEATH

There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulse, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.

So let us then work with these changes now, in life: that is the real way to prepare for death. Life may be full of pain, suffering, and difficulty, but all of these are opportunities handed to us to help us move toward an emotional acceptance of death. It is only when we believe things to be permanent that we shut off the possibility of learning from change.

If we shut off this possibility, we become closed, and we become grasping. Grasping is the source of all our problems. Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp on to things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go. And this is the tragedy and the irony of our struggle to hold on: not only is it impossible, but it brings us the very pain we are seeking to avoid.

Erase Traumatic Memories

Tonight I'm going to post one more "mind movie" exercise. My last post was about image switching, and I first posted about mind movies back in November 2007. Tonight's technique is called the "eraser," and I hope it can be especially helpful for those of you who find yourselves replaying the moment of your spouse's death over and over and over again. Between these three "mind movie" techniques, I hope you are able to be free of the Ludovico Treatment:

THE ERASER

Here is a powerful exercise to rid yourself of negative feelings caused by past events. This can be done in your mental theater. It is an excellent technique to use for fears and phobias, as well as shyness.

1. First sit in the audience of your theater, near the back, so that the screen is quite far away and small. Have some popcorn, relax and enjoy yourself.


2. On the screen, put a black and white still shot of yourself just before the incident that gives you bad memories occurred.


3. Now, from the back of the theater, enjoying your popcorn, watch yourself in a black and white movie of the incident. View the incident until it is over and you're okay. (If the incident still makes you a little uncomfortable, make the screen even further away and smaller, rewind the film to the beginning and watch it again.)


4. After you have watched the incident to its conclusion, stop the film and STEP IN to the movie — become yourself in the movie.


5. Now turn up the color and the sound and run the film backwards to the beginning very fast — in one or two seconds, no more. Everybody and everything will move backwards super fast like a movie rewinding. Stay in the movie. Now run the movie forward to the end even faster — now back again.
   Return to your seat and think about the incident that made you feel negative. Notice the difference in your feelings.


6. Imagine a similar situation in the future. Notice your feelings. Look into the future. Is there any time when those negative feelings would be appropriate?

It is proper to be a little nervous or frightened in some situations. It keeps us alert.

[Taken from the Zero Resistance Living course, Volume 1, page 233.]

Image Switching

I wrote early on about mind movies and a powerful technique for changing memories of traumatic events. The basis of the technique is altering the movie you play in your mind by changing your perspective of it, much like you change your perspective in a real theater by sitting further back as opposed to close to the front. It is a great technique that was super-helpful to me, and I often recommend it for widow/ers who can't get images of the death of their spouse out of their heads.

There are several other "mind movie" exercises in the Zero Resistance Living course, and tonight I'd like to share another one called "The Image Switch." This one is similar to the Theater of the Mind exercise I wrote about earlier, but it deals more with the creative aspect of building our new life.

A short word of warning: this exercise is very helpful for those of you who are down the road a fair way and are maybe just looking for a technique to help get you un-stuck in your grieving. If you are still within that first year, however, be aware that any kind of planning for the future is often a major grief trigger. Still, I share it for everyone so that when the time is right, you have this powerful tool at your fingertips. I hope you find it helpful:

The Image Switch Exercise

This is an excellent exercise for ridding yourself of unwanted habits and reprogramming your brain to do new, positive behavior automatically.

In this exercise, you actually switch mental images so that the image or situation that "triggered" the unwanted action will trigger new, desired behavior automatically.

The Image Switch Exercise is very powerful and useful. You can use it to change attitudes and feelings as well as habits. Take the time to learn it thoroughly.

1. Make a still picture of yourself just before you do the thing you want to stop doing. Be in the picture. (For example, if you want to stop biting your fingernails, see your hand-coming up to your mouth.) Make it as detailed as you can.


2. Close your eyes and on your movie screen create a beautiful vibrant color picture of yourself the way you would be if you didn't have the habit. Be out of this picture.

Look at yourself. What kind of person would you be? Make a very attractive, positive picture of yourself. Make it colorful. It is a picture of a wonderful future you, a person free of that unwanted habit. Someone you really want to be.

Set that picture aside for a moment.

3. Put your bad habit picture on your screen. Make it further away and smaller until it just disappears on the horizon.


4. Substitute your tiny, distant, positive picture on the horizon. Make it closer and larger. Notice how attractive that wonderful, future you is — your real, best you.
   Feel yourself drawn to the picture.


5. Open your eyes.


6. Repeat Steps 3 and 4 ten times, each time switching the pictures faster and faster. By the tenth time you will be able to switch the negative picture to the positive one in about one second.

Remember to open your eyes after each time you do Steps 3 and 4.

You can use this exercise to create new habits also.

In this case, in Step 1, create a picture of yourself not doing what you want to do.

In Step 2, create a very attractive picture of yourself as the kind of person you would be if you had the habit you want.

Then do Steps 3 and 4 as before.

Do this exercise ten times each day this week using the same pictures. (It will only take a couple of minutes to do — remember, the faster you switch the pictures the more effective it will be).

Feeling, Not Thinking II

In my last post, I wrote about how grieving is more of a feeling process than a thinking process. In fact, intellectualizing grief can prove to be counter-productive because our thoughts produce feelings, and we already have more feelings than we know what to do with. We need some way to deal with the feeling we already have.

What worked for me was managing my sensory environment as much as possible. This tied in with my major goal in grieving, namely, how to be at peace with Deb's death. I found that I could shorten this goal to simply asking, "How can I be at peace?"

So, in managing my sensory environment, peacefulness has been my goal. I'll go through all five senses with some examples that I found to be helpful:

• Sight
  I put some classical art on my walls. Each scene is very peaceful. Looking at each painting helps me imagine being at peace. I've also reduced or eliminated clutter everywhere in my house. Where clutter persists, peace is absent.


• Hearing
  I listen to the Smooth Jazz channel from satellite TV every day at home, and I listen to a selection of classical music at work. I remind my son to use his indoor voice ;-) I wake up to peaceful music.


• Taste
  I eat wholesome, savory food every day. I don't go overboard with snacks, but I certainly indulge myself a lot more than I used to with tasty treats and desserts. When I was deeply grieving, I often didn't feel at all hungry, and food tasted bland, if I could taste it at all. I ate good, healthy, tasty food anyway.


• Smell
  I have learned a bit about essential oils, and I make sure my house always smells nice and pleasant. I also burn incense from time to time. The tasty food I eat often smells delicious as well. And for a real pick-me-up, I take a good whiff of certain essential oils right out of the bottle, like lavender, peppermint, or eucalyptus.


• Feel
  Even days when I spend the whole day inside my home, I still wear clothes that fit well and make me feel good about myself. I don't dress like a slob, ever. And I smile whenever I feel a little bit out of sorts -- yes, forcing a smile still releases endorphins. Five or six rapid smiles will give an even bigger "hit." Exercising helps me feel better, and it releases endorphins also. And lastly, I can force myself to breathe in a more peaceful, relaxed manner.

By providing my body with the most peaceful environment I could create, I found that I could facilitate grieving using feeling techniques like Focusing a lot easier.

By far the easiest way to peacefully affect all five senses is to get outside in a beautiful nature setting. I found a wonderful walking trail 10 minutes from my house, and I walked it with my son as often as I could. If you are only looking for one thing to do to help you in your grief, get out there and take a walk in the Great Outdoors. You'll be glad you did.