Growth through Loss & Change, Volume II

Free Preview Definition of Healing Grief Grief is that process set in motion by a perceived loss, be that loss a person, place, thing, or fantasy. Grief is a process. Grief overcomes you. That means you have no choice whether or not to grieve. For grief follows love as surely as night follows day. Grief is a love story. You would not grieve so if you did not love so. Grief comes from the psychological principle of attachment and loss. What do we mean by healing grief? We do not mean getting over missing the dead person. You will always miss a special person in life. If you loved a brother who died as a teen, you will miss him over and over as you go through your life. You will miss him as the uncle for your new born child. You will miss the sister in law, aunt, and cousins he would have brought to your family. Again, when you are in your fifties and your parents are aging you will miss him to confer with, and when you are an old man or old woman in the nursing home you will yearn for him again. Healing grief is not about missing. The goal is to heal so as to be willing to invest in life fully again, with the memory of, the gifts of, the enrichment of having loved, but without that person in your physical world. The second goal of healed grief is to love fully and completely again, not as a replacement for, but in addition to the love that died. One does not have a replacement child, one has a subsequent child. One does not have a replacement mate one has a second husband or second wife; one does not have a replacement parent but a step parent. A child now has two fathers to love at the same time; and will, in time, have two fathers to grieve. You will always be the Dad of two sons whether both are alive, one is dead, or both are dead. Your healthy self-image will always include both your sons. Why Do We Grieve So? It is not an option. Grief overcomes us. Why is this design part of humans? Grief has existed since the beginning of time and exists in all cultures around the world. One thing we know is that when something survives over centuries it has survival value for the human race. It means that somehow the world is a better place because people heal through grief. We know the human race is enhanced because of grief. Mourning is a creative period. Scores of symphonies, requiems, art, literature, speeches, poems, songs, architecture, paintings, sermons, compassionate research, and cures have all been prompted by grief. Organizations of change agents: MAD, Amber alert, and Breast cancer walks, are all the result of grief. If these folks were not mourning, it is safe to say the changes would not have occurred. Growth through grief is innate in the human being. Grieving people change the world! Brokenness is not bad! It is painful, but not bad. What is the gift that comes from your grief? How are you different now than you were last year? Bonding, love, attachment, and detachment are an enriching experience. We who grieve are not victims. ***** Child Grief Child Grief is an interesting subject because it is not about a segment of our society, children. It is about each one of us, because in grief we are rendered into our child self. We are prompted to go back to the child within and from there we heal ourselves. We are impelled to ask, “Who am I now that I have this loss?” Then we must begin at the very beginning and do the life review. We need to say, “I am a person whose Father left me at the age of two, a person whose Mother preferred my sister to me, a person who broke his leg just after being accepted on the football team. I am a person who had to leave college three times before I could finish. Now I am a person whose mate could choose to leave me or die. Who am I? I am no longer who I thought I was.” This is the work of grief, to rebuild a representational model of self which includes the present loss and to integrate it with all the former losses as well as the gifts and philosophy of one’s life. Mosaic of Life Then, very painfully all these broken pieces of one’s self image must be gathered into a huge pile. This takes a lot of time because when fine crystal breaks on a tile floor the multitude of shattered pieces scatter far and wide, under couches and against the footboards. Day after day pieces are found. Next is the time consuming task of laying out the broken pieces to make a new shape, a new image that is created out of many pieces. It cannot look like the former image for that has been shattered. As you fit the broken pieces side by side you notice gaps, they must be filled with something to make a new pane by which to let your light shine to the world again. What do you fill these gaps with? You must scrounge around over and under things to find more pieces. That is when you find resilience which belonged to that two year old who yearned for Daddy. You identify the inner strength of the teenager whose broken dream of football went with the broken leg, and the determination of the college bound person who went back again and again. It is with these strengths, gathered through rebounding from former losses that the grieving person finds the coping patterns to survive this most recent major loss. Studying the grief of children helps you reach out to your child within. It is as much about helping adults grieve as it is about helping young people grieve