Grief Recovery Institute – Page 3

Incomplete Grief: Part II

HAS ANYONE ever said to you that you don’t seem as though you’ve finished grieving yet? Have you ever felt that way years after a loss?

Perhaps what they really mean to say is that you’re experiencing incomplete grief.

What is the real goal of grieving?

Many of us think the goal of grieving is to experience deep, painful emotions and finally arrive at the point where they aren’t as noticeable or don’t bother us as much as they did when the loss was fresh. A point where we feel as though we can get back to some kind of normal life.

But is that really the point of grieving?

It is. And it isn’t.

The point and task of grieving are to first grieve, feel all those emotions, and then complete the relationship with all the unfinished emotions you had when the relationship ended or the loss occurred.

You can think of it as unfinished business that niggles your brain and causes frustration or regret.

While grieving occurs automatically, completing the grief—or grief completion—results from specific actions you take to make that happen.

Well-meaning but bad grief advice—

You’ve probably heard someone say, “It’s best not to dwell on the past.” Or “Better let bygones be bygones.”

They sound like good practices, but in the long run they can be dangerous.

Why?

Because the human mind functions in a very different and specific way than the human heart. And vice versa.

The human mind tends to hang onto and replay what ifs—what could or should have been different, better or more. And those different, better and more thoughts can devour us emotionally, year after year after year.

It’s natural for us to do this. And where grief is concerned, it’s better to go along with that persistent brain, answer those questions, and take some steps to complete the thought and the revelations that come with it.

Incomplete grief can be about good things too—

As the experts at The Grief Recovery Institute note:

“Incomplete grief exists when there are any undelivered communications of an emotional nature.”

With that definition, you can easily see how incomplete grief can come from both good and bad events. They can be positive or negative.

For example: Let’s say you received a gift from a special friend and written and mailed a thank you note. But the morning after mailing the card, you learn your friend has died of a stroke. Besides the pain of losing a good friend, what feelings would you have about the loss?

One thought probably replaying over and over in your mind is that you wish your friend had known just how much you appreciated her gift. And now she’ll never know. Something has been left unfinished. And it hurts.

What if the last thing your spouse heard before driving off to work and getting killed in an auto accident was your snippy comment about something he did that morning that irked you? You would likely chastise yourself repeatedly over your unloving last words. Replay what you should have said to him; wish you could have apologized.

As Grief Recovery Institute experts point out:

“As a generality, undelivered emotional communications are going to be about things that we wish we had said or done, or about things we wish we had not said or done.”

And they’re also about something else, like the things we wish the other person had said or done, or not said or done.

But they can be about good things too. And it’s important to replay those.

Consider the happy scenario, where you share a kiss and a long hug with your spouse before you both depart for work. Later that day you learn he’s been killed in a freak work accident. Along with your heartache, you replay in your mind your last embrace, your loving goodbye, his joyful wave to you as he drives down the driveway. Those thoughts make you smile and bring gladness to your broken heart.

The reality of life is that we never know when our last encounters with someone will occur, and it’s more than likely that every loss brings with it unfinished details—words you wanted or planned to say, discussions you wanted to have, plans you were in the midst of making. Not procrastination but planned for events and get-togethers.

These types of things can leave you with a feeling of incompleteness in a relationship loss.

When others hinder your grief completion journey—

You may experience incomplete grieving when others cause or exaggerate your incompleteness.

Ever know someone who won’t allow you to express meaningful things to them? Your communication with them remains shallow or frustrating. We can’t force anyone to listen to us, and their refusal to hear or listen can leave us with incomplete feelings about them and the relationship.

Sometimes we’re fearful of being honest and saying things we know are emotionally loaded. We fear another person’s reaction, or their misunderstanding of your intentions.

We want to wait for the right time, but it never comes. And death ends the possibility of it ever coming.

We lose our nerve and never say what we need to say to the other person.

These events can leave us with incomplete emotions.

I can give you a personal example in my life that I still find frustrating. An event that left me with incomplete emotions.

For a reason I don’t understand, someone I considered a precious friend and loved like a sister decided “the season of our friendship had come to an end.”

That’s how she put it in the email she sent me. Not in person. Not in a phone call. She wouldn’t talk to me about why, explain her reasons, or tell me what I might have done to hurt her to cause that decision. I even asked her so I could apologize for how I might have hurt her.

She did tell me that we hadn’t communicated that much since she moved across the country, so I did get an inkling that she felt that, to remain good friends, I didn’t meet her frequent communication expectations.

It’s been a year since that happened, and I still experience incomplete grieving over it. My heart still cries about it. I miss her. But I feel as though she tied my hands and made my grieving difficult. I don’t think she acted loving or fair toward me.

And that makes me angry.

I feel as though her actions robbed me of the opportunity to be complete.

But her actions do not need to become the final say in this friendship ending. I need to heal, completely. So I’m going through the actions I need to take to complete that grieving, the actions I’m going to teach you in this incomplete grieving series. Actions I’ve taken before that helped me complete the grieving process and close open, festering wounds that took their toll on not only my mind but my body.

Goal of complete grieving—

Your goal is to discover those undelivered emotional communications occurring in both minor and major life events.

It’s the uncovering of all the undelivered communications, both large and small, that have emotional consequences for you. And it’s likely there is a heap of these undelivered communications that need unearthing and examination.

Where my former friend is concerned, I’m going to be exploring all of the unfinished communications and feelings I had when the relationship ended. I’m going to detail how the way she ended it makes me feel.

In the process I’m going to take into account the numerous overwhelming burdens in her life: the recent and unexpected death of a loved one; the illness of a beloved relative; the serious accident she incurred a year earlier that seemed to leave her mentally foggy and fearful of life.

In this specific instance, it’s a combination of juggling truth with love and mercy.

And in the process, I can’t tell myself I shouldn’t feel the way I feel. I already feel a certain way, have experienced certain feelings. Telling myself I shouldn’t feel them isn’t going to make them go away. Examining them, figuring out what to do with them, and then doing it will ease the burden and complete my grief.

And that’s the end goal.

Invitation—

Can you identify any relationships that ended by separation or death that still feel incomplete? If so, start jotting down those happy, sad, or unfinished events you wanted to continue, wanted to fix, or wanted to finish. You’ll use those in a future post to be able to complete your grieving.

NEXT WEEK we’ll dig deeper into incomplete grieving: how holding onto feelings may be stifling the grief completion process, and learning to express the feelings that will help us heal.

Until then, don’t be afraid to feel those feelings, and don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t have them.

Blessings,

Andrea

Andrea Arthur Owan, M.S., A.T., R., is a fitness pro, award-winning inspirational writer and senior-ordained chaplain. She works and writes to help people recover from trauma, grief and loss and to live their best lives — physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

COVID Grieving: Emotions, Anticipatory Grief, Myths and Healing

What’s tailgating on your COVID-19 fear? Fear of infection? Fear of the future and unknown? Fear of loss and business failure? Maybe it’s vaccine fear and the government making it mandatory.

Whatever fear you’re feeling, it may not actually be fear.

It may be grief.

Grief may be the real villain lurking behind your emotions and uncertainty. And it may be accompanied by classic grief symptoms of numbness, sadness, anger, and loneliness. Not just the natural loneliness that accompanies extended lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, but the loneliness that tells you no one in the world has ever experienced what you’re going through and doesn’t have a clue what you’re suffering.

Tune in to your emotions—

Why is it so important to recognize your feelings and mine deeply into your heart and soul to discover what’s causing them?

Because if you don’t, you risk doing yourself physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual harm.

Without recognition and proper healing completion, you can be left with lifelong emotional and physical side effects.

The side effects of trauma.

Have you ever considered that what you’ve been experiencing for the last several months is trauma?

It is.

And most of us have experienced it to a certain degree.

Digging deeper into grief—

There’s no way around it. Grief is uncomfortable, even physically painful.

And it encompasses three elements in your life: emotions, spirituality, and intellect, in that order.

First, you’re drenched with emotions, some of which may come and go.

Then your spirit is affected. The part of you that holds your emotions and character. The deepest part of you feels the grief. The pain you feel in the pit of your gut and heart.

And finally your intellect comes around to recognition and dealing with all of it. Confronting the reality of it and figuring out how to adjust.

In the beginning, because it craves a nice familiar balance, the brain will naturally rebel. It feels the discord and fights against it. The more you rehearse something new and make it “normal” the more normal and familiar it becomes to the brain.

What grief can look like in a life-changing pandemic—

According to David Kessler, co-author with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on the book: On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss, and author of the new book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, it’s important to acknowledge your grief so you can manage it.

He also believes you can find meaning in it.

Let’s look at what’s been happening in most states around the country during this coronavirus crisis and how it’s affected you.

You’re likely feeling a number of different griefs.

The world around you has changed, maybe dramatically. There are things you feel you’ve lost.

Even though you know this restricted living is temporarily, it probably doesn’t feel like it. You wonder how long it’s going to go on. Worse yet, what if it never stops?

You know things will change—maybe like having to mask up on every airplane flight from now on and having to submit to temperature checks before being allowed to enter a terminal—but at this point you really don’t know all the changes, or how they’ll affect you.

Then there’s that loss of “normal,” and the economic toll—to you, your city, state and country—and the loss of close contact, the connection you enjoyed with others at your weekly girlfriends’ night out or worship service, where you hugged and chatted and sang—loudly.

You might be feeling a loss of safety—what if the guy that accidentally bumped into you at the grocery store breathed COVID-19 viruses on you, after he coughed? You run home and anxiously hunker down through 14 days of self-quarantine. Every day you wake up making an internal assessment of how you feel—feverish, chills, sore throat, body aches, cough, breathing.

And that loss of safety seems to be universal, or collective—people staying six feet away from others and looking suspiciously at anyone who missteps that distance. Or maybe spitting on someone who does, as one shopper did to another in a store recently. Nice. That makes everyone feel safer, doesn’t it?

As Mr. Kessler pointed out for a recent Harvard Business Review article , the stages of grief he and Ms. Kubler-Ross arrived at aren’t linear and may not happen in order. And you may go through your grief process without experiencing all of them.

He also gives a great parallel construction of the grief stages to this pandemic:

“There’s denial, which we say a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us.
There’s anger: You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities.
There’s bargaining: Okay, if I social distance for two weeks, everything will be better, right?
There’s sadness: I don’t know when this will end.
And finally there’s acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed.”

When you arrive at the acceptance stage, you can take steps to manage your response and feel as though you have more control than you thought you did over the situation. Well, at least over your life.

This, Kessler says, is where your power lies. This is where you can gain some control.

But there is another grief you need to be on the lookout for. A grief that can blow this situation out of proportion for your brain and emotions.

It’s called anticipatory grief.

What is anticipatory grief?

Several of my friends have experienced what we call anticipatory grief. It’s really anxiety, an unhealthy state of grief where you imagine the most horrible things that could happen. It’s where we see the worst-case scenarios and allow those scenarios to overwhelm our minds and bodies.

Kessler believes anticipatory grief is when our minds are being protective, and he gives some advice on how to manage that kind of grief.

“Our goal is not to ignore those images or try to make them go away — your mind won’t let you do that and it can be painful to try [to] force it. The goal is to find balance in the things you’re thinking. If you feel the worst image taking shape, make yourself think of the best image. We all get a little sick and the world continues. Not everyone I love dies. Maybe no one does because we’re all taking the right steps. Neither scenario should be ignored but neither should dominate, either.”

So it’s not a matter of trying to ignore these worst-case scenario thoughts, but to ask your brain some questions about what the reality is and the odds that those horrible things will really come to pass.

Bring yourself from the future back into the reality of the present.

Because that’s what you have control over.

As we’ve talked about in the last several posts, note your emotions, don’t get carried away in them. Note why you think you’re feeling them. Breathe and meditate. Use your senses to re-stabilize yourself—your surroundings, your present reality. Lean into what you do know.

Take control over what you can control. What others do or don’t do is out of your control. Don’t expend precious energy on thinking about it.

And practice compassion, on yourself and others. Frustrations are long, and tempers are short. People can overreact. Life is hard. We’re depleted of energy. Now is a time for all of us to extend great compassion and mercy toward one another.

And while we’re recognizing and honoring our emotions and tuning into our grief, we need to remember there are myths about grief we want to be aware of, and avoid getting caught up in.

Grief Myths—

As we talked about last week, from an early age we learn myths about grief. We learn those myths by watching others mishandle their grief, or we are taught those myths by parents, family members, friends and spiritual counselors who also learned them while growing up and believe they’re the right way to respond.

But these myths can stunt grief healing and grief completion.

Last week we looked at the three myths: Don’t Feel Bad, Replace the Loss, and Grieve Alone.

Today we’ll look at Be Strong and Keep Busy. In two weeks, we’ll cover the most well known myth:

Time Heals All Wounds.

Be Strong Myth (#4)—

Ever heard anyone say, “You have to be strong for her”? It’s especially true if there’s a death in the family, or a grave illness.

Or maybe you’ve heard someone say it to a child when a parent dies: “You have to be strong for your mom.”

When we say things like that, or try to act strong when we’re not feeling it, we teach others that it’s best to tough something out rather than be realistic and honoring of our emotions and reality.

And we teach children habits that will hinder them in life.

When we encourage children to become the family caretaker, they feel as though they need to be the responsible “strong” one, and save everyone else in the family.

Overnight, they try to transform themselves from children into adults.

The experts at the Grief Recovery Institute claim this is probably the most damaging myth, and behavior, of all.

“In all our years of working with grieving people, one of the most common and difficult-to-overcome problems is the child who was cast in or adopted the role of taking care of everyone else. It is one of the most heart-wrenching examples of loss-of-childhood experiences. While we are able to help people get their hearts back, we cannot give them their childhoods back.”

How many of you feel as though you lost your childhood because you felt you had to be strong for the family, because no one else in the clan was behaving like an adult, so you had to?

I know I felt as though much of my childhood was robbed because of these underlying reasons.

I was taught to be tough, to be strong, to never display emotion. And because of my parents’ relationship with one another, I constantly felt like the intermediary, the fixer. For so many years (decades) I was angry, and I didn’t know why. A couple of years ago the light bulb in my brain went on, and I knew why.

I’d been forced to grow up before my time.

So what does real strength look like?

The Grief Recovery Institute explains:

“Real strength looks like this:

The natural demonstration of emotions.

Saying and doing what is emotionally accurate.”

What kinds of results does having and demonstrating real strength give you?

“[It] teaches…how to communicate feelings, not to bury them.

[It] sustains energy for other tasks.”

Proper expressions of emotions free up energy to deal with life.

When you cling to and bury feelings and don’t express them properly, they get improperly expressed through explosive behavior or implosive destructive actions.

Myth # 5: Keep Busy

Have you ever asked anyone recovering from the death of a loved one how they’re doing and receive the response: “I’m keeping busy”?

You might nod your heading knowingly and say, “I suppose that’s a good thing.”

But is it?

Keeping busy can be emotionally and physically exhausting.

After my daughter’s death, I either couldn’t stay busy enough or sleep enough. Either way I didn’t have to face my pain, think about my sorrow, or address the future.

I thought I was doing pretty well with my grief, being and doing constructive things.

I wasn’t.

Instead, I was avoiding the unfinished emotions attached to her physical death and the death of my hopes and dreams.

I distracted myself from pain and buried my emotions deep within my soul.

My husband did the same thing, immediately returning to work and distracting himself in it.

But grief emotions are powerful forces that don’t retreat or disappear quietly or without a fight.

When I lay down at night, the memories, emotions and physical pain swamped me like a tidal wave. And when they did, I put myself to sleep with the post-op painkillers my doctor prescribed. Until I ran out and he wouldn’t prescribe anymore of them.

Ever hear anyone talk about an emotional event they had that occurred twenty, thirty, forty or more years ago, and it sounds as though it happened yesterday?

Those people are the ones that haven’t really recovered from the event. They’re still reliving it.

As I’ve counseled before, please don’t rush yourself back into “normal” life after a traumatic event—like a death. And don’t let others try to rush you back there. There’s no “back there” to return to. You’re facing a new reality. You’re mind and body reel from it and reject it.

That numb feeling is normal. And it’s good for the overall recovery you need to go through. It protects us from dying of broken hearts, which some people do following the death of a spouse. Our brains, hearts, spirits and bodies need to adjust. And they need time to do that.

And each loss is unique to the individual. What’s helpful for one person may not be for another. And as much as time is a consideration, there is no recovery timeline a grieving person needs to be put on.

Above all, make sure a grieving person is allowed to share what they’re feeling. They need to be heard, and we need to listen.

If you or others are not heard in grief, then you risk burying emotions and developing behavior problems to combat the energy those emotions need to express and displace.

Then it winds up resembling a behavior problem rather than the grief problem it really is.

At this point a grieving person doesn’t need intellectual answers (those will come later, and they’ll figure them out), they need to heal their broken heart.

And that requires a lot of things.

Time isn’t necessarily one of them.

We’ll cover the time myth two weeks from now, on June 15.

Next week I’ll be providing a special COVID-break post.

I think we all need it.

Invitation:

Continue to keep an emotions journal, noting what emotions you’re feeling and what triggers them. Again, don’t judge them. Just note them.
How are you doing with COVID grief right now? At what grief “stage” would you say you’re functioning at—denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, acceptance? Or are you moving between them?
What do you need to do to move through the process and come to terms with your losses and life changes? What are you doing to keep yourself physically healthy in the process?
Have you experienced anticipatory grief, or are you in the middle of it, letting it cause you anxiety and paralyzing fear? How can you balance that kind of grief with reality and recognizing the control you do have over your life?
What grief myths have you learned that have stifled your healing? What myths do you need to let go of in order to complete your grief healing process?

Until next week, journal your emotions, identify any anticipatory grief you’re experiencing, control what you can control (and rejoice over it!), and allow yourself to heal—without needing to be strong or keeping busy.

Blessings,

Andrea


Andrea Arthur Owan, M.S., A.T., R., is a fitness pro, chaplain, and award-winning inspirational writer. She works and writes to help people recover from trauma, grief and loss and to live their best lives — physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Coronavirus: Grief Myths and Grieving During the Pandemic

Grief. The word alone conjures up a lot of emotion—sadness, fear, pain, numbness, agony, anger. And it may conjure up memories—a loved one’s death, a divorce, or the loss of something significant in life.

Grief. Something all of us at every level of society are experiencing right now, amid strict or loose stay-at-home orders, career losses, thwarted, delayed and unknown futures in this worldwide COVID-19 catastrophe.

Usually grief is felt individually, or in small family and friend units. But now we’re experiencing a collective grief, probably more massive than the grief experienced by a country’s inhabitants during large-scale wars.

Before launching into dealing with the emotions and grief that invariably accompany a catastrophe like this coronavirus, let’s review the definition of grief I presented last week.

Grief is the conflicting feelings caused by a change or an end in a familiar pattern of behavior.

Is what you’re feeling grief?

Based on that definition, would you say you have, have not, or are currently suffering grief during this pandemic?

Has anything in life abruptly changed for you?

Has anything familiar—work pattern, family schedule, travel plans, freedom to come and go as you please—changed for you?

Are you worried about whether, and when, life will ever return to what you used to define as normal?

A myriad of emotions—

The new life we’ve had to adjust to and slog through the last several months, and may have to navigate for some time, dredges up a myriad of emotions.

Anger. Denial. Fear. Sadness. Fatigue. Numbness. Racing heart and thoughts. Fight or flight survival response. Pain. (Emotional pain can and does bring physical pain along with it.)

Emotions come and go all the time, but they’re likely far more frequent, intense and varied now.

As those emotions come, it will help us recognize them for what they are: grief.

Recognizing grief?

Why is it so important to recognize grief?

Because when you can recognize and name grief, you have a better chance of managing it and healing.

And when you can successfully manage it, you can find meaning in it. Meaning behind those uncomfortable—and sometimes frightening—emotions.

David Kessler (who worked with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on the 5 stages of grief) says that aside from natural disasters or wars, few of us have ever encountered the weight of collective grief. A national grief that bears down on a nation’s conscience, heart and soul.

A grief that presses down until we feel we’re about to crack. That causes our hearts to race and our minds to conjure up possible, horrible events. A grief that triggers anxiety.

Which may explain why so many people are now rebelling against and defying government “orders” to stay at home. Alone. Sometimes isolated and lonely.

The human brain, and its innate desire and need to socialize in tribes, has reached a breaking point for some. They need to do something to remind themselves they’re still alive. That they have a reason for living; to strike a kindling for hope.

Tips for combatting grief-driven anxiety and fear—

Make a list of your life’s tangibles—things you can hang onto that likely won’t change.

Relationships are the first things that usually come to mind, and people seem to be doing a great job of maintaining and deepening them right now. Hopefully that effort will continue once we’re out of the virus woods. It is a positive side effect of this pandemic.

Be tuned in to the emotions that do pass through your conscience, or assault it. And if they’re “negative” emotions, don’t be too inclined to let them settle down in your brain for the duration of this event. It’s when we allow them to nest in our psyches that they overwhelm and control us.

If the emotion is joy, rejoice and nurture it.

If it’s fear, recognize the fear, talk to it if you must, (as I learned to do with the claustrophobia that threatened to stunt my life and rob it of freedom and joy), or draw pictures of it, as you learned how to do in last week’s post. Journal about it in your emotions journal. And definitely learn how to meditate and breathe through it.

Remember to not judge your emotions, or chastise yourself for having them. Just recognize them and learn what you need to do with them.

Avoiding anticipatory grief—

Have you ever experienced anticipatory grief? The kind of grief that creeps up on you and lingers when you anticipate the death of a loved one. That kind of grief can help cushion the fall your heart will take when it happens, prepare your mind and body for the inevitable loss. In many ways, it can protect you from a devastating shock.

But anticipatory grief may be the kind of grief you’re experiencing right now, if you’re looking to the future and all you see is murky fog, an unknown.

When all you care or dare to see is a frightening void.

Since you don’t usually know exactly what your future is going to hold, it’s critical that you don’t get caught up in catastrophic thoughts or what ifs. They can paralyze you, restrain you from doing anything, even if that anything is positive.

It’s so important to keep dreaming and planning; keep hoping, laughing, and loving.

Keep living!

What do you want your post-coronavirus story to look like?

What kind of life story do you want to write?

Whatever it is, I encourage you to start plotting and writing it! Don’t let what’s happening keep you from dreaming, planning, doing.

I know it’s difficult, but we need to keep forging ahead. Not oblivious to realities but in spite of them.

Who wants to look back one, two five years from now and lament how we let this event overwhelm us, control our behavior and thoughts, and stifle our lives and dreams?

As we plan, we know that the plan will come to fruition only if God wills it to be. As we plan, it’s God behind the action, the One who orders our steps.

So as we plan, we commit those hopes and dreams to God—to bless, delay or erase (Proverbs 16:9; James 4:3,15).

Myths about grief—

To get started on grief healing, it’s important to recognize the myths we’re usually taught from a young age. Myths that stifle our emotional health and growth.

Today I’m going to give you 3 of those myths, recognized and taught by the Grief Recovery Institute.

Myth #1: Don’t feel bad.

Have you ever experiencing something traumatic in your life (if it felt traumatic to you, it was), and been told not to feel bad about it?

You felt sad about something and expressed your honest emotion—sadness—to a family member or friend, and their response was that what happened to you wasn’t that important by declaring you shouldn’t feel bad.

What’s wrong with saying that to someone?

For starters, it’s dishonest and dangerous. A feeling is a feeling. And it’s insanely illogical for someone to tell us we shouldn’t feel a certain way.

And the people who do say things like that to us—like moms, dads, friends—often try to anesthetize our feelings with food. And we may try to anesthetize ourselves with alcohol or drugs.

The truth is that you’re going to feel a certain way whether someone else approves or not. And by saying that to someone, you shut down their emotions and cause them to question their feelings and worth.

You’re telling them that their sadness is wrong.

You simply can’t bypass sad, painful or negative emotions, no matter how unnerving or profound.

A good question to ask yourself is: Why is it okay to feel good when something pleasant happens and not okay to feel sad when something painful happens?

As the Grief Recovery Institute experts note:

“If you believe in the magnificent design of humans, then you must accept the fact that in order to have the capacity to feel happiness or joy, you must also be able to experience sadness or pain.”

In their book When Children Grieve, they point out:

“A recent study determined that by the time a child is fifteen years old, he or she has already received more than twenty-three thousand reinforcements that indicate it’s not acceptable to show or communicate about sad feelings” (2001; page 17).

The truth of this statement hits home, in a painful way.

I started my gymnastics career at the tender age of eight and learned immediately that expressions of pain or sadness weren’t allowed. In fact, they were punished.

Stuffing my feelings became the reality and habit of my life for decades. Only recently have I been able to identify my emotions, validate them and understand them as normal.

My emotions make me human and whole. I’m more broken and harmed when I don’t acknowledge them and tell myself I’m weak because I feel them.

I’ve had to go through the difficult grieving process of not being allowed, or able, to feel them.

The book goes on to say that:

“The single largest source of emotional confusion in our society stems from the patently false idea that we somehow should not allow ourselves to experience sad, painful, or negative feelings.”

Feeling bad is not bad. It’s okay for us to feel bad about bad or sad things: Losses. Pain. Dislocations in our lives or routines.

Telling others that feeling bad, or feeling hurt, also feeds into the pervasive and destructive belief that since we shouldn’t feel bad about anything, it must be someone else causing us to feel that way. And then we point blaming fingers at people for making us feel something we believe we shouldn’t be feeling.

When we believe that, we really convince ourselves that we’re helpless.

And the end result is that we don’t take responsibility for what we’ve said, felt, or done.

We become victims—convinced other people are the designers and cause of our feelings.

And we believe that we’re responsible for others’ feelings too.

Myth #2: Replace the Loss

Have you ever felt sad about losing a pet, or a relationship, or an opportunity and had someone say to you: “Oh, that’s okay. We’ll get you a new pet. Or, We’ll go someplace else.

It’s the idea that what you were hoping for or counting on can easily be replaced by option #2, or something else.

That way you’ll instantly stop feeling bad!

Heaven forbid we should feel bad about losing something.

Trying to replace a loss with something else, or thinking that you can, dismisses the importance of the event, the relationship, the milestone, the hard work and dedication given to a goal.

How many thousands of young women and men have missed high school and college graduation ceremonies—significant rights of passage—this year. Passages they’ll never be able to retrieve or recreate or enjoy?

How many couples have missed planned wedding dates, or had to substitute brief court ceremonies for family-festive wedding ceremonies and receptions?

In the United States alone, at least 100,000 families have had to forego honoring memorial services or funerals.

A dangerous effect of this replace-the-loss attitude and practice is:

“A failure to complete past relationships can make full participation in new relationships difficult or impossible.”

Trying to replace a relationship loss can cause a wedge between others.

I think you can see how “Don’t feel bad,” and “You need to replace the loss” often go hand-in-hand.

We can’t fix our sadness and loss through replacement. We need to go through the healing process to complete the grieving.

When your heart has been broken, feel bad about it.

I’m giving you permission.

Myth #3: Grieve alone

Can you finish the following well-known line?

“Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry…”

Could you finish it?

Insert the word “alone,” and you’re right.

But nothing could—or should be—further from the truth.

But that’s what we’re taught from an early age. That we should let others grieve alone; and that it’s best if we grieve that way too.

Yet Scripture is clear: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15).

Just as we are to celebrate with those who have something to celebrate, we are to grieve with those who have suffered a loss, or are mourning for some reason.

While you may feel as though you want to be left alone (initially) to process the shock of the loss or the information you’ve just received, how many of us grieve alone exclusively because we feel uncomfortable grieving in front of others (heavens, we can’t let them see our weak, weepy side); or feel as though we need to “remain strong” for someone else?

It seems to be a stoic Western trait, as many societies actually invite others to join them in their homes to wail and mourn for a designated period of time. Some actually hire wailers and mourners to follow caskets and funeral processions.

There’s something comforting in knowing that someone else is willing to come alongside you to allow you to grieve, and support you in doing that.

Yes, information and shock overload often cause us to retreat, to be alone and away from others that act as though nothing has changed, or because we’re downright overwhelmed and exhausted. But that doesn’t have to be the norm, and likely shouldn’t be.

The reason most people grieve alone is because they feel guilty about feeling bad and fear being judged or criticized by others for having feelings of loss and sorrow.

We don’t want to feel defective or weak. We’re not sure we should feel bad. And many people are probably telling us this, or implying it.

If you don’t feel safe feeling bad, you’re certainly not going to feel safe feeling bad in public.

Sadly, I frequently see and hear this in the Christian community. In chirpy, pontificating tones, earnest believers cite passage after Scripture passage about counting suffering as joy, or how blessed the mourners and sufferers are and will be in God’s kingdom.

This type of encouragement usually doesn’t encourage. It often adds a heart burden.

The feeling of not being grateful for what I’ve got, I shouldn’t feel bad, and I need to grieve alone.

I encourage everyone to listen to people’s hearts. Weep with them. Hear them. Listen so they’ll talk.

And find others who will listen to your heart, so you can grieve properly, successfully, and complete the grieving so you can arrive at the place of being healed.

Invitation—

How did you do on last week’s invitation to keep an emotions journal? Did you find it helpful? Did you learn anything about the emotions, or number of them that you experienced?

Were you able to reduce your fear and anxiety with the breathing, dancing or shaking exercises?

For today’s post, consider answering the following questions:

What have you lost, or lost out on because of COVID-19? A job, or business profit? A graduation ceremony? An opportunity you likely won’t have again?
What kind of emotions are you experiencing because of those losses?
Have you been able to grieve them, or have you been afraid to grieve? Did you realize the emotions you’ve been experiencing are related to grief?
Who do you know that you can share your grief with and will listen to your fears and grief and mourn with you? Have you shared with them?
Think of where you are now and where you’d like to be six, twelve, eighteen months from now? What would you like your life plan to look like? What would you like to achieve?

NEXT WEEK we’ll look at more common grief myths that hinder our healing and grief completion.

Until then, mourn your losses and remind yourself that grief is a natural reaction to them. Find someone to mourn with you. And look forward to the future with hope and dreaming. (Once we complete the grief and emotions discussions, we’ll look more closely at life planning!)

See you back here next week!

Andrea


Andrea Arthur Owan, M.S., A.T., R., is a fitness pro, chaplain, and award-winning inspirational writer. She works and writes to help people recover from trauma, grief and loss and to live their best lives — physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Coping with COVID: Emotions and Grief Relief

Do you feel as though you’re being overwhelmed by your emotions and are barely able to cope with the COVID crisis that’s unhinged your world?

If you answer “yes” you’re not alone. Even the most “together” of us are experiencing a whirlwind of emotions. Emotions we don’t understand and are struggling to handle.

Do any of these feel familiar?

Anger
Fear
Isolation
Disillusionment
Anxiety
Sadness
Self-blame
Guilt
Apprehension
Suspicion
Hyper-vigilance
Scared
Separation
Depression
Pain (physical)
Numbness
Doubt
Dread

All of the above are classically categorized as “negative” emotions.

What about any “positive” emotions you might be feeling? Like:

Joy
Peace
Gratitude
Understanding
Compassion
Motivation (to help others)
Trust (in faith, family, friends)
Deepening faith
Generosity
Empathy
Conviction
Patience
Kindness

Importance of validating Emotions—

You’ve likely heard when you were a child that there are “good” emotions and “bad” emotions, or at least gotten that impression based on something a parent or family member said or implied.

As a grief recovery chaplain, I’m going to tell you that it’s a travesty and healing hindrance to label them that way.

Why?

Because emotions just are. They’re feelings. And feelings aren’t good or bad. They are normal reactions to outside or internal stimuli—like death, loss, change, trauma, physical illness or injury, and shock.

When we label emotions good or bad, we often try to dismiss them or accentuate them. Other people may help us in that dismissing or accentuating (playing into) process; and they may shut us down from sharing or expressing them. But I’m going to encourage you!

Validate your feelings even if no one else will.

When you validate your feelings, you’re better able to identify those emotions and the root cause for them, evaluate them, and avoid being hampered by them or stuck in them.

We validate our emotions without letting them rule our lives.

Emotions are innocent. We must try to avoid making value statements about them, and thinking or making value statements about the emotions others experience.

Because that’s where things tend to go wrong—when we either demean our emotion or get stuck in an emotion and can’t let go of it.

Your varying emotions will come and go. That’s normal. Having an emotion doesn’t mean something is wrong with you.

But they can overtake you in a variety of ways.

And dismissing or hanging on to them can cause short and long-term problems.

Emotions and Physical Symptoms—

Emotions, and the mind-body neurochemical reaction to them, often trigger physical symptoms—headaches, backaches, stomach issues, sleep disturbances, inability to concentrate, allergies, asthma, and a host of other ailments.

The mind and body are really interconnected, and rarely does something happen in one system that doesn’t cause a chain reaction in the other. Perceived external or internal threats can take over every cell in our body.

Who hasn’t experienced a situation where abrupt fear hasn’t caused our heart rate to skyrocket, our blood pressure to sore, and our breathing to race?

It’s the old term many of you are familiar with: psychosomatic. Brain and body.

And many of the stresses we’re experiencing right now in this COVID19 crisis can dredge up emotions from old wounds and events we thought we’d healed from or moved past.

The purpose of validating our emotions—

As Dr. James Gordon, author of the book The Transformation, points out, there is a process to validating and understanding our emotions and dealing with them.

The first step is to pay attention to your emotions.
Then clearly see the messages they’re bringing to you.
Work with what the emotions can teach or reveal to you.
See what ways you can grow through and beyond the emotion to heal.

As I noted above, it’s not a good idea to try to suppress your emotions. When we do that, we usually end up creating more physical and psychological problems for ourselves.

What we can do is use our imaginations and creativities to discover what to do with these emotions. Keeping a journal helps in this process.

So how can we best identify, validate and respond to these wild emotions?

At the end of this post, I’ll give you several tips for validating and releasing your emotions and the stress they can cause. I’ll give you several tips today and more in the following weeks.

To keep you from getting stuck in your emotions.

What does validating emotions have to do with grief?

Many of us are experiencing grief right now, and we don’t know it.

We can recognize grief by identifying and validating our emotions.

How do we know it’s grief?

To understand the answer to that question, let’s look at the definition of grief The Grief Recovery Institute experts provide us:

Grief is the conflicting feelings caused by a change or an end in a familiar pattern of behavior.

Changes in living arrangements—lockdowns, quarantines, new environments.
Loss of familiarity—schedule changes, loss of daily or weekly gatherings
Tangible or intangible losses, obvious or hidden—family members, friendships, belongings, jobs.

As C.S. Lewis so poignantly noted in his book A Grief Observed:

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”

Do any of these emotions and sensations sound familiar to you?

We have a sense of numbness, a decreased ability to concentrate. Maybe a decreased ability to care about anything going on around us. A struggle to get up, maintain a schedule and slog through our boring, same-old, same-old day.

Maybe our eating habits have gone awry. We have no appetite, or too much of one. We nibble and snack and indulge out of fear or boredom. Because we have nothing to do, no more reason to maintain a healthy weight. Or no motivation to do it.

I’ve noticed on some of my ZOOM calls that people aren’t paying as much attention to their appearances. They can’t get their hair cut. They’re not interested in showering. For weeks makeup has languished in a bathroom drawer. They’re living in underwear or clothes they haven’t changed or washed in days.

But they’re washing their hands raw and sanitizing every surface in their homes several times a day.

They’re overwhelmed by their emotions and their bodies’ responses.

Something unordinary occurred, and the body responded to the “conflicting feelings caused by a change or an end in a familiar pattern of behavior.”

We’re responding to painful—sometimes overwhelmingly so—information and a pandemic that no action could have fully or properly prepared us for.

Even though countries have experienced pandemics before, little can prepare us for the emotional reactions we each have to this particular pandemic, and how it’s being handled.

It’s important to remember that these responses are normal.

It’s okay to have them. It’s when we don’t have them that we should worry.

Dealing with emotions and grief: focusing on small, correction actions—

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to give you some tips to help you uncover, validate and deal with emotions and your changes and losses. Confront your grief and heal.

But before we delve into this arena, we need to cover several bases.

First, please don’t ever compare your loss with someone else’s; and don’t allow someone to compare her grief to yours.

Everyone handles her loss in her way. There is no “larger” loss to make yours seem small; no “smaller” loss to make yours feel larger or more significant.

A loss is a loss. Depending upon our ages, life experiences and faith, each of us handles our losses differently. Don’t ignore them and don’t grade them.

Don’t expect time to heal you, or others. It’s not time that heals (a common statement and fallacy). It’s actions that bring healing.

The Grief Recovery Institute experts say,

“The false belief that time heals is probably the single largest impediment to recovery from loss of any kind.”

Instead, remember that:

“Recovery from grief or loss is achieved by a series of small and correct action choices made by the griever.”

For me, seeing a baby girl reminds me of my precious baby Victoria, and that memory still brings stabbing pain to my heart. The brain remembers, and it doesn’t ask permission before releasing memory chemicals of and pain response into my system. Sadness, remorse and regret automatically overtake me. If I allow those emotions to overwhelm me, depression will drip through my system until I’m overwhelmed by it.

But if I don’t try to stuff it and, instead, acknowledge it, note it, validate it and remind myself that sadness is a perfectly reasonable reaction to still have to my daughter’s death—and the trauma surrounding it—I’m okay.

I’m acknowledging I’m normal.

Like that event, I think many of us are going to be taking small, correct—healing—actions after this pandemic is long gone and parsed out in the history books.

Understand that grief is a normal and natural reaction to any loss. It’s not a “pathological condition nor a personality disorder.”

But in the heat of a crisis, don’t be surprised if you find yourself having odds thoughts, performing odd behaviors, having odd dreams, or saying unusual things.

A couple of weeks into our quarantine, I had a PTSD nightmare I thought I’d never have again. It had been years since my last one. But there it was again. Not as intense. And, actually, it provided a happier ending.

And the funny thing about it was that I was in a light sleep and knew I was having it. And this time I didn’t seem to want to run away from it.

Most of us have grown up with a multitude of myths that only hamper our emotions and grief responses.

In the following weeks, we’ll look at those and see how we can correct them. Further help for validating our emotions and healing.

Facing realities—

Normal isn’t normal anymore. And that may be part of the bigger emotional problem.

For better or worse, any kind of change is stressful, and our brains react accordingly. Stress hormones get dumped into our body systems, and our bodies respond. Adrenaline pumps. So much adrenaline that we might get wiped out from system overload.

For most of us this pandemic and the resulting lockdowns, job losses, massive schedule and life upheavals have been traumatic. And our brains (and bodies) are trying to process all of it, at one time. It’s not healthy or productive to try to ignore it or wish it away.

We may be looking at a new paradigm that will take time to become familiar and comfortable with.

I want to provide the tools and resources you need to survive this storm and thrive!

Invitation—

I invite and encourage you to use the following tools to identify and validate your emotions and not allow yourself to get stuck in them.

Keep an emotions journal—

One way of validating and responding is by keeping an emotions journal.

There are big benefits to jotting down your emotions on paper, even if your emotions flip flop wildly throughout the day.

And now’s a perfect time to start keeping one.

Seeing them written down in a journal helps validate them. It makes them real and manageable. And it tells you a lot about you and your present needs.

Many of us don’t have any place we can vacate to—alone—right now to assess and decompress. To blow off steam. To weep over losses and unknown futures. Although locking yourself in a bathroom and turning the radio up REALLY loudly might suffice.

Having a journal, or even loose paper you can keep together as a journal, is effective in noting how your emotions change throughout the day, and how you can validate and respond to them.

Learn to breathe and release—

Learning meditation-type breathing techniques is invaluable for allowing the release of emotions. It allows us to be more fully aware, moment-by-moment, of how our what emotions might be lurking just below the surface and affecting us physically or psychologically.

Breathing can also tune you in to just how quickly emotions can come and go. And we can use our imaginations and creativity to learn what to do with our emotions.

You can find a lot of meditative breathing techniques on line. I’ve included some here for you. They can be done lying down, sitting or standing. The process generally involves breathing in slowly, deeply through your nose and exhaling slowly and completely through your mouth, making sure you are using your diaphragm to fill your lungs and allowing your stomach muscles to relax, or soften.

Try to put away any distractions, like ringing phones, when you do these exercises, although when you get good, you will be able to perform them in a busy environment.

Once learned and frequently practiced, they can be very effective at slowing your breathing and dropping your heart rate and blood pressure.

Rather than thinking of breathing exercises as emptying your mind, I like to have my clients and patience just become aware of the emotions they are feeling, without casting any judgments on them. And becoming aware of how these emotions affect your body: tension, stress, and shallow breathing are frequent side effects of out-of-control emotions.

Five to ten minutes should be adequate. If this type of breathing is new to you, just starting with a couple of minutes can be enough.

After your breathing, note what emotions emerged and any accompanying thoughts you had with them. Don’t dwell on them. Just note them. You can spend time analyzing them later.

In the first video, Dr. Andrew Weil gives a great, brief presentation on the benefits of breathing modulation and its effects on illnesses. He says it’s the constancy—regularity—of doing these exercises that result in dramatic changes.

In this next video, Dr. Weil teaches yoga breathing.

This City of Hope video provides a little more in depth breathing and imagery. The video below is longer and includes a guide imagery technique too. Just doing the breathing exercises for several minutes is enough for now.

And now we can move on to another tool.

Draw your emotions—

Any kind of drawing—putting pen or pencil to paper—can stimulate the brain and creativity.

And emotions can be expressed through drawings. Even childlike ones. So don’t think that you have to be an artist to utilize this tool.

Grab several pieces of paper and crayons or markers.

Do the drawings quickly, with no more than several minutes spent on each. The drawings are simply about self-discovery.

Drawing #1: Draw a picture of you right now, the emotions you feel. Stick figures. Representative symbols. These aren’t complicated or necessarily detailed.

Drawing #2: Draw yourself and your biggest problem. The problem might be represented by a shape, a color, a word. What kind of emotions trigger this drawing?

Drawing #3: Draw yourself with your problem solved. How does the solving make you feel? Those are the emotions your want to recognize.

Dancing or shaking—

Free dancing and body shaking are wonderful ways to identify emotions and express them.

When I was using movement gymnastics with my elementary school classes, I’d give each student a colorful scarf to dance to music with, run around the gym with. Dance with. Because they were less inhibited or self-aware, the kindergarten students were a joy to watch.

They stopped watching each other and just went with the movements their little bodies were dying to exhibit. They choreographed their emotions, their joys, their delights, their inhabitations. Their creativity. They danced and moved to their emotions.

They loosened up and released. They laughed and shouted.

Shaking can do the same thing.

This video offers a great teaching.

I hope you find these suggestions helpful.

NEXT WEEK: we’ll look at the myths of grief that hamper our long-term healing, and I’ll give you more tools to release and validate your emotions.

Until then,

keep breathing, dancing, and drawing. And remember that in any situation, we can make our life better and more fulfilling.

See you back here next week!

Blessings,

Andrea


Andrea Arthur Owan, M.S., A.T., R., is a fitness pro, chaplain, and award-winning inspirational writer. She works and writes to help people recover from trauma, grief and loss and to live their best lives — physically, emotionally, and spiritually.