🔗 Grief Intelligence: A Primer
- Grief is a normal reaction.
- Grief is hard work.
- Grief Doesn't offer closure.
- Grief is lifelong.
- Grievers need to stay connected to the deceased.
- Grievers are changed forever.
- Grievers can choose transcendence.
“So I invite you to reflect on these grief principles, how they might be true for you and how they might be true for someone you know and love. Share and share again so that we might spread grief intelligence far and wide. Perhaps we can effect a change so widespread that grievers will know what to expect. Hopefully, we all can be comforted, in small ways, by that knowledge.”
In order to take my grief away, you'd have to take my love away.
“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.”
The pain is only part of the joy
Somewhere along the line, I turned "The pain now is part of the happiness then" into "The pain is only part of the joy." Meaning that if there was no joy in the past there'd be no pain now. When all you have left is the pain, hold on to it, it is the joy, the love, of the past.
“Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”
“Trauma upends everything we took for granted, including things we didn’t know we took for granted. And many of these realities I wish I’d known when I first encountered them. So, while the work of life and healing continues, here are ten things I’ve learned about trauma along the way:”
“If you’re on this grief path, no doubt you have heard a zillion and one suggestions about how you can do your grief better. You’ve been encouraged to get out of it fast, to go back to “normal” life.
...
Grief has your heart working as hard as it can. When you are in pain, you don’t need to be fixed. ... What you need are those things ... that come up underneath you and give you roots. You need those things that nourish you, that help you do the work your heart already knows how to do.”
Psychologist, writer and innovator, Geoff Warburton has spent the last 25 years studying love and loss. Geoff challenges conventional apathy about grief and loss by offering an approach that evokes curiosity, openness and compassion. His approach synthesises Eastern wisdom traditions, in-depth psychology and common sense. The emphasis of his message is towards thriving after loss -- and not merely surviving. He presents a perspective that challenges Western thought by saying there is no 'right' way to grieve and advocating that grief can be 'the ride of your life'. Working from both his personal and professional experiences of bereavement, he goes so far as to say that loss through bereavement can become an adventure to be had, rather than a problem to be solved.
"If I let myself feel my emotions, I won't be able to function" ... The thing is, we're much more likely to NOT function, actually, if we block our emotions. Research shows that we're much more likely to get anxiety, depression, eating disorders, even become violent, if we suppress our emotions.
You need to embrace everything that grief brings you.
In grief you're going to meet hate, you're going to meet anger, you're going to meet emotional pain, you're going to meet rage, you're going to meet terror. If you get through that you're probably going to feel torn to pieces. You might feel crazy. You might end up in a total emotional abyss. You're probably very likely to end up in an emotional abyss. You need to feel that emotional abyss. You need to let that abyss swallow you. ... Close off your experience of the abyss and you close off the flow of life.
Block that anger and you block your vitality. Block that fear and you block your excitement. Block that deep emotional pain and you block your access to compassion. Even block your hatred and you block your access to peace. Block your experience of that abyss and you will block access to the depth of who you really are and the energy that's going to take you forward.
Right in the center of that abyss ... you'll find your liberation.
Let loss be a life adventure. And the way to do that, stay with it, breath, and let your inner experience guide you.
“This is the experience of Stumbling in the Dark. A time of Second Crisis. Bleak. Hopeless. Empty. The structure, shape, focus, and direction of the past are gone, and there is absolutely nothing to take their place in the present. Every assumption one has ever had about how life works and what an individual’s role is or can be is assaulted. You have been completely knocked off course. You don’t know what to believe, what to think, what to hold on to. The underpinnings of your life have been destroyed. The world as you knew it has been shattered. And you have neither the desire nor the resources to rebuild it.”
“It’s one thing to remember the past, the good and the bad, and you remember both. But it’s another thing to grieve over what’s not happening now that would have happened if the person were still here. ...
... It has taken me many months to get to the point where I can say, “All right, the future is not going to be what you thought it was. It’s gone and you’re not going to get it back.” ...
... I just miss all the things that are now never going to happen.”
“My life was liquid — it had no form. I didn’t know who I was; I didn’t know where I was; I didn’t know where I was going. You see, I had been defined before. I was Sandra’s husband.”
“The first thing I took out of the box was a Mr. Coffee. Well, as I unloaded the coffeemaker the glass decanter fell out and broke on the tile floor. I was so heartbroken that I just sat down, broken glass and all, and cried. ...
... I shook a lot; my voice trembled. I cried easily, I was angry and short with people without notice. I began behaving erratically. ...
... I lived a life of nobody-ness. It was a time of being helpless and hopeless.”
“While we Stumble in the Dark, we are dealing with much more than the loss of someone who was an essential part of our lives, as central as that loss may be. We are also dealing with a loss of meaning and a loss of those purposes that determined not only how our life had been but also how we thought it would be in the future. We’ve lost the structure that informed our life, the mental map that served as the source of our choices and plans. We’ve lost our “assumptive world,” the life we expected to have. ...
... Now, not only must we mourn the absent one but we must mourn the loss of the future we naturally assumed we were going to have.”
“Many powerful feelings well up as memories of the relationship are sifted through: regret that more was not valued when the partner was alive; resentment over those things that were not made right or over being cheated by death of what was hoped for in the future; ineffable sadness over what was and can no longer be; sorrow for the lost past and the younger years that are gone with it; anger at life, the dead person, the self for what one did not have and now may never have - perhaps children, perhaps love; guilt for the love that was not perfect, for the hate that was nurtured, the care that failed; release from the suffering of illness, from the suffering of relationship; triumph that one did not die oneself; guilt that such a feeling could appear; depression at the emptiness of self and the world; and envy of those who have not lost, but live unscathed by death.”