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This is one of a series of articles comprising Lesson 3 in the Break the
Cycle! self-improvement course. This lesson aims to educate readers to healthy
grieving basics so they can spot and complete unfinished mourning of major
losses.
Typical survivors of childhood trauma (Grown Wounded Children - GWCs) never
learned these basics, and risk psychological, physical, and relationship
problems from incomplete mourning.
This Lesson requires major progress on
Lesson 1
- reducing psychological wounds.
Thruout
their lives, healthy infants, kids, and adults (like you) automatically form
bonds (emotional / spiritual attachments) to special living and
inanimate things. By choice or chance, these bonds break, creating painful
invisible and physical
losses.
Nature provides an automatic way to
process the
questions, thoughts, and painful
feelings created by losses over time,
understand and accept broken bonds and
their impacts, and to
regain personal and social
balances and life purpose.
This natural process is the slow
[mental +
emotional + spiritual]
process of grief, or mourning.
Healthy grief requires seven
personal and environmental
factors.
Few adults and no kids can name
them. Can you? A sobering implication is - many parents are unable to
provide, model,
and teach these good-grief requisites to their kids - i.e. they can't
provide a "pro-grief" home..
Without these requisites, mourning
may be slowed or blocked. This can promote serious personal,
relationship, and family problems,
including chronic
sickness or
depression, addictions, obesity; hypertension; "endless" rage or sadness;
divorces, difficulty sleeping, digesting, concentrating, and/or forming new bonds;
and premature death.
My experience as a therapist since 1981 suggests that incomplete grief is so prevalent
that I include it among five core
hazards
that promote epidemic misery,
stress, and illness in our society. Americans avoid recognizing this hazard by condoning
ceaseless distractions (like TV, PCs, iPods, and cell phones). These discourage personal solitude, reflection, and awareness,
which are
key grieving requisites. Do you agree?
U.S. mental health workers are just beginning to recognize incomplete
("complicated") grief is a serious, widespread condition in our country.
This recent research summary notes that it is
not yet recognized as an "official" mental-health condition by the American
Psychiatric Association (APA).
Incomplete grief has distinct
behavioral
symptoms. Knowing them can help people like you identify missing personal and
family requisites, and facilitate the grief process in themselves and
others. This is specially important in typical
dysfunctional, divorcing,
and step families
whose adults and kids are prone to many major losses,
requisite-deficits, and incomplete grief.
SO - this
series of Lesson-3 Web articles and resources exists to...
inform Web site visitors on basic
realities about...
psychological attachments and losses,
three levels of
healthy grief and their phases, and...
seven requisites for healthy
grief; and to ...
provide a useful way of
assessing...
personal and family
grieving policies (healthy > unhealthy) and
permissions (encouraging
> discouraging); and...
grieving status in kids and adults (blocked > incomplete >
complete).
And this series exists to...
provide practical
ways to acquire healthy-grief requisites and help family members - specially
kids to fully accept their inevitable life-losses,
and regain their personal balances and life-interests.
And this series
also exists
to...
help courting partners
learn how to assess whether incomplete
grief and what causes it could promote unwise
commitment decisions
.
Note: The
Lesson-3 Web resources are integrated in
two chapters of the guidebook
Stepfamily Courtship.
(Xlibris.com, 2001). Most of the book pertains to all courting
couples
One element of an effective family grieving policy is learning
how to talk clearly about bonding, losses, and the mourning process. That invites
learning and using some....
Grief Concepts and Terms
In this
Web site and its guidebooks...
bonding is the normal
psychological - spiritual process of developing an interest
in, appreciation for, enjoyment of, and spontaneous caring for, a living
thing, or a prized place, ritual, activity, idea, sound, smell, object,
dream (hope), memory, or fantasy.
Some psychologically-wounded
survivors of childhood
neglect are unable to bond or love, and have no losses to grieve.
Bonding (a) is different than
needing(depending on), (b) may be one-way or mutual, and (c) may or may not include
the feeling of love.
to
losemeans a process or event which
results in an adult or child being deprived temporarily or permanently of part or all of something s/he's
bonded (attached) to.
a loss may mean
(a) this process, or (b) the
abstract or
tangible thing that is reduced or
gone. All losses are changes,
but not all changes cause losses (broken bonds).
aloseris a person who
is deprived by choice or chance of something they cherish.
grieving and
mourning both mean
the long, natural mental-emotional-spiritual process that heals the pain and emptiness of
a significant loss over time - unless by the loser and/or their
environment.
good grief means an unhindered natural process that completes well enough to allow the loser to (a) fully accept
major
losses on mental, emotional, and spiritual levels; and (b) eventually resume
normal life and form new bonds.
grief levels
refer
to inter-related mental +
emotional + spiritual aspects of the normal mourning process. Each level
has several sequential
phases which allow tracking grieving progress..
blocked
grief occurs on one or more levels when a person and/or
family lacks the requisites to grieve well. If prolonged, blocked
(incomplete) grief promotes significant personal and family stress.
complicated grief
is an emerging term some health professionals use to denote serious
incomplete mourning and its toxic effects.
grief permissions are internal (personal) and social encouragements to move
through the natural mourning process to completion.Without
stable permissions, grieving slows or stops.
grief requisites
-
seven things that typical kids and adults need in order to grieve well.
a grieving policyis a set of semi-conscious attitudes + values + expectations about
bonding and "proper" or "healthy" grief conduct and
progress. Every
person and family
unconsciously evolves such a policy. Typical men and women (like you?)
are often unable to articulate it without
studying mourning basics, meditation, and discussion. Personal, home,
and family grief policies range from healthy
(grief-promoting) to toxic (grief-blocking).
grief support
occurs when one or more people accept and empathically encourage
(permit)
a loser to move through their process towards full loss-acceptance. The
alternative is discouraging a loser from moving through the three
grief levels in their own way. This often stems from a low family
nurturance-level
and toxic personal
and/or family grief policies.
How do these definitions compare with yours?
Perspective onLosses
Most adults and kids automatically associate "grief" with
death. Actually, we must mourn the endings of many bonds we
form throughout our
lives.
To grieve well, it helps to realize that
our losses…
are inevitable for any child or
adult who is genuinely able to bond;
can betangible(e.g. loss of a prized physical thing or place),
and/or
invisible (e.g. losing a dream, a
relationship, trust, hope, a security, a ritual, a freedom, an
ability, a group status, an identity, a family role, a
purpose, ...); And ...
our losses
may be planned and expected (e.g. a
chosen job change, graduation, or geographic move),
or unforeseen (e.g. a car crash
or illness). And losses can be....
very slow (like natural aging),
or sudden(e.g. being robbed, flooded, or fired without warning).
many concurrent modest losses may have a cumulativeemotional
impact in us, if not well mourned as we go;
And specific losses...
are
experienced uniquely
by each of us
- e.g. a child usually reacts differently to the loss of a pet hamster
than their parent does; and...
well-mourned losses
usuallymake hope and new bondings possible, like
acquiring a new friend, partner, ritual, dream, or pet.
Notice your thoughts and feelings now. Do you agree with these premises?
Were you taught these things as a child? Was your mate (if any)? Is someone teaching these ideas about loss to the young
people in your home and life? Doing so is part of an informed grieving policy.
What
Is "Grieving"?
We're each born with the
instinct to form
minor to major psychological bonds
or attachments. Because Life usually forces
most bonds to break, we're also naturally
able to grieve
or mourn -
i.e.
to move through
a
predictable sequence of emotional, mental, and sometimes
spiritual
phases.
If unhindered, this healing sequence eventually relieves our painful thoughts and feelings
from broken bonds over time by attaining true acceptance of our
losses and their personal and social effects. Our genetic
programming to survive and to grow
naturally triesto move us through concurrent mental,
emotional, and - for some - spiritual levels of grief.
Let's explore each level briefly. The following will make more sense if
you study this summary of grieving levels
and phases, and return here.
1) The
EmotionalLevel of Good Grief
Noted British researcher John Bowlby proposed that
young children's' grieving of absent caregivers has
three emotional phases:
protest, despair, and detachment (unbonding and indifference). Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who
has studied and written widely on reactions to human death, proposes
five phases of (the emotional
level) of mourning for
any significant
loss:
Shock, numbness, and disorientation
("This can't be happening!");
Irrational pleading, fantasizing, or bargaining
("magic thinking") - e.g. "If I start taking out the garbage on time like my
parents want, I know they won't divorce.";
Cyclesofanger and rage. These surges may
be felt or
repressed and denied
. If
anger
energy is felt,
it may be expressed directly or indirectly,
or
unconsciously converted into a "safer" emotional/physical state
(e.g. "heaviness," "depression," or "hyperactivity.")
There is
persuasive evidence that
repressed anger can be stored in our muscles as a tight jaw,
and/or shoulder, stomach, and "back pain." It also seems to contribute to some
recurrent headaches, facial tics, teeth grinding, and stomach problems.
Cycles of
deep sadness, apathy,
despair, and
(perhaps) depression. Again, these emotions may be felt or not, and
expressed
or not. By the way, medical research reports that
tears of joy differ chemically
from tears of pain because the latter contain compounds that cause
stress.
By
ejecting these chemicals, cryingis one of our
body's naturalways of staying balanced during times of trauma and endings.
Implication - blocking our healthy human reflex to weep stresses us,
and is
often a sign of psychological wounds and a toxic grieving policy!
The last phase of the
emotional level
of our normal grief process is …
Regaining stable emotional calmness, which
allows us to resume our life interests, activities, and goals, and form
selective new bonds. Periods of calm sadness (e.g. at anniversaries) may
continue.
We life-long losers
can move through these phases in order, repeat or skip one or several phases for a while,
or may move back and forth between the phases over time.
We each evolve our own mourning style, so it's usually
not helpful to "persuade" a loser to grieve
"right,"unless they're stuck.
2) The
MentalLevel of Good Grief
While
healthy losers are moving through these emotional phases, they also need to
traverse a gradual shift from mental chaos to
stable, credible understanding of common questions like
these:
"Specifically,
what have I lost? What has ended temporarily
or completelyfor me?"
"Is it reallygone for good?"
"How and
why did my loss/es happen?"
"Am I to blame? Could I or others have prevented this
ending?"
"Why did this happened to
me? Why now?"
"How will this
loss affect
me and others important to me?"
"Can I replace what I've lost? How? At what cost or
risk? Do I want to? When?"
Family
adults can gently and patiently help young losers and each other to
find their own
answers to these questions over time.Suggestions and
patientempathic listening help more than giving
mourners "right" answers.
Lack of clear, realistic answers to questions like
these can promote
psychjological wounds and block
the final grief step of loss-acceptance. Acknowledging realities about key losses can
take a long time, because they can be so painful and/or slow to manifest ("I'll never have my birthday
again the way we used to do it!")
In their
book "Second Chances," psychologist Judith Wallerstein and
Sandra Blakeslee propose that it takes some kids 10-15 years to fully adjustto
(accept) their complex set of tangible and abstract losses from parental separation,
divorce, and
family restructuring. I believe where this is true, it probably indicates that such
kids are not living with pro-grief caregivers.
3)The
SpiritualLevel of Good Grief
A third level of
healthy mourning has to do with (re)gaining a stable, nourishing
spiritual faith in a
trustworthy Higher Power, "Nature," and/or "the Universe." People
overwhelmed by grief can lose a life-long trust in a benign Supreme Being, raging
"How could you let this happen to me (or a beloved other)?" - and perhaps
feeling great
guilt for this "sacrilege."
They may alter or stop their worship
(religious) practices, reject their God and perhaps Guardian Angels, stop
participating in a religious community, and feel spiritually disconnected, betrayed, and abandoned.
Non-believers can feel their skepticism in a loving Higher Power is obviously justified.
For
originally-faithful grievers,
the third phase of healthy mourning is regaining or growing a new, firm faith that their Higher Power
and/or
"Nature" is trustworthy in ways that can't be humanly understood.
Many factors seem to affect how important
spiritual grief is to a child or
adult, and how long it takes to move through it. It's possible that people with firm
nourishing
(vs. toxic) spiritual faith can often
accept significant losses more quickly than
non-believers. Some options to help move through the
phases of spiritual
mourning are
prayer, reflection, and perhaps spiritual guidance and/or pastoral
counseling.
In healthy mourning, the concurrent mental, emotional, and spiritual levels
and phases are eventually complete
enough.
Loss emotions and questions gradually subside, and refocusing on normal
living returns. Significant needs created by the loss/es start to
fill with new rituals, activities, goals, and bonds. Each person's unique needs, traits, and situations shape if and how
this grief-completion occurs, and how long it takes. Because mourning involves mind, body, and
spirit, conscious effort speed it up, but can
promote
it.
Conversely, our
three-level grief process can be unconsciously slowed or stopped.This seems (in my
experience) to be very common in members of low-nurturance families.
Incomplete grief
adds greatly to ongoing, day-to-day personal and family distraction and
stress. I believe it is one of
five main stressors
in
typical troubled families. Does this premise
seem credible?
If effective grief
is vital for personal health and growth and family welfare, what's needed to "do" it? Pause, breathe, and
say your answer to this question
out loud before reading further. Then compare your answer to this...
Seven
Requisites For
Healthy Mourning
This
video clip previews what you're about to read:
Premise:
these factors are key
ingredients for most kids, adults, and families:
1)Significant
progress in
reducing psychological wounds from
early childhood
trauma. Without this, the other six
good-grief factors probably won't help much.
Lesson 1
in this nonprofit Web site focuses on wound reduction.
2) Clear awareness of...
the natural three-level mourning
process we're all endowed with (above);
our tangible
and invisible losses, and...
their personal
impactson us and key others.
3) Confidencein surviving our losses and their impacts, based on experience +
realistic counsel + faith;
4) Commitmentto
patient grieving as a healthy personal priority, without excessive
guilt, ambivalence, or anxiety.
5) Consistent
inner and outerpermissions to...
feel and express our natural shock, disbelief, rage, and despair -
over and over; and permissions to
turn our mental confusion into clarity and order,
over time, by asking questions, and repeated venting, discussion, and meditating.
Restated - grievers need a stable,
pro-grief (high-nurturance)
environment to move steadily through the phases toward loss-acceptance;
6) Motivation and opportunitiesto meditate, sort, feel,
and process; and…
7) All
the time we need,
and patience as we
mourn a day at a time.
Premise:
the
more of these factors that are missing for a loser, the more likely s/he will move slowly through, or be frozen in,
accepting their inevitable
life losses and moving on. What do you think?
Grieving
Work through the
denial that hides the anger;
...
Work through the
anger that hides the hurt;
...
Work through the hurt that hides the loss
and loneliness; ...
Work through the loss and loneliness that
hides the
lack of self worth;...
Work through the lack of self worth that hides
the total confusion; ...
Work through the total confusion that hides
our unwillingness ...
to give up our own control and to surrender
our lives to the Creator.
- Anonymous
Pause, breathe, and reflect - why did you read this article? Did you get
what you needed? If not, what do you need? Who's
answering
these questions - your
true Self,
or
someone else?
The Web address of this article is http://sfhelp.org/grief/basics.htm
Why
Does This Series on Good Grief
Exist?
1) The
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