When I lead people through the process of healing the pain of past losses, there are two pitfalls they commonly encounter.
- Getting overwhelmed and wanting to stop
- Not going deep enough
Often, they’re able to surmount these obstacles, by trusting the process and finding the courage to keep going. But sometimes it keeps them from doing the healing work they need to do.
It’s incredibly sad when that happens. I believe we’re always moving toward healing, in whatever weird and messy way we go about it. We want to heal. Being healthy is our natural state.
But it’s not easy.
I’m not trying to make you quake at the thought of doing grief recovery work. But I do want to give you a heads up so that, if it happens to you, you can recognize it.
A great deal of this healing work is recognizing our losses and our responses to them so we can make different choices, resulting in a different, healing outcome.
It’s like the transition to the final stage in labor, when a mother is just about to give birth. It feels totally overwhelming and impossible. I know because I’ve been through it twice. With both births it was the point at which I decided I was done for the day and was ready to go home and maybe try again tomorrow. I looked around the room, sizing up the nurses, trying to determine if I could make a run for it.
I was in transition. It was time to push. The baby was coming.
The second time this happened, during my youngest child’s birth, I caught myself in the midst of the experience and was able to laugh at myself a little, feel the overwhelm and the panic, and keep going. Ben was born 12 minutes later, much to my immense relief.
I’m telling you about this stage in your healing so that you can do the same. Notice it, observe it, maybe smile at yourself with compassion and understanding, and get on with the labor.
These two obstacles — getting overwhelmed and wanting to stop and not going deep enough — may seem contradictory at first glance. But they’re really based on the same fear: fear of pain.
Overwhelmed by pain
The pain you might feel in doing grief recovery work is that it’s pain you’re already feeling. Looking at your past losses, with clarity and insight, isn’t going to make you hurt more.
It may bring it more to your surface consciousness. You may feel temporarily stunned at the amount of loss or depth of loss you’ve experienced. Losses that perhaps you never let yourself acknowledge before. But these are losses, and pain, that you’ve been carrying all this time, whether or not you realized its source.
Doing grief recovery work is similar to cleaning out a closet stuffed full of clothes. You’ve got to take everything out of the closet to begin with, so you can begin to sort through it and decide what to toss, what to keep and what to store somewhere else in the house.
You’ve got to look at it all first.
I won’t tell you not to let it overwhelm you. In fact, I’ll tell you the opposite. Let yourself be overwhelmed. Cry. Get under the bed covers for a while. Be gentle with yourself. Call a friend. Journal a little. Go for a walk. Take some deep breaths. You can do this. You can look in the dark corners of your life and survive.
Why? Because you’re learning the tools to do things differently. Because there’s a way to move through this, to sort out what still fits you and what needs to be released.
If you get to this point in your healing work, don’t stop. Keep going. It’s a sign you’re doing the right work.
Not going deep enough
The other thing I see happen is fear of pain keeping people from going deeply enough — whether that’s truly looking at a relationship with all its highs and lows, or taking the plunge to work on the loss that’s hurting the most.
Every relationship has its sweet and sour moments, whether it was a great, loving relationship, or a deeply hurtful one. Very few relationships are ever all of one thing. Your dear spouse at least occasionally let you down. Your overbearing and abusive parent may have done much wrong, but must have done at least a couple of things right (feeding you, housing you, bringing you life).
There are a few relationships in which there truly wasn’t much good. I’ve experienced these myself, mostly in the form of sexual assault or abuse. The good was that I survived.
It’s vitally important to look at the full truth of a relationship, including the part you played (without blaming yourself). Unless you do this, you can’t resolve what’s been incomplete and painful. You have to hold yourself, and the other person, accountable for all the things that happened in the relationship that hurt you.
The other aspect of this is not being willing to complete the pain of a deeply painful relationship and, instead, choosing to work on one that didn’t impact you as much.
At times, this can actually be helpful. You learn the tools of grief recovery which you can then apply to a more difficult relationship — but that only works if you then choose to complete that second relationship. Learning the tools isn’t enough.
It can be a hard choice: do you work on the toughest relationship first or do you learn the tools first so you can be more comfortable with the process and know what to expect when you do work on the hard one?
If you’re committed to healing more than one relationship, there’s no wrong choice. If you’re only going to go through the process once, pick the most painful one and go through it with the support of a certified grief recovery specialist.
You won’t regret going deeper, either in choosing a relationship to work on, or in really digging through the unresolved feelings and events in that relationship. You can do it. You have the courage and strength within you, or you wouldn’t even be thinking of starting on this journey.
When I gave birth to my children, I had a wonderful midwife with me, guiding me through the process and reminding me of my inner strength when it came time to move my children from the womb into the world.
I knew she wouldn’t let me make a run for it out the hospital room — because she knew that you couldn’t just stop labor and try again another day. I knew that, too, even if I didn’t quite want to face it at the time.
So I stayed, and I pushed, and new life began.
In grief recovery work, I’m your midwife. When you want to run through the door and try again some other time, I’ll be the one to help you know that your pain won’t magically go away and subside if you don’t deal with it now.
I’ll guide you through and help you to the other side of grief, so your new life can begin, too.
Image by Sanjasy from Pixabay