Shortly after the loss you experienced, you probably became acutely aware of how ill prepared you were to deal with the conflicting mass of emotions we call grief. The same is true for almost everyone in our society. We are far better prepared to deal with minor accidents than we are to deal with grief. We receive more education about simple first aid than we do about death, divorce, and other emotional losses.
Stop and consider your own experience. In grade school, you took a class on first aid; in high school, you took a class on health and safety. The local Red Cross offers classes on first aid in the community. Nationwide we have a convenient 911 number to call in case of emergency. At some level, we’re all prepared to take action if an accident occurs in our presence. How many classes have you taken on how to deal with the grief caused by significant emotional loss?
We think it’s strange that we all know what to do if someone breaks an arm, but very few people are prepared to assist grievers. Eight million people become new grievers each year owing to death alone. In addition, the divorce rate exceeds 45 percent. This statistic does not include relationships that were never formalized by marriage. Many millions of relationships end annually, affecting not only the couple but children, parents, other relatives, and friends. It is estimated that more than fourteen million pets die per year in the United States alone. When you add the many millions of loss experiences related to retirement, job loss or change, medical problems, and major financial changes, the numbers are staggering.
WE’RE TAUGHT HOW TO ACQUIRE THINGS, NOT WHAT TO DO WHEN WE LOSE THEM
In our formative years, an overwhelming emphasis is placed on learning how to acquire things in order to make life successful and happy.
In early childhood, we try to acquire our parents’ praise. Later we try to acquire toys at Christmas or Hanukkah by being good. We try to earn high grades in school in order to gain approval. We try to look attractive to our peers so we’ll be accepted. This process of learning how to acquire objects and attention continues into our adult lives. Certainly the advertising industry understands this phenomenon: marketing campaigns focus on finding happiness and contentment through the acquisition of things.
While we have learned much about acquiring things, we have precious little accurate information on what to do when we lose them.
Loss is inevitable. Sometimes loss is even predictable. In spite of these truths, we receive no formal training in how to respond to events that are guaranteed to happen and sure to cause pain and disruption. We are even advised not to learn about dealing with loss—or at the very least, not to talk about it. “What’s done is done.” “You have to move on.” “Don’t burden others with your feelings.” The list goes on and on.
We are all liable to face several major losses in our lives. We must acknowledge that much of what we’ve learned about processing the feelings caused by loss is incorrect. In fact, if we had no knowledge about dealing with grief, we would be better off than we are operating with what we currently know. Most of us rely on old ideas to deal with whatever crisis confronts us. Even though we could show you that most of the ideas you learned about dealing with grief are not helpful, you may fall back on them when faced with the painful thoughts and feelings caused by loss. We typically do the same actions the same way, over and over. All actions, physical and emotional, become habitual. This is actually good news, being able to develop and maintain habits. The crucial step is to develop some helpful habits for dealing with grief.
First, in order to develop a new habit, you must become aware of the need to have a new habit. If you are reading this book, you are probably already aware that you need more effective information and habits for dealing with grief. Second, you must learn the component parts or skills necessary to build the habit. In the case of grief, this means identifying the ideas that do not work and replacing them with ideas that do. Third, you must practice the new ideas so that you can turn them into habits.
As you work your way through this book, you will be learning new ideas and practicing them. This is essential to the goal of completing the pain caused by loss. After working through this book, you will have much better habits for dealing with any losses or disappointments that occur in your life.
WE’RE TAUGHT MYTHS ABOUT DEALING WITH GRIEF
Before we can discuss what recovery is, it’s important to look at what it isn’t. We must be clear about why we need to find a new way to deal with loss. We begin by clarifying our understanding of how we have dealt with loss in the past. We will use John’s and Russell’s experiences with loss as illustrations.
John’s first memory about learning to deal with loss comes from when he was five years old:
We had a family dog. This dog adopted me from the moment I arrived home from the hospital. When I was old enough to crawl, I’d pull the dog’s tail and she’d let me get away with it. The dog would go everywhere with me. As I grew older, I tried to teach the dog to retrieve. (To this day, I’m not sure who taught whom to retrieve.) The dog always found a way to sleep with me each night. This drove my mother to distraction. But the dog and I were persistent and eventually Mom gave up. Then, one morning, I called to my dog and she wouldn’t get up. I remember how cold she felt when I touched her. I remember being afraid. I called to my mother to help me. My mother told me that my dog had died. I’m certain she tried to explain what death was. I’m also certain she didn’t know how.
For the next several days after the dog died, John cried a lot and spent a great deal of time in his room. “My parents felt inadequate in knowing what to do to help me,” he remembers. Finally, in total frustration, John’s father said:
Don’t cry—on Saturday we’ll get you a new dog.
Now, that doesn’t sound like such a profound sentence. But let’s take a closer look. We learn by many different methods. One of these is called influence learning. A child is born into a family. During the first few years, the child’s primary contact is with his or her parents. The child learns from watching and emulating what he sees his parents do. Usually, by eighteen to twenty-four months, the child has gained verbal skills. From this point forward, the child can not only see what his parents are doing but can understand what they say. John’s father’s words carried the following message:
Don’t cry…
Meaning: Don’t feel bad.
…on Saturday we’ll get you a new dog.
Meaning: Replace the loss.
John believed his father. He began to form a belief about dealing with loss. He tried to follow his father’s advice and not feel bad. To a young child who wanted his father’s approval, this was a powerful communication from the most important authority figure in his life. As John explains, “I thought that if this is the way my father deals with death, then this is the way I’m supposed to deal with it.”
Sure enough, on Saturday John’s dad took him to the kennel and they got a new dog:
I still missed my old dog, but I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t think they’d approve. After a long period of time, I actually forgot about my old dog. I also found it hard to love the new dog in the same way I’d loved my old dog, and I didn’t know why.
It’s possible, in fact likely, that John couldn’t love the new dog because he wasn’t emotionally complete with the old dog.
When John was fourteen, he fell in love for the first time. It may have been puppy love, but it sure felt like the real thing to him.
It was wonderful. I was preoccupied with thoughts of her all the time. I had trouble eating and sleeping. The birds sang. I listened to love songs on the radio. I didn’t hang out with my friends as much.
When we broke up, I was devastated. This was a major loss for me. For days I wandered around like a wounded duck. Finally, my mother couldn’t take it anymore.
What his mother said was:
Don’t feel bad—there are plenty of fish in the sea.
By this point, John had gotten a clear idea about what to do when you lose something. He was going forth into life armed with two pieces of information on dealing with loss:
Russell’s childhood experiences were very similar to John’s. “Don’t feel bad” and “replace the loss” were used in the same kinds of circumstances.
Russell was unable to “not feel bad” when he felt bad. Loss experiences of all kinds made him feel sad. His sadness and tears were often met with comments like, “If you’re going to cry, go to your room.”
Russell struggled with hiding his feelings. He tried to talk with his mother about still feeling sad. She said to him, “Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone.” It is heartbreaking to realize that when you are sad and might really benefit from some emotional understanding, you are taught to “be by yourself.”
Meaning: Grieve alone.
It would be sad enough if it ended with feeling dismissed and misunderstood as a child. Unfortunately, though, this kind of misinformation becomes the foundation of lifelong habits, many of which directly interfere with our ability to be happy. Russell can remember too many times in his marriages when he stormed out of the house following an argument with his wife and drove aimlessly around the neighborhood. His car became a metaphor for his room as a child. The unchanging habit was to “grieve alone.”
Since most of us are socialized in much the way John and Russell were, we usually think that it is correct for us to “isolate” or “grieve alone.” Also tragic is the conclusion that stems from what we were taught. If I need to “grieve alone,” then you do too. Thus, when a friend has experienced a loss, we often say, “Give her some space,” or, “He needs to be alone.”
John’s experience following the death of his grandfather further illustrates the depth of society’s belief in grieving alone.
In 1958 my grandfather died. He was very important in my life. He was probably closer to me than my father was at that point. Every summer was spent at his farm. He taught me how to fish, hunt, and was the first to teach me how to play baseball. When I was told he’d died, I was sitting in one of my high school classes. I can remember going numb. It was like being in a trance. After several minutes, I began to cry, and I suppose that made everyone uncomfortable. So they sent me to the principal’s office so I could be by myself.
Since they didn’t know what to do, they sent John to the office to be alone.
Once again, I assumed the adults around me knew what they were doing. This attitude of handling pain alone was further reinforced when I got home that night. My mother was sitting in the living room with her head down and was obviously crying. As soon as I saw her, I wanted to go to her so we could cry together. Both my father and my uncle came and said to me:
“Don’t disturb your mother. She’ll be okay in a little while.”
John and Russell now had three pieces of data on how to deal with loss.
Not a single one of these lessons was going to be of any help to either of them.
While John was struggling with the death of his grandfather in Illinois, Russell was having a very difficult time as a teenager in Florida.
With each successive loss experience, Russell was constantly met with the same unhelpful ideas. Since he could not find a way to feel better using the ideas he had been taught, his life began to feel smaller and sadder. Each time a painful event occurred, he tried to “not feel bad” and to “grieve alone.” He found himself believing that he would never be happy.
Finally, in desperation, he went to his mother. He told her that he could not seem to deal effectively with the thoughts and feelings that were troubling him. She looked at him sweetly and said, “Time heals all wounds.”
Meaning: Just give it time.
Russell has absolutely no doubt that his mother loved him. She had no intent to harm her son. She merely passed on to him what had been taught to her.
In 1972 Russell and his first wife, Vivienne, divorced. Russell was devastated. He walked around like a zombie. Normally talkative and outgoing, he hardly spoke at all. Although he was not supposed to “feel bad,” he was crushed. He felt awful. Having been taught to grieve alone, he found himself isolated a lot.
The early training to “replace the loss” was reinforced by well-meaning friends who suggested that he start dating. He didn’t feel good, so the idea of dating didn’t make sense to him. At the same time, he was being reminded that “time would heal him.” The two ideas didn’t go together. If replacing the loss was going to fix him, then he didn’t have to wait for time to heal him. On the other hand, if time were to heal him, then maybe he shouldn’t be in such a hurry to replace the loss.
The concept that time heals is probably responsible for more heartache than any other single wrong idea in our society. The terrible part is, it isn’t true. It’s one of those falsehoods that’s been passed down from generation to generation.
The mistaken idea that after enough time passes something will magically change to make us whole again is preposterous. If we were dealing with any other human pain, no one would say, “Just give it time.”
If you came across a person with a broken arm, you wouldn’t say, “Just give it time.” Just as broken bones should be properly set to heal and ultimately function again, so must the emotional heart.
We all know too many people whose hearts remain broken partly because they are waiting for time to heal them. Sadly, they come to believe it’s true. People wait around for years with the idea that after a long enough period of time they will feel better again. Some of you reading this book already know this isn’t true.
In one seminar, we asked people to raise their hands if they were still experiencing pain caused by a death or divorce that occurred more than twenty years ago. As expected, many people indicated this was true for them. They all believed that time would take care of the pain. We asked one woman whether twenty years didn’t seem like too long a time to be waiting for recovery. She answered with a clear and classic statement: “Yes, it does, but I don’t know what else to do.” Can you imagine the pain and frustration? The years of waiting for some relief?
To illustrate the absurdity of waiting for time to heal, we ask this question. If you discovered that your car had a flat tire, would you pull up a chair next to the car and sit and wait for air to somehow get back into the tire? Seems silly, doesn’t it?
Time itself does not heal; it is what you do within time that will help you complete the pain caused by loss.
Let’s recap what John and Russell had learned about grief.
In 1957 Russell’s grandmother died. She had been living with his family since Russell’s mom went back to work. Grandma was the primary caretaker for Russell’s younger brother, who is ten years younger than Russell. Russell had never felt particularly close to his grandmother. Sometimes he felt that she was mean to him. In those days in his family, it was not okay to talk negatively about family members—“blood is thicker than water” being the prevailing theme.
When his grandmother died, Russell recalls a family meeting. He remembers being told, “We have to be strong for your brother.”
Meaning: Be strong for others.
There were no specific instructions on how to do that. “Be strong for others” is one of those expressions that sounds good but has no real value. Many years later, when Russell and his first wife divorced, his brain came up with, “Be strong for others.” This was one of the few ideas Russell had for dealing with grief. In a heartbeat, he realized that this had no application to his divorce and he didn’t have a clue what to do because he was the other.
In our twenty-plus years of helping grievers, “be strong” or “be strong for others” makes the top ten list as one of the most confusing of all ideas relating to loss. It is confusing because it is undoable.
At this point, John and Russell had accumulated five pieces of misinformation:
There are many ideas that are not helpful for grievers. The five we have listed so far represent those with which you will probably identify. While not absolute, they have a universality to them. This next one is also so common that most people believe it to be true and helpful, yet it is neither.
“You have to keep busy,” or, “You must stay active,” are two of the clichés that we have all heard following any kind of significant loss.
Meaning: Keep busy.
Here is an important question. Does keeping busy discover and complete the pain caused by loss? The obvious answer is no. Then what does keeping busy accomplish, if anything? It distracts you. It makes one more day go by.
Keeping busy buries the pain of the loss under an avalanche of activity. Every griever we have ever talked to will say, “No matter how busy I stay, at the end of the day, there’s still a hole in my heart.”
In addition to exhausting you, there are other dangers in keeping busy. Earlier we defined grief as “the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior.” A death, a divorce, or any other major loss produces massive changes in all things familiar. It is very difficult to adapt to life after a loss. If you were never a busy person before a loss, keeping busy would add yet another major change to the familiar.
The most dangerous flaw of keeping busy is the idea that it will make you feel better. Busy-ness is just a distraction. It does not alter the fact that you have to take direct actions to complete the pain caused by loss. We have heard this lament thousands of times: “I don’t understand, I kept busy, but I felt worse, not better.”
John and Russell and perhaps many of you were sent into life with several pieces of misinformation about dealing with loss. The six we have identified so far are:
None of these ideas leads us to the actions of discovering and completing the unfinished emotions that accrue in all relationships.
PARTICIPATING IN YOUR OWN RECOVERY
Earlier we talked about the fact that grievers have been taught to isolate themselves. You have probably experienced such isolation yourself. Since isolation is one of the problems confronting grievers in our society, then participation is clearly part of the solution.
To encourage you to participate in your own recovery, we are going to suggest that you start right now. Using the list of six incorrect ideas as a guide, see if you can think of any other ideas that you were taught or that influenced your beliefs about dealing with sad, painful, or negative feelings.
It is normal and natural to feel sad when a sad event happens. But every time we express our normal and natural responses, we are met with one or more of that list of false ideas, starting with, “Don’t feel bad.”
John and Russell each brought many of their painful emotional experiences to their parents, teachers, coaches, or others, only to be met with intellectual replies. The accumulation of unhelpful reactions began to add up to a loss of trust. While their initial loss-of-trust incident might have been with a parent or other adult authority figure, eventually the blanket of mistrust covered all relationships.
John’s father was an alcoholic. When his father was intoxicated, he repeatedly spanked John for things he did not do.
Even though I would tell him it wasn’t my fault, he didn’t believe me and punished me anyway. It seemed very unfair to me, and my faith in him was diminished.
Since the loss was never acknowledged or settled, John’s suspicion of adults expanded. He trusted less and was on guard more. This limited John’s aliveness and freedom. It limited the type of people with whom he could have trusting relationships. It caused him to be wary of all authority figures.
“I’m not saying that this general loss of trust was right on my part.” Loss of trust was painful, so John learned that the solution was don’t trust, thereby eliminating the potential for pain.
John’s breakup with his first girlfriend reinforced the idea of not trusting people. From that point on, he found he had great difficulty in trusting the girls he dated. He was tentative and held back, since he didn’t want to be hurt again. That attitude limited his capacity for aliveness. We know many grievers who have trouble starting up new relationships because they’re afraid of enduring another loss. Most of you bought this book because of an awareness that something was not finished in your relationship to a death, a divorce, or another loss. Or you may have been given this book by a well-meaning friend or relative.
As this book unfolds, and as you participate in the actions that lead to recovery, you may recognize a sense of diminished trust. We cannot command you to feel safe or trusting about your feelings. We can, however, suggest that we too have been there. We did not feel safe either. We had been so conditioned to convert our emotions into intellect that we thought we were defective for having feelings at all. Please keep reading, even if you don’t trust right now.
Why do we persist in trying to use information that hasn’t worked for us? To understand why, you need to know some things about the computer we call the mind.
First, the mind has access only to what it has learned. It cannot use what it doesn’t know. If you are given only misinformation, that’s all you have access to. Second, the information stored in the mind is stored with importance attached. That means that the more important the source of the information, the more tenaciously we believe it to be right. Most of the data John and Russell acquired about loss came from their parents. To a child, parents are a very important source of information. Third, the mind’s job is to believe that whatever it has stored in it is always right! This is why people are so critical of each other. If you believe you’re right and others don’t agree with you, then they must be wrong!
It’s for these reasons that we persist in using misinformation in trying to process the feelings caused by loss. We believe that what we already know about loss is right. The fact that you are reading this book implies that what you have practiced is not delivering the relief and sense of well-being you want and deserve.
If you will accept the simple premise that you practiced and habituated some incorrect ideas, then you can allow that if you practice some correct ideas, you will have different results. We will give you correct information to help you discover and complete what is unfinished between you and others, living or dead. You must take action and practice what you learn here.