Choosing which loss to work on first is more important than it might seem at first glance. Even though the loss that brought you to this book may have happened recently, and may be causing you a great deal of pain, it isn’t always the best first choice. The best way to explain it is to ask the question: “If you were going to build a house, would you put the roof on first? And if so, what would hold the roof up?” Using the obvious answers to those questions, we often suggest that people go back and work on their foundational relationships, even if those relationships are not the current cause of pain. There is real benefit from working on those relationships first because elements of them will have been carried forward and affected your more recent relationships.
START WITH RELATIONSHIPS YOU REMEMBER
It is not uncommon for people to arrive at this book because of the death of a parent when they were very young, or as a consequence of a family split-up that resulted in the long-term loss of contact with one or both parents. Still others, who were adopted at an early age, may feel incomplete because they don’t know their birth parents. While the death or absence of a parent, or the mysteries surrounding adoption, may be a defining event in someone’s life, it is almost never the correct place to start taking the actions of Grief Recovery.
There are many reasons not to start with the death of a parent, or with other losses of contact. The most obvious relates to your age when the death or family break-up happened. If the loss happened between your birth and age 6, you will have a limited amount of conscious memories of the missing parent and the relationship you had with them. The things that happened to you in the first few years of your life, especially prior to the dawn of conscious memory, are difficult to access with any degree of accuracy. It is almost impossible to create a realistic Relationship Graph of memories that are buried beneath your conscious awareness. It is also dangerous to rely on other people’s opinions or reports about things that happened before you can remember.
We suggest you work first on your relationships with those people about whom you have the most conscious memories. Generally speaking that will be the parent(s) who raised you. We are in no way diminishing the likelihood that the death or absence of a parent may be the loss that most affected your life. It’s just that we’ve seen too many people fail when they try to graph their relationship with someone they can hardly remember, before they have learned the techniques of Grief Recovery. What tends to happen is a simple recitation of how bad they have always felt about the absence of that person from their life.
Making Relationship Graphs and writing Completion Letters about those relationships with people you really knew will help you in many ways. It will help you discover and complete what is emotionally incomplete in those relationships. This is true whether the relationships were good, poor, or mixed, and whether or not those people are still living. It will have great benefit for you later when you do the work on the parent who was missing from your life.
As you do this work, it’s helpful to remember that in most of the situations where there was the death of a parent, the surviving parent was also grieving. The same is true for both partners in a divorce. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that your grieving parent(s) had limited knowledge about dealing with their own grief, as well as limited ability to help you deal with your emotions about the loss. Children learn by observing what their parents do. As you look back, you might realize you were copying one or both of your parents. Some of what they did may have been helpful in terms of communicating about grief, but it’s likely that much of what they did and didn’t say or show, may have limited your ability to deal with the loss. It is helpful to recognize what you learned from them, so you can discard what is not helpful and take effective actions to complete your grief.
OTHER FIRST CHOICE CONCERNS: HIDDEN OR DISGUISED CHOICES
In the fourth choosing instruction, we indicated that the person/relationship that would be the best for you to work on first may not even appear on your Loss History Graph. It’s not uncommon for an alcoholic or otherwise difficult parent to appear on the graph because they caused so much disruption in your life. The hidden loss is often your relationship with your other parent, who may not appear on your graph, especially if he or she is still living. While it might not be obvious, the other parent often represents a huge incomplete relationship. This happens in part because that other parent is often much more present in your life, and because their own grief reactions to their difficult spouse may cause them to create problems for you. The fireworks associated with the problem parent may grab more attention as you reflect on your life, but it is often the other parent that is the best “first” relationship graph for you to choose.
Death of Spouse or Divorce—Begin at the Beginning
Some people are drawn to this book by the recent death of a spouse. But if you’ve already done the preliminary work in this book, you may realize that you also have one or more incomplete relationships with your parents or other people who have affected your life. It can benefit you to go back and work on your relationships with your parents before you work on your relationship with your spouse who died. When you work on those earlier relationships, you will discover things that will be valuable later when you work on your relationship with your spouse. Keep in mind that what you brought into your marriage was the product of a great deal that you learned from your parents—or in reaction to them.
The same idea holds true if you were originally drawn to this book because of a recent divorce or romantic ending. It is especially valuable for you to go back and deal with some of your foundational relationships, which will give you greater clarity about your part in the romantic relationship that ended. It will help you be more honest about yourself within the relationship as opposed to being totally focused on what your former spouse did or didn’t do that affected the marriage. In effect, it will help you see what emotional baggage you brought to the marriage.
It is entirely your choice which loss you work on first, but always give yourself the option of going back and working on your earliest relationships first. Keep in mind that ultimately you will want to take Grief Recovery actions in all the major relationships with people who affected your life.