| We have all been educated on how to
acquire things. We have been taught how to get an education, get a
job, buy a house, etc. There are colleges, universities, trade
schools, and technical schools. You can take courses in virtually
anything that might interest you.
What education do we receive about
dealing with loss? What school do you go to learn to deal with the
conflicting feelings caused by significant emotional loss? Loss is
so much more predictable and inevitable than gain, and yet we are
woefully ill-prepared to deal with loss.
One of the most damaging killer
clichés about loss is "time heals all wounds."
When we present open lectures on the subject of Grief Recovery®,
we often ask if anyone is still feeling pain, isolation, or
loneliness as the result of the death of a loved one 20 or more
years ago. There are always several hands raised in response to
that question. Then we gently ask, "if time is going to heal,
then 20 years still isn't enough?"
While recovery from loss does take
some time, it need not take as much time as you have been led to
believe. Recovery is totally individual, there is no absolute
time frame. Sometimes in an attempt to conform to other people's
time frames, we do ourselves great harm. This idea leads us to
another of the killer clichés, "you should be over
it by now."
It is bad enough that well-meaning,
well intentioned friends attack us with killer clichés,
but then we start picking on ourselves. We start believing that we
are defective or somehow deficient because we haven't recovered
yet.
If we take just the two killer
clichés we've mentioned so far, we can see that they have
something in common. They both imply that a non-action will
have some therapeutic or recovery value. That by waiting, and
letting some time pass, we will heal. Let's add a third cliché to
the batch, "you have to keep busy."
Many grievers follow this incorrect advice and work two or three
jobs. They fill their time with endless tasks and chores. At the
end of any given day, asked how they feel, invariably they report
that their heart still feels broken; that all they accomplished by
staying busy was to get exhausted.
Now, with only three basic killer
clichés we can severely limit and restrict our ability to
participate in effective recovery. It is not only that people
around us tell us these clichés, in an attempt to help, but we
ourselves learned and practiced these false beliefs for most of
our lives. It is time for us to learn some new and helpful beliefs
to assist us in grieving and completing relationships that have
ended or changed.
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| ANSWER:
Part of the problem is the phrase "get
over." It is more accurate to say that you would never forget
a child who had died, anymore than you would ever forget a parent
or a loved one. Another part of the problem is one of those killer
clichés we talked about, that time, of itself, is a recovery
action. Although recovery from loss does take some time, it is the
actions within time that lead to successful recovery.
The primary goal of Grief
Recovery® is to help you "grieve and
complete" relationships that have ended or changed.
Successful Grief Recovery® allows you to have fond
memories not turn painful and helps you retake a happy and
productive place in your own life. In addition, you regain the
ability to begin new relationships, rather than attempting to
replace or avoid past relationships.
© 2002 Russell P. Friedman, John W. James and The Grief Recovery Institute.
All rights reserved. For permission to reprint this and other articles
please contact The Grief Recovery Institute at
Editor@grief.net or by phone
USA (818) 907-9600 Canada (519) 586-8825 |