Engaging Grief: A 4-step guide (part 1)
If you’re currently in a season of grief, there is one phrase I guarantee you’re tired of hearing. Sure, this phrase gets dressed up and worded differently each time, but the message is the same. Well-meaning family members and friends say it so tenderly and softly, believing they’re offering wise words that will in some way soothe you.
When they don’t know how to help you pick up the pieces and they can’t sit alongside you in your pain any longer, you hear a variation of this:
“Give it time. You won’t feel like this forever.”
“Time heals all wounds.”
“Things like this take time, dear. You just have to get through it.”
It’s enough to make you scream. No matter how true it may or may not be, it’s not comforting or helpful at all. Yet people keep saying it. All the time! So, you keep hearing it. And you’d like it to stop. Pleeeeease!
How I learned to grieve
When I was going through my own season of grief and loss these words were like nails on a chalkboard to my heart and my brain. I would smile and nod, thanking the person politely because I knew it was their best attempt at easing my heartache. But inside I was thinking, “But I don’t want this to take time! I can’t keep feeling this way every single day from the time I open my eyes until it’s time to stare at the ceiling and hope sleep comes more easily tonight than it has the past 100 sleepless nights before. I simply cannot just sit here and wait for time to pass so I feel like I can breathe again. I can’t - and I won’t!” At its worst grief can be absolutely intolerable. So no, I’m not going to let time be the one to heal my wounds. I’ll find another way to grieve and move forward, and it won’t be by the tick tock of the clock, thank you very much.
I learned a powerful 4-phase process to engaging grief in a constructive way from a supervisor when I was a brand-new therapist. So much of the advice around grief is passive. But this approach involves active grieving instead of simply waiting for time to do its thing. Which, by the way, I’ve never actually seen the passing of time heal someone’s grieving heart, but I sure have seen the effects of NOT dealing with emotions compound over time and make people bitter, angry, and resentful.
I immediately loved this approach because:
1. It gave me a way to structure therapy sessions with my grieving clients
2. It made sense to me and them, and most importantly
3. It gave my clients back some power in the grieving process
Now we have something to do - a path to follow in our grief journey.
The 4 phases of getting through your grief
So here it is, the 4-phase grief process that I’ve seen help my clients and that truly helped me. These phases need to be completed in order, and I’d caution you to not move on to the next phase until you’ve fully and thoroughly done the work of the current one. And I recommend getting out the old pen and paper to really engage this process mindfully.
• Phase 1 - Face your anger
• Phase 2 - Face your regrets
• Phase 3 - Appreciation
• Phase 4 - Wishes for the future
I’m going to cover Phase 1 in this post and then cover Phases 2 through 4 in my next post.
Facing your anger
You’ve lost something or someone. He’s gone, the dream is dead, she’s found someone new, or you’ve lost something important to you and your life story. And yes, there is a lot of sadness and enough tears to fill a five-gallon bucket, but you know what else there is a lot of? Resentment. Anger. A lot of it-shouldn’t-be-this-ways. Grief tends to bring a lot of anger about all the ways that a person, a medical diagnosis, an event, and even God Himself really let us down. We need to be with this anger. We need to hear it and feel it and put words and actions to it just like we would with any other emotion that comes our way. Anger is no exception.
Yes, I know that our society does a particularly bad job at teaching us how to be with anger, but the truth is that if we don’t sit with the anger, it will never simmer down and go away. We can try to ignore it and shove it down, but it will just pop up again. You can see it play out in other people even if you can’t see it in yourself.
We all know those people who just seem angry, and we can't tell why. They’re on edge and critical, sarcastic, and cutting. The anger never got resolved and so it sort of leaks out all over the place. Or maybe it erupts from time to time like a geyser. Maybe the anger evolves and turns into something else entirely. Sometimes depression is anger turned inward.
Your loss is already hard enough. Let’s not allow the anger to turn into depression because we weren’t willing to listen to it.
There are three steps to successfully facing your anger. Let’s look at each of them in detail.
Catalog your feelings about your loss
I want you to sit down and think about the parts of your loss that make you angrier than you ever thought you could be. You can write all of these on paper or follow the lead of some of my clients and categorize these injustices in excel spreadsheets (some with over 100 rows and I’m not kidding). Just get it out and write it all down.
What are all the things that make you so furious and take you to the brink of having an absolute conniption fit? I’m talking about something that makes you want to have an adult temper tantrum, kicking and screaming on the floor, the whole bit.
What is so devastating that it doesn’t just make you sad, it makes you hot under the collar and hopping mad?
When you zoom out and look at the big picture, what do you resent the most about this whole situation?
What are all the little specific details that make you feel like you’re two seconds away from blowing a fuse? I want you to really go there. Name every single thing that makes you irate, perturbed, frustrated, and just plain mad.
Ok, now we’ve got material to start our work. A whole list of ways that you’ve been wronged, someone you love has been wronged, or some kind of injustice has happened in your world. Now what do we do with it?
Before we move on, let’s reflect for a moment.
• What was it like to write this list?
• What is it like to look at a record of all the reasons you’re angry?
• What sensations do you notice in your body when you see a complete set of all the things you resent about this loss?
• What’s the story you tell yourself about what this list means about you? For your life moving forward? About other people and the world in general?
Validate yourself
Next, let’s validate ourselves like we’ve never validated anybody before. When we self-validate, we say three things:
1. What I’m feeling is real. I’m not making it up or blowing things out of proportion.
2. What I’m feeling is logical. I’m not having a psychotic break here.
3. What I’m feeling is understandable. If a friend told me this happened to her, I would get why she was angry.
Let’s see what this can look like:
“I’m angry she cheated on me. I really trusted her.”
Yes, of course you’re angry. What you’re feeling is incredibly real and it makes perfect sense to feel this way. You made vows together. And then your partner broke them. Of course your heart is shattered. How could it not be? That pain is cutting you deep and it’s not okay that she broke those promises. You were told this was a forever commitment and to find out otherwise is devastating.
“I’m angry I have to raise these kids alone now.”
You lost your spouse to cancer and you’re wondering how in the world you are going to raise two kids by yourself. Of course you feel overwhelmed and lost and afraid. You went into parenthood with a partner, and you can’t be both mom and dad. This is a whole new world you’ve been thrust into, and certainly not the path you would have chosen if you had any say. It makes sense to be angry that cancer took so much away, including the way you planned to raise your kids, with your spouse by your side.
“I’m angry my business partner lied to me. He screwed me over and my finances are crippled.”
You were done dirty in a business deal and now you’re not sure if you’ll be able to retire. How could you not feel enraged when you think about the lies you bought as truth and the people you trusted? Of course your blood is boiling. You’re human and you’ve been lied to and that hurts deeply. The anger makes sense – this is not what you were told. These were not the terms you agreed to.
Keep validating yourself over and over again. Ask a trusted family member or friend to read over this list and validate you too. Take it to counseling and let your therapist sit with you in this place of anger and resentment over what has happened. Sit with the anger and validate yourself as long as you can and as much as you can.
And then, after you’ve sat with the anger, validated it yourself and let others validate you too, it’s time to explore a particular F-word that will likely bring all that anger right back to the surface. It’s a word that no one really wants to hear when they’re grieving, but it gets brought up for a good reason. And hear me out because I just might have a different take on this word than you’ve heard before.
Forgive
You guessed it. The next step in this process is to explore forgiveness. I know. I know. This is the time when you could absolutely lose it on me. Didn’t I just ask you to write all the ways this loss has hurt you and totally wrecked your world? And now I’m asking you to entertain forgiveness? I get it. I really do. So, let’s make sure we are on the same page here.
Forgiveness sucks when we look at it like we are letting someone or something off the hook. That kind of forgiveness feels like you’re giving a pass where you should be holding someone accountable. Or even worse, unhealthy forgiveness feels like you don’t have the right to be angry and hurt anymore about the thing that ripped your life apart. If that’s what it is, then it’s a hard pass for me bro. Thanks but no thanks.
You’ve been wronged. Deeply and truly wronged. Something was stolen from you or someone was taken from you and you’re owed something in return for this injustice. You have every right to be furious and to enact your wrath on the person or situation that created this pain. So every day you wake up ready to do just that: enact your wrath. You’re ready to take the pain out on the person or system or situation that deserves it most. And it’s totally justified. They earned it.
But what if forgiveness looks more like this?
Here’s the problem. If you’re going to be the one making these people pay, you actually have to be the one carrying around all the anger and hurt you plan to pour out on them. You have to hold all the emotions in your heart, the infuriating thoughts in your mind, and physical distress in your body. You have to possess all the pain that you want to unleash on them. So, what is the cost to you?
Forgiveness is saying, “I have every right to be furious with you and enact my wrath on you for what you took from me. But it costs me too much to try to make you pay. I have to do all the heavy lifting of this anger and fury that should be poured out on you, and that’s not fair to me. You’ve stolen enough. And so, I’m not going to give you what you deserve. I’m laying down my right to be angry because it costs me too much. And it’s time for this loss to not cost me anymore.”
Line by line, detail by detail, we lay down our right to be angry. It doesn’t mean it was ok. It doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. It means that when I could have chosen to keep the focus on you, I chose me. I chose my own wellbeing. I chose freedom.
You’ve made it through Phase 1
There you have it, Phase 1 of what to do with your grief. Easier said than done, but I assure you it is possible. I’ve done it and I’ve helped a lot of other people do it too. a long as you need in this phase. Some parts of the story will be easier to address than others. Some parts will require a lot of processing. Don’t do this part alone. Draw safe and trustworthy people into your process. Take each resentment one by one and really engage the three steps outlined above:
1. Name it.
2. Validate it.
3. Forgive it.
You don’t have to wait for time to heal your pain and for the anger you feel to fizzle away because we took another trip around the sun. Because it won’t. Engage this process and you’ll notice a tangible shift in your relationship with grief.
Next up we will tackle Phases 2 through 4.
• Face your Regrets
• Appreciation
• Wishes for the Future