Lois Tonkin created this quote about grief:
“People think that grief slowly gets smaller with time. In reality, grief stays the same size,
but slowly life begins to grow bigger around it.”
When we experience a profound loss, grief becomes a part of our make-up. It remains in our cells, in our memories, in our stories. The presence of our loved ones who have passed away come to us every day in the smallest and biggest of ways. We can find grief in our laughter, in our tears, in our narrative. To image and concieve of grief as life growing bigger around it can be a comfort to us when we struggle with the weight of it. Know that is is okay to ‘grow around grief.’
Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@jannerboy62
Sometimes we can’t find an answer to our questions. It may be that they are existential in nature, or perhaps the person we need to gain understanding from is not capable or willing to answer. It is a theme that is often repeated in therapy – from a mother who wrestles with understanding the loss of her child, to a young woman who fails to comprehend how, despite her effort, her mother chooses to remain distant, to a young man who wants to understand why his girlfriend treats him with such casual indifference.
There are times when we get into a “poor me” or “why me” train of thinking. Sometimes it comes from a lot of stress that we are under, chronic pain can bring it on, or our life circumstances are feeling particularly challenging for whatever reason. And although it is perfectly okay to recognize and accept that this is the way we are feeling, we must be cautious not to stay there. Defeatist thinking tends to create a cycle that can lead to feeling stuck, and if we give the “poor me’s” too much care and attention, we can begin to live in the “poor me cycle.”
Building from yesterday’s post in which we looked at some key steps to managing difficult emotions, today we look at the “0 to 60” response. Very often, people will remark that they can’t control their emotions- that when they feel something, their need to act on it is immediate. That might be anger by means of a quick or short temper, fear – which can produce a panic attack or immediate tears when triggered to something sad or overwhelming. As we touched on yesterday, every feeling that we have is meant to be there. Feelings produce action urges, and it is often the follow through on those action urges that can get us into trouble. In order to temper the “0 to 60” response, we can begin by:
We all have them – difficult emotions. Sometimes the struggle is with anger, sometimes it is with fear, or shame, or deep sadness. The difficulty is often in what feels uncontrollable; a reaction that feels out of our grasp and all-consuming. But we can learn to help control and contain difficult emotions.
For anyone living with chronic pain, they are forever challenged by the fact that try as they might – taking medications on time, getting the right amount of sleep and exercise, eating healthy – if pain decides to take over on any given day, they get bumped out of the driver’s seat. The dissonance that gets created as a result, lies not in the fact that you are having a pain day, but rather that you had expectations for the day. If we can’t get done what we had planned, or get less done than we usually would have, we can be quite hard on ourselves; resulting in feelings of discouragement, and we open the door for the blues to set in.
I see many women who come to therapy because of domestic violence; and there are two things that consistently form an observable pattern among their stories:
In an article entitled “Mindful Grief: 3 Ways to Manage Your Sorrow” by Ashley Davis Bush and featured on GoodTherapy, we read about how to be more mindful about the grief process. Bush notes that we tend to have a tendency towards avoiding painful feelings which can lead to complications when we are actively grieving. I especially enjoyed reading the three thoughts she had in trying to give grief its due course:
People often come to therapy to work through a trauma; a past or present experience is plaguing them and taking up too much space in themselves. Perhaps they have spent too much time avoiding the after-effects of the negative experience, and it is now creating trouble in their relationships or with the way that they regulate their emotions.
Building on yesterday’s post about how chronic pain can affect someone’s emotional health as well, we can see how chronic pain can often lead someone to living a pain centered life. Prolonged pain can be quite stealthy, invading our system in an insidious way. Often times, we continue to live our life as we always did, ignoring the pain as we plow through our day. This becomes a pain centered way of life, forcing us to eventually face the pain when we have pushed ourselves too far.