Living in the Shadow of the Ghosts of Grief: Step into the Light
152
Living in the Shadow of the Ghosts of Grief: Step into the Light
152Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781879651517 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Companion Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2007 |
| Pages: | 152 |
| Sales rank: | 1,040,721 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Living in the Shadow of the Ghosts of Your Grief
Step into the Light
By Alan D. Wolfelt
Center for Loss and Life Transition
Copyright © 2007 Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-879651-51-7
CHAPTER 1
Part One
Change means loss; loss means grief; grief requires mourning
"Loss is an integral part of human existence, a fact which has profound consequences from birth to death."
— David Peretz
From the moment we are conceived, our lives are a series of transitions.
We slide from the dark, cozy womb into the bright, cold, colossal world — a shocking transition indeed! We nurse at the breast then are weaned. We learn to walk and talk. We attach to our parents then are forced to detach from them when we are placed in daycare or school. We learn to ride a bike and swim. Our baby teeth fall out. We make friends and lose them. Brothers and sisters may be born. Our parents may divorce. Someone we love may die.
As we grow to adulthood, many of the normal and natural life transitions we experience are joyful. Some are painful. Most are both. We learn that change — for good or for worse — can be difficult. This is because change is almost always part loss, part gain. When we move to a new neighborhood, we may lose old friends and gain new ones. When we leave home to go to school or start a life of our own, we may thrill at the newfound independence but grieve the loss of day-to-day nurturing from our family.
Along life's journey, there are repeated losses — of security, of connectedness, of innocence. We also learn that some forms of change feel like pure loss. A pet dies. A best friend moves away. A boyfriend or girlfriend decides they no longer love us. And one day, a person we love dies. We learn very early that it feels good to love, but it hurts deeply when love is lost. We learn that loss and grief are inevitable parts of our humanness. Grief is the price we pay for our capacity to give and receive love.
So from the time we are little, we feel grief. And when we are little, we express both our joy and our grief. We laugh and giggle. We cry and throw tantrums. We know instinctively that transitions often stir up strong feelings, but as we grow older, our culture teaches us to downplay the "bad" strong feelings and emphasize the "good" ones. It's OK to laugh and giggle when we are feeling happy, but it's not so OK to cry and throw tantrums when we are feeling scared, anxious, angry and sad.
By the time we're adults, we're often so trained to ignore or deny our feelings of grief and loss that we can hardly identify when we're feeling bad or, especially, why we're feeling bad. Grief is so much more a part of our lives than many of us realize or care to acknowledge.
The Difference Between Grief and Mourning
"There is no love without loss. And there is no moving beyond loss without some experiences of mourning. To be unable to mourn is to be unable to enter into the great human lifecycle of death and rebirth — to be unable, that is, to live again."
— Eric Lifton
So we grieve when we experience a transition or loss. That is, we feel painful feelings inside us. The word grief means the constellation of internal thoughts and feelings you experience within you about a loss. Think of grief as the container. It holds all of your thoughts, feelings, and images of your experience when you have a loss.
The word mourning, on the other hand, means something different. Mourning is when you take the grief you have on the inside and express it outside of yourself. Mourning is "grief gone public" or "the outward expression of grief." When you cry, you're mourning. When you talk to someone about your painful thoughts and feelings, you're mourning. When you write about your grief in a journal, you're mourning.
You can mourn in physical, emotional, cognitive, social and spiritual ways. You can jog out your grief; you can paint it; you can pray it. Anything you do to express your grief counts as mourning.
I believe that to heal your grief, you must mourn it. A basic premise of this book is that to give and receive love well — and to simply live well — we must mourn well. By "mourning well," I mean openly and honestly expressing our thoughts and feelings from the inside to the outside — no pretense, no repression, no inhibitions. The losses we encounter demand our attention as we work (oh yes, it is work!) to integrate them into our lives. Somewhere, in the collision between heart, which searches for permanency and connection, and brain, which acknowledges separation and loss, there is a need for all of us to mourn.
Self-love is a prerequisite to expressive love (i.e., loving outside of self; opening oneself to others). The essence of self-love is to be true to ones feelings and needs when we are mourning. Authentic love can only take place if we don't cut ourselves off from the need to mourn, and, instead of running from our grief, we have the courage to befriend the pain of loss.
Courage originates from the Old French word for heart (coeur). Your courage grows for those things in life that impact you deeply. Our life losses invite our hearts to open. An open heart is a "well of reception;" it is moved entirely by what it has experienced. We often get encouraged to close our hearts to our grief. Yet I am convinced that the pain that surrounds the closed heart is the pain of living against ourselves, the pain of denying how loss changes us, and the pain of feeling alone and isolated — unable to mourn, unable to love and be loved by those around us.
Instead of dying while we are alive, we can choose to remain open to our pain. If instead we deny our pain, we also unknowingly defend against all that brings meaning and purpose to life, leaving us feeling alone and isolated — cut off from our own humanity.
An ancient Hebrew sage once observed, "If you want life, you must expect suffering." Paradoxically, it is gathering the courage to move toward our pain that ultimately leads to the healing of our wounded hearts. Our integrity is engaged by our feelings and the commitment to honor the truth in them.
In part, helping yourself authentically mourn is to have the discipline to face the work of mourning. The word discipline means "being a disciple unto oneself." When you are able to be a disciple unto yourself, you are honoring your own rhythm and the intuitive ebbs and flows of grief.
Befriending Your Grief
"To suppress the grief, the pain, is to condemn oneself to a living death. Living fully means feeling fully; it means being completely one with what you are experiencing and not holding it at arm's length."
— Phillip Kapleau
Refusal to descend into our life sorrows can destroy much of our capacity to enjoy life, living and loving. After all, how can we relate to ourselves or others if we don't feel? Moving away from grief results in moving away from ourselves and other people. The epidemic of grief avoidance we now witness as a culture gets in the way of our capacity to be transformed by our pain, our sorrow and our suffering.
To befriend the pain of our life losses is to acknowledge we cannot go around it, we must go through it. In our willingness to gently embrace the pain of our losses, we are in effect honoring our pain and freeing ourselves to live fully until we die.
"What?", you naturally protest, "honor the pain?" Crazy as it may sound, our pain is the key that opens our hearts and ushers us into our healing.
First, I want to acknowledge that when we initially experience loss, it is instinctive, normal and necessary to want to push away or avoid raw emotions — temporarily.
There is a delicate balance between the normal need for evasion of the reality of the loss and the necessary encountering of the reality of the loss. The path of the heart of grief is paradoxical. It moves, often simultaneously, toward both evasion and encounter. Spiritual maturity in grief is the capacity to inhabit the paradox, to embrace both the instinct to avoid and the need to encounter, to both push away and surrender to grief and sorrow.
So yes, temporarily seeking to avoid or deny the pain of grief is normal and necessary. It helps us survive, at first, what would otherwise be unsurvivable. And even when we begin to embrace the pain of our grief, it is normal and necessary to move back and forth between embracing the pain and distancing ourselves from it. The pain that results from significant life losses is too much to bear all at once. So, we "dose" ourselves with our pain a little at a time. It is when our patterns of avoidance and denial dominate and become rigid and fixed in place that we are at risk for living in the shadow of the ghosts of grief.
DOSING GRIEF
The concept of dosing our grief recognizes that we cannot embrace the pain of grief all at once out of some ill-founded need to "overcome" it. Instead, we must allow ourselves to "dose" the pain — feel it in small waves then allow it to retreat until we are ready for the next wave.
Trying to stay in control by denying, inhibiting or converting grief can result in what Kierkegaard termed "unconscious despair." Doing the soul work of grief demands going through suffering and integrating it in ways that help unite you with your fellow strugglers and the greater community of people.
The very essence of this book is to help you honor your pain on the pathway to living your life with meaning and purpose. Honoring means "recognizing the value of and respecting." I realize that when we live in a mourning-avoidant culture it is not natural to see grief as something to honor. Yet, the capacity to love requires the necessity to mourn. To honor our grief is not self-destructive or harmful, it is self-sustaining and life-giving.
My hope is that you will gently befriend your own losses and griefs as you explore what follows. Trying to shield ourselves from the grief that touches our lives only results in shielding us from all that we love, leaving us feeling alone, isolated, depressed, and anxious.
In reality, what is not faced within and eventually mourned is still carried as a deep personal pain. To experience healing and eventually to contribute healing to others and the world around us, we are summoned to the wilderness as we encounter life's journey. Where we do not go willingly, sooner or later we may be dragged.
The good news is that we as humans come equipped with an organic capacity to integrate our life transitions, losses and endings. Yet, when you live in a mourning-avoidant culture where grief is supposed to be "overcome," "let go of" and "resolved," it can be difficult, at times impossible, to remember and celebrate that we can mourn.
The fact that we are capable of grieving and mourning reminds us that we are meant to embrace losses and integrate them into our lives. Until we get contaminated to deny our feelings of loss, we instinctively feel sadness, hurt, pain and fear when loss occurs. The expression of these and many other potential feelings is what helps us heal our griefs.
"Grief work" and "active mourning" is the very pathway through which you reconcile your losses. It is up to each one of us to allow and gently embrace the mourning that all of life's conditions require. It is up to us to learn to trust that in befriending our grief, we enhance the quality of our lives. In reading this book you are accepting the invitation to engage in living fully until you die.
In reading this book, you are, in part, acknowledging a need to surrender to the reality of your life losses. I believe that surrendering to your losses and realizing you can't control them give birth to your self-compassion and grace. The grief that touches our lives has its own voice and should not be compromised by our need for comparison, judgment, or control.
The opposite of befriending your life losses is to try to control them. Underneath the impulse to control is fear that you will have to experience feelings of helplessness and hurt. Befriending leads to integration of loss into your life; control leads to refusal to surrender and the evolution of "shadow of the ghosts" symptoms. In large part, the choice to surrender is yours and yours alone.
To surrender acknowledges you cannot insulate yourself from loss, grief and the need to mourn. The need to control often comes about because you have been taught to make grief your enemy instead of your friend. You try to control because you have learned to fear grief. You have grown up in a culture that attempts to "overcome" grief as opposed to experiencing it. It hurts to allow feelings of sadness into our life. It hurts to let yourself know what you have lost.
The need to control has become such an unconscious part of North American culture that many people think they can let go of control by simply deciding to. Yet, we don't let go of control and surrender to our grief; we let go of the belief that we have control and surrender to our grief. If we stay in control, we miss the invitation to humility and self-compassion.
My sense is that you the reader would not be giving attention to this book if you didn't recognize the important need to embrace your life losses. I do hope this book will inspire a larger discussion about our mourning-avoidant culture, eventually leading to more dialogue about our cultural unwillingness to befriend our grief and be humble and self-compassionate.
While grief is a powerful experience, so too is your capacity to help in your own healing. You wouldn't be reading this book if you were not interested in helping yourself or your fellow human beings mourn life losses. So, savor this book, underline what speaks to you, create a reflective journal to help wrap words around your experiences, and most importantly, do not hesitate to reach out and find what I will describe as a "compassionate companion" to help you mourn your carried pain and step out of the shadow of the ghosts of grief and into the light.
CHAPTER 2Part Two
Why we carry grief instead of mourning it
"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
— Acts of John, Gnostic Scripture
We've learned that we pack up all our unmourned grief and carry it into our future. And I've mentioned that our society is good at inviting us to deny and repress our pain, which causes us to carry our grief forward instead of mourning it as we encounter it.
But why, if we're born knowing how to express our grief, do most of us learn to repress or deny it?
There are a number of factors, some that have been predominant in Western culture for millennia and some that have converged only in recent decades, that inhibit authentic mourning in our culture. Allow me to explore a few with you:
Family-of-Origin Modeling
Each of us brings our personal history of our child and teen years into our adult lives. Our parents and other significant adults are the most influential models we have for how to experience and navigate the world. What our parents did or didn't do with their own grief and loss experiences has a great impact on how we experience and express — or don't express — a multitude of emotions. Legacies of grief and loss will find expression down through the generations. As previously acknowledged, some family rules surrounding loss are loud and clear: "Thou shall not mourn."
Some families pass down a longstanding style of responding defensively in the face of loss. For many, the resistance to mourn openly and honestly is passed down generationally. Obviously, where family rules do not allow for true feelings, the natural capacity to mourn becomes thwarted, often resulting in carried grief and living in the shadow of the ghosts of grief.
Imagine a child who experiences a loss and is responded to with support, empathy, and unconditional love. This child's right to mourn is affirmed, and she learns to respond to her life experiences, both happy and sad, with the natural responses that her psyche conjures. She will grow up being able to know, express, and normalize her feelings, internalizing the capacity to have empathy for herself and others.
As life unfolds, she will still come to have losses and additional challenges; however, with this modeling of the importance of befriending her feelings and expressing them openly and honestly, she is able to integrate losses into her life with her sense of "self" intact. She has been blessed by growing up in what we call an "open-family system" surrounding loss and grief.
By contrast, imagine a child who experiences a loss and is denied the opportunity to identify and experience her feelings because the adults around her don't recognize this need. Instead of learning about the need to mourn, she has to create defenses to prevent her awareness of these feelings. For example, she may learn to project or displace feelings onto others, or internalize these feelings, resulting in low self-esteem and preventing her from finding deeper fulfillment and real intimacy in her life. She is living in what we call a "closed-family system" surrounding loss and grief.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Living in the Shadow of the Ghosts of Your Grief by Alan D. Wolfelt. Copyright © 2007 Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of Center for Loss and Life Transition.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Also by Dr. Alan Wolfelt,Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Dedication,
Preface,
Introduction,
Part One - Change means loss; loss means grief; grief requires mourning,
The Difference Between Grief and Mourning,
Befriending Your Grief,
Part Two - Why we carry grief instead of mourning it,
Family-of-Origin Modeling,
Fear of Painful Emotions,
Self-Interest Before Community Interest,
Bad Theology,
The Psychopharmacology Revolution,
Contemporary Mental Health Care's Focus on Efficiency Versus Effectiveness,
A "Constant State of Urgency" Negates the Capacity to Feel,
Inability to be in Liminal Space,
Part Three - Are you carrying grief?,
Fall-Out Symptoms of Carried Grief,
Difficulties with Trust and Intimacy,
Depression and Negative Outlook,
Anxiety and Panic Attacks,
Psychic Numbing and Disconnection,
Irritability and Agitation,
Substance Abuse, Addictions, Eating Disorders,
Physical Problems, Real or Imagined,
Grief Avoidance Response Styles,
The Displacer,
The Replacer,
The Postponer,
The Minimizer/Intellectualizer,
The Chemical Abuser,
The Worker,
The Shopper,
The Traveler,
The Eater,
The Crusader,
The Perpetual Griever,
Carried Grief Self-Inventory,
Part Four - How to heal your carried grief,
Deciding to Go on a Journey: A Model for "Catch-up" Mourning,
Step 1: Acknowledging Your Carried Grief,
Step 2: Overcoming Resistance to Do the Work,
Step 3: Actively Mourning Your Carried Grief,
How You Will Work With Your Compassionate Companion: The Needs of Mourning,
Need 1: Acknowledge the reality of the loss(es),
Need 2: Embrace the pain of the loss(es),
Need 3: Developing a new self-identity,
Need 4: Searching for meaning,
Need 5: Receiving ongoing support from others,
Step 4: Integrating Your Carried Grief,
The Beauty of Now,
Part Five - Stepping into the light,
Discovering Your New Life,
More of So Much More,
Touching the World Around You,
Living on Purpose and Making a Difference in the World,
Carrying Your Transformation Forward,
My Prayer For You,