| SUBSCRIBER LOGIN |
|---|
| News Briefs | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||||||||||
| Polls |
|---|
| Special Offer |
|---|
|
|
| Unmourned Losses |
| Columns - First Person | ||||||||
| Thursday, 31 January 2002 | ||||||||
|
My wife walked into the nursery at 8:00 a.m. on a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning wondering why she hadn’t heard any noises. She found our six-month-old daughter, Therese Nicole, dead in the crib. I was at a local church conducting a class on parenting. My wife called the church and I left a shocked classroom of people to rush home. Numbness, shock, horror, disbelief, fear, confusion, bewilderment Ñ the whole montage of emotions: our lives changed forever by this inexplicable, mind-shattering event. The police and paramedics did what they could. Then the coroner came. He walked upstairs, and then down again. My last memory was of him carrying my child out in a maroon satchel. He never said a word. I, my wife, and two remaining children, were left standing at the curb. We did not have a clue about what to do next. We muddled through the next week with the help of my graduate school advisor and his wife Ñ Dr. Jim and Helen Oakland.Funeral arrangements, viewing the body, the funeral all seemed surreal and done in a haze. I remember my wife going with her mother to view Nikie. I didn’t go, my defenses were massing to repel this unbearable catastrophe. I did finally manage to get to the funeral home and view the body. It was sitting on the floor, a white box with what appeared to be a small doll. Surely not my child. Denial, avoidance and numbing were holding back the torrents of chaotic emotions, too overwhelming to feel all at once. I set about to regain control of my world. I dismantled the nursery in one day. I went back to work and school, a flurry of activity to restore mastery and order to my world. The lid fastened securely, my rage on a short tether, my despair knowing no bounds. I could not verbalize, or articulate to anyone my experience, not even to my wife. I became frozen, wooden, unable to feel any grief. I remained that way for 20 years. My wife handled her grief differently, we withdrew, didn’t talk. She went her way, I went mine. An ocean of sorrow flowing between us; unacknowledged. My emotions came out symptomatically, colitis, insomnia, irritability, rages, compulsive spending, over working, and over eating. And now, 30 years later, I am a psychologist who specializes in trauma and bereavement. Recently I have been working intensely with individuals who have had life changing incidents; traumatic losses which have radically changed their lives. In the process I have run into people with a variety of losses from which they have had difficulty recovering. One woman put it very succinctly, “I lost my husband to AIDS, and I had a miscarriage, I have just realized that I do not know how to mourn.” This woman is not alone. Few of us know how to mourn, we have never had to learn until our first encounter with a major loss. And because of this most of us have many unmourned losses. How can this be when loss is such a large part of life, and death occurs so frequently? There are over 20 million new bereavements every year. Over one third of these are likely to result in complicated bereavements. The social and psychological cost of these unmourned losses is staggering. Let us look briefly at the problem, some of its causes, and try to develop an understanding of some ways to deal with loss. When a loss is sudden, overwhelming, and exposes us to threat, horror, and death, and we experience intense fear, helplessness or horror then we are likely to have been the victim of a traumatic stressor. The specific circumstances of a death, are critically important in determining the course of events to follow. If the death was sudden, or unanticipated, violent or mutilating-suicide-homicide, random and or preventable, if the deaths were multiple and at the hand of another, and the bereaved was personally exposed to the horror or death, this equates to the death being traumatic and equals a high risk for complicated mourning. Complicated, unresolved, or delayed mourning is defined as a compromise, distortion, or failure in one or more of the stages of mourning which may lead to a lack of resolution or accommodation to the loss. Unmourned losses lead to a variety of psychological symptoms: you may experience anxiety regarding your death or be preoccupied with the death of others, you may be chronically restless, tense and irritable. There may be blocks and avoidance in anything having to do with the event. You may have intrusive, unwanted recollections and flashbacks. You may increase your intake of substances to regulate your feelings. Relationships with significant others may be marked by increased conflict, rage, and or withdrawal. You may experience deadness and an inability to feel any loving feelings. You may have chronic feelings of emptiness, loneliness, isolation and alienation from others. There may be chronic sadness and persistent crying. And finally, you may develop numerous illnesses which are stress related. If you have any of these symptoms or several, as is the usual case, there is a strong probability that you have some losses in your life with which you have not dealt. We are now back to the original problem. I donÕt know how to mourn. I may recognize that I have had several painful, life changing losses in my life but I don’t know how to deal with them. “Isn’t it best if we just forget about them and move on with our lives. What’s the point of dwelling on these things?” The problem with unmourned losses is that they cause problems. People with unmourned losses frequently have what I call “dead zones.” These are areas where they are unable to remember, or feel certain kinds of feelings. Their relationships usually suffer. They have damaged self-esteem from these losses. And they do not seem to be able to experience any joy in living. I felt empty, dead, and unable to experience any loving feelings for years. I took it out on my wife. We divorced. I was still unable to feel. The point I am making is that when we do not deal with our losses, they create major distortions, disruptions, and often result in our psychological development stopping at the date of the loss. Again, knowing and recognizing the problem is one thing, what can be done about it? This is the first step, recognition of the symptoms. This is difficult, because typically, complicated grief is caused by persistent avoidance of any and all reminders of the event. Nevertheless, by becoming aware of the potential meaning of our symptoms we have taken the first step toward mourning our losses. And this is the major struggle in bereavement, one part of us wants to defend, avoid, and not feel at any cost. The other part is seeking growth, healing, and restoration of wholeness. This can only be done by feeling, grieving, and facing the problem. Intrusion vs. denial, a difficult tug of war. Feelings needing to be felt, memories needing to be connected to feelings, and unmourned losses seeking integration into our personal narrative. Meaninglessness and chaos needing to be made a part of our story. This step can be facilitated by keeping a journal of feelings, images, and those unwanted thoughts. By writing these down we are beginning to take the fear out of them. They also serve as the messenger and are trying to tell us where the pain is that needs healing. Another technique for helping focus on the losses is to create a loss inventory. This is done by dividing your life into ages, or decades. Some do it by dividing it into childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The divisions will be natural when you begin to write down the losses. Write them down, and then write about how they affected you and what you did about them. Then think about how it changed your life. This process transitions you into the next phase of bereavement: connecting the feelings, memories and images. This is often a very painful part of bereavement because we have disconnected the feelings that were too painful at the time. Do not expect to accomplish this all at once. Be patient and do it at a pace that allows time for reflection, integration, and healing. One client is creating a picture storybook of her family and losses. The third step is what I call reconciliation. Often times there are mixed, ambivalent, and conflicted feelings about our loved ones and losses. We need to make sense of what happened, accept the event, relinquish the loved one, and find new ways to live. Sometimes, rituals of healing can be very helpful. A few years ago, my two adult children and I went to the gravesite, located the head stone and stood there, confronting the ghost which had haunted our lives. We put our arms around each other and faced the loss which changed their lives as much as mine. Finally, we must rebuild. This may take the rest of our lives, but it involves restoring our self-esteem, dealing with the effects of the losses, and undoing any destructive, distortions which may have been due to our avoidance. Every loss must be mourned. One of my clients who lost a son to a drug overdose is discovering that she not only lost a son, she lost her good friend, she lost the future. “I will never see him get married, have children, or get his dream job.” In summary, losses are a part of life. Traumatic, life-changing losses often create problems over a long term if they are not mourned. Each loss presents a unique challenge to our capacities to mourn and accommodate to the pain. Bereavement is a process, it is not a series of stages we go through in a predictable fashion. Bereavement is an active process and each person’s losses and grief are as unique as their fingerprints. If we are to live, we must learn to mourn. The reward will be healing and wholeness, not only of yourself, but of your relationships, and your whole life. Avoidance, denial, and repression deaden us, in order to feel fully alive we must live with awareness and embrace the suffering, which will lead us to transformation and a new and different self. Mourning is such a difficult experience, yet, if we do not embrace it, we will remain stuck psychologically at the very point of time in which our lives were changed forever. Mourning means to embrace pain, accept the event, make sense of what happened, and say yes to life. In mourning we must learn to care again, we must develop new attachments and relinquish the deceased. Our shattered beliefs and devastated emotions must be healed. Mourning is imperative, avoidance leads to emptiness and despair. Learning to mourn is an essential part of learning to live, it is a part of the process of learning to heal our wounds as we are wounded. Wounding and healing are integral to life. Dr. Gary Reece received his PhD in clinical psychology from Fuller Theological Seminary school of Psychology in 1975. Since that time he has worked extensively in the area of addiction, trauma, and disaster response training. He has published three books in these areas and frequently does workshops and seminars on addiction and bereavement. He may be contacted at www.stepcare.org
Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.26
3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."             |
||||||||
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
