Loss and Grief

Most recently, another family member passed away and this time so unexpectedly. Our loss impacted our family in different ways. My spouse found the lifeless body of our beloved seven year old German Shepard while I was away on a flying trip. What happened next for us was such an emotional burden of shock and disbelief and learned habits of loss and grief. I received the phone call after my spouse who is medically trained in CPR who tried to revive his body. I then started crying in the public restaurant and tried to keep it together. After that outburst of emotion, I went into action so that my spouse would get some help to lift the 92 pound lifeless body into the car. Most of us rely on old ideas to deal with whatever crisis confronts us. As we have patterned our other habits, we typically do the same actions the same way. While we typically do not experience loss and grief daily, we have emulated others and their patterns of what to do intellectually the way we learned to deal with whatever challenges come our way.

It is not all of our faults on how we developed and maintained our habits. All physical and emotional actions become habitual. Even loss is inevitable and sometimes predictable. As we grew up, our primary caretakers, usually our parents, we learned from watching and mirroring what the parents do before there are words. After the child learns verbal skills, there is more of an understanding about how the parents deal with life's lessons including loss and grief. In dealing with loss and grief through a child's eyes, the caretaker usually only teaches the familial habit patterns and what they remember. They are usually patterned after others from the past who may have said, "Don't feel bad. Replace the loss. Grieve alone. Just give it time. Be strong for others and keep busy." After hearing these statements, how can we focus on the recovery of loss and grief of the individual? Everything we do and say is deeply personal and we should focus on the individual and not on blanket statements. Otherwise, after hearing these types of intellectual advice, we then mistrust our feelings and may not fully experience any future success in love and living a life fully lived.

We have been taught to acquire things and not what to do when we lose them. In our younger years, there is so much emphasis on learning to acquire things in order to make life successful and happy. So when we lose something or someone, what, where and how well will you be able to recover from that loss? To help with loss and grief or, any other area not related to success and happiness, you may need to change how you look at the world with new habits when the unexpected happens. You may be able to do this yourself or you may need some coaching to do some of the following changes:

You need to develop new habits by becoming AWARE of the need to have a new habit. You must learn the components or parts necessary to build the habit by identifying the ideas that do not work and REPLACING them with ideas that do. Finally, you must PRACTICE the new ideas so that you can turn these skills into life-long patterns when your life turns upside down with loss and grief. Then when you have those life skills of going through that loss, you will return to a deeper state of feeling more success and happiness in the growth of your soul and spirit.