Having been on my own grief journey many times, and listened to many people on their grief journeys, one thing that strikes me is the heartbreak of losing someone you love.
The loss may be due to death, a broken relationship, having to move somewhere new, losing a treasured object or any other event that results in loss.
I have always been aware of how little people know about grief and how unhelpful those people can be when you are grieving. But it was only when hearing Canadian writer Zoe Whittall be interviewed about a poetic memoir she wrote that the realisation dawned on me that one of the big issues is heartbreak.
Zoe feels in our Western culture there is a practice of not admitting the depth of loss for the individual. Loss is life changing and it can impact many years of your life.
She described that loss as not something that people relate in cold, hard facts but something related in deeply emotional experiences and feelings.
I pondered that for some time after hearing the interview. I realised she was right. The biggest thing for me with all the deaths and other losses I had mourned was the broken heart I was left trying to mend.
In our deeply analytical culture, with an emphasis on evidence based mental health, the acknowledgement of the depth of emotion involved in grief is often brushed aside.
Instead grief is pathologised and people who grieve for “too long” are considered to be mentally unwell. The reality is they are mending a broken heart and learning how to live again. And they are doing really well.
Sadly people feel uncomfortable when confronted with the heartbroken grief of another person. When people are uncomfortable their instinct is to shut the other person down. Hence the heartbroken are unsupported.
When putting her book together Zoe’s editor told her that “Heartache is a universal experience.”
That is so true. If you are heartbroken and grieving, draw comfort from the fact that others are heartbroken too. If you can, seek out those people so that you can feel safe to share your heartbreak, to feel heard.
• And if you are worried that maybe there is something wrong with you.
• Or you feel overwhelmed by the people around you telling you that you should be over it by now.
• Or if you can’t find others to share with and you need to be heard …
… then seeking grief counselling can be helpful.
Can I Help?
If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with your heartbroken grief, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au
If you would like to learn more, I write a regular newsletter with helpful information, tips, information on courses, and the occasional freebie. At the moment I have a free mindfulness meditation for anyone who signs up to my newsletter. This meditation offers a way to safely explore your feelings and learn to be okay with them. If you would like to subscribe please click on the link here: http://eepurl.com/g8Jpiz
This is because when a person you love dies you are heartbroken.
When a person you love leaves you and rejects you and continues to reject you, then you are heartbroken.
Which pain is worse?
The worst pain is the pain you are experiencing.
Heartbreak
Heartbreak is always present in grief. It is heartbreak at the loss of the future with that person, whether they are alive or dead. Now you must face a future you did not plan and may not even like.
Heartbreak can occur through other life events. Losing a job, not getting the job you really wanted, not getting into the university course you wanted, not getting the marks in an exam you wanted, losing out on the house you wanted to buy, losing the house you can no longer afford to pay the loan on, your car being stolen, your house broken into, the end of a relationship, losing your pet, losing your country.
The really important thing to remember is your pain is always worse for you. There is no comparison. Just because someone else is hurting, it doesn’t mean their pain is worse. Comparisons just can’t be made when it comes to grief.
Heartbreak is not logical
It is always important to remember that the act of making a comparison is one that uses your mind. But when you are heartbroken and suffering grief, those are emotions you are feeling. They are not logical, they are not of the mind. They are the emotions of heartbreak.
Be careful, because grief that isn’t attended to doesn’t just go away. It stays there, unattended, and trips you up when something reminds you of it.
Questions to ask yourself
Ask yourself the question. What heartbreak, what grief, what disappointments in your life have you not attended to?
Once you have the answer ask yourself. Why don’t you attend to it?
The answer is most likely that it is difficult, painful even, to confront that pain.
It is so easy to run from pain. Pain hurts.
The realness of emotional pain
Did you know that physical pain and emotional pain are registered in the same part of the brain?
All these years people’s emotional pain has been dismissed as being nothing, yet it is as painful as physical pain.
The metaphor of the Buffalo
Grief expert David Kessler uses the metaphor of a buffalo turning to face a storm and walk into it. The buffalo knows it will get through the storm faster if it does this. But humans try to stay away from the storm. They try to keep a metre or so away. This way they remain in the storm a long time.
Instead of facing the storm, humans stay close to it and try to numb themselves, try to move away, but not far away, or try to avoid any triggering memories. Humans may even run away.
Substituting One Emotion For Another
One way of avoiding the storm is to go to another emotion that feels more comfortable.
What emotions might that be?
The most common one to go after is anger.
If you explore what is under your anger you will often find it is sadness, grief or fear.
There is a very real fear that once you give in to the pain of grief you will never be able to stop crying.
But you will stop crying in time.
Self Compassion Is The Best Treatment
When you allow yourself to enter the storm and feel your emotions deeply. When you allow yourself to engage with the emotions, then you are caring for yourself. You are showing up for yourself. Allowing yourself to feel these emotions is the way you can be there for you. It is an opportunity to show self compassion.
Self compassion only works if you pay attention to your emotions.
To show self compassion you have to be able to accept that this horrible thing happened. You have to be allowed to feel sorry for yourself, for the pain you are experiencing and have experienced.
Our society tells us it is wrong to feel sorry for yourself. But that is wrong. It is not wrong to feel sorry for yourself. It is not wrong to feel for what you have been through. To acknowledge that what you have been through was horrible.
When others try to shut you down over this it is because they feel uncomfortable and don’t want to be exposed to that discomfort.
Beware The Failure To Own Your Problems
Refusing to be accountable for what you have done in your life and refusing to own your problems causes difficulties around feeling sorry for yourself.
If you feel sorry for yourself and get stuck in that place, constantly seeking those who will affirm your pain but never doing anything to get out of that pain, then you are failing to understand your own problems and find ways to resolve them.
The Importance of Being Seen
It is important to feel seen, to have your pain acknowledged. But sometimes you are the one who is going to see you, who will acknowledge your pain.
Being seen is empowering. Seeing yourself is as empowering as being seen by someone else.
Tara Brach PhD, a leading western teacher of Buddhist meditation, emotional healing and spiritual awakening, talks about the importance of putting your hand over your heart centre and saying “Ouch, that hurts” as a way to acknowledge the pain you are feeling and give yourself self compassion. Try it sometime, you will most likely find it helps a lot.
In Summary
The worst abandonment is when you abandon yourself
In your pain do not fail to acknowledge to yourself the pain you are in.
Don’t fail to show compassion to yourself.
Stop judging yourself, shaming yourself, criticising yourself, telling yourself you are bad or unworthy, failing to defend yourself.
Make sure you recognise your own pain. Remember “Ouch it hurts” is very important.
Sit with your pain and acknowledge it. Comfort yourself.
Advice To The Recently Bereaved
I often have recently bereaved people visit me. Their bereavement is so recent they haven’t even had the funeral yet. One of the things I tell them in that first session is to be kind to themselves, to be okay to not look after other people at the funeral. To let others care for them. To absent themselves from the post funeral get together if they need to. To cry, be unstable, not want to talk, not want to socialise, not look after others are all permissible and necessary self care actions.
Grief Forces Change
I model for the recently bereaved how to speak kindly to yourself, how to be caring and compassionate to yourself, how to be there for yourself.
It is scary to be placed in the position where you have to grow and change. But grief puts you there and there is only one way out and that is to walk through the storm.
You are going to have to learn the new way to be. You will not know it immediately, but you will learn over time and self compassion is your best ally in this learning.
Can I Help?
If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with your grief and heartbreak please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au
If you would like to learn more, I write a regular newsletter with helpful information, tips, information on courses, and the occasional freebie. At the moment I have a free mindfulness meditation for anyone who signs up to my newsletter. This meditation offers a way to safely explore your feelings and learn to be okay with them. If you would like to subscribe please click on the link here: http://eepurl.com/g8Jpiz
One of the buzz words you will likely hear spoken around disasters and traumas is resilience. It is particularly popular in schools where teachers speak enthusiastically about developing resilience in children. Sadly, teachers have so much they had to teach children that adding resilience to the mix is really difficult.
Resilience Is Not Always Enough
What researchers have found is that maintaining resilience is virtually impossible. Resilience is defined as a consistent ability to adapt to difficult situations and return to normal.
This is fine if you have gaps between your difficult situations that allow you to adapt. As for returning to normal. Once something, anything, happens it changes you and you can’t go back, only forward.
Resilience requires great mental toughness. Something that goes out the window with massive difficulties. Facing a life changing crisis is more likely to leave you feeling weak and disempowered.
Mental Toughness Leaves When Facing Heartbreak
If you have been through a disaster or major trauma, or you have faced a devastating grief, mental toughness is one thing that will be in short supply.
You are scared, tired, overwhelmed, not knowing what to do next.
Resilience goes out the window here and suggesting to a person in that situation that they are resilient and will cope, or that they need to learn resilience is soul destroying.
You Can Only Ever Go Forward, Never Back
In grief, as in disasters and major traumas, life altering events occur. There is no going back to what you were. You are in uncharted territory.
You won’t bounce back. You won’t get over it. You won’t go back to what was there before. To how you were before.
Learning To Be A New Person
What you do need to do is learn how to be a new person. The new person who has suffered a loss and has been changed by what has happened to them.
You won’t bounce back, you will likely limp slowly over the finish line, long after the race organisers have packed up and gone home.
Imagination, The Hero Of Healing
What is more likely to help you in grief is your imagination. That right brain side. The creativity that allows you to find solutions to life’s problems. The side that allows you to imagine things. The side that is curious, open and allows you to adapt.
The right side of your brain allows you to imagine the future. It allows you to look at the future from different angles. It allows you to perceive your blackness and despair as something temporary and malleable. As something you can change. As a future with potential.
Imagination Brings Your Conscious Brain Back On Line
There is a method of using imagination to reimagine past events in an effort to heal the past trauma. This uses the concept that imagining things stimulates the cognitive part of our brains that is usually taken off line in unsafe situations, such as grief and trauma.
Researchers have discovered that if you are able understand what matters to you most right now then you can use your imagination to discover what is possible for you to do in the present moment.
Imagining What You Are Able To Do
Your imagination actually helps you to imagine what you are able to do in this moment. Not what you “should” be doing, but what you are able to do.
The interesting thing about imagination is that it can find slight suggestions of hope that you can use to help you through this time of heartbreak.
People who have used their imagination to get through grief have found that imagining something as simple as getting out of bed, having a shower, eating breakfast, getting dressed, going out of the house. Have helped them actually do those things that had seemed so impossible.
Imagination Helps You Get Back Into The World
As the people moved out of the deepest parts of the crisis they were able to imagination things that led them out more into the world.
Over time, these people were able to use their imaginations to discover the new them and the new life without the one they loved so much.
Your Imagination Will Never Remove Your Pain, But…
You can never imagine away your pain. That would be impossible. But you can imagine small gaps in your suffering that can allow other things to happen. Moments of laughter, connection with others and compassion for yourself and others.
You can imagine so much more. Maybe a conversation with a stranger that becomes amazingly soothing and even healing. Peace when you suddenly see a beautiful flower. The feeling of support when someone gives you a hug.
Imagination allows you to discover that your life is not all pain, that there are still things in your life that are not pain.
Find Your Way Out Of The Pain
When you are in such pain that you can’t see a way out, imagination can allow you to make a choice that will help you see there are gaps in that pain. This is wonderfully helpful for you in being able to cope.
You can imagine choices in what you will do, in where you will go, in whether life is all darkness, or there is light there.
Using your imagination allows you to imagine meaning in the loss of your loved one.
Making a Choice Between Hardness or Imagination and Possibilities
Yes, you can survive the depths of grief by becoming hard, or you can use your imagination to find those gaps in your grief where you can use your curiosity and be able to live with the uncertainty of your life as it will become. You can even use your imagination to stop being afraid of your suffering.
The Role of Mindfulness
To use your imagination it can be helpful to use mindfulness to access that area of your brain.
Mindfulness is a practice that is best used regularly, preferably daily. It can be just 5 minutes. You can do it quietly without anyone else noticing. Although it is best done somewhere away from others, many people practice on public transport on the way to or from work because that is when they have the best opportunity to snatch 5 minutes.
A Helpful Mindfulness Practice
• Sit quietly, preferably somewhere where you will not be disturbed. This is really helpful when you first learn to do mindfulness.
• If you can, close your eyes so that you can focus better. Alternatively you can soften your focus or look down into your lap.
• Take a deep slow breath in to your tummy.
• Release that breath slowly.
• Continue to breath deeply, in and out.
• As you breathe in, notice the feeling of the air entering your nose, you tummy and chest expanding.
• As you breathe out, notice the feeling of the air leaving your nose and your tummy and chest contracting.
• As you breathe in, breathe in peace.
• As you breathe out, breathe out tension.
• Breathing in peace
• Breathing out Tension.
• Once you are settled into this rhythm, and you feel the tension has been released from your body, breathe in say to yourself:
• “Who I was before this time of suffering cannot be resurrected.”
• Continue to say this for a few breaths.
• Now when breathing in say a word of something you are determined to experience while experiencing this hardship. The word may be peace, growth, connection, surprise, reconciliation or any other word that expresses what you are determined to experience in your recovery.
• Now use this word as you continue to breathe in.
• Imagine what it would feel like to be that word, not in the future but now. Find somewhere in your current life where you can feel that word now.
This may seem hard at first, and it will be. But with commitment to practice regularly you can find a way to move forward with your life and your healing from heartbreak.
Can I Help?
Sometimes, when going through experiences that are hard to live through, it can be helpful to get help from a counsellor. If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with your heartbreak, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au
If you would like to learn more, I write a regular newsletter with helpful information, tips, information on courses, and the occasional freebie. At the moment I have a free mindfulness meditation for anyone who signs up to my newsletter. This meditation offers a way to safely explore your feelings and learn to be okay with them. If you would like to subscribe please click on the link here: http://eepurl.com/g8Jpiz