Current research suggests that grievers do not actually move through grief in a series of five “stages,” but instead tend to experience grief in cycles of recurring waves.
There are high tides during which emotions are intense and the griever is preoccupied with feelings and thoughts around the loss, alternating with restorative tides during which the griever feels numb or is more focused on adapting to life without the deceased. Although these cycles are normal and decrease in intensity over time, grievers often feel disoriented by these vacillating emotions and wonder how to cope with them.
One way you can cope with these waves is to apply the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the practice of compassionately and curiously observing your feelings and thoughts and breathing through them without judgement. When we apply mindful awareness to an emotional response, we essentially notice the sensations, thoughts, and feelings that we are experiencing and accept them as they are, without judging them, or having a secondary emotional reaction to them.
When you pause and become mindful, you will notice that although emotions feel intense as they are rising like an enormous wave, they will crest and descend, decreasing in intensity within a few minutes. Breathing through the experience with an attitude of acceptance and loving-kindness toward yourself will make it more bearable. It’s akin to surfing a wave or flowing with it instead of futilely standing against it and getting knocked down.
Here is a short beginning mindfulness practice you can use called the Mindful Breath:
Begin by noticing the rhythm of your breath without changing it. Place your hand on your belly and feel the expansion of your abdomen as you inhale. Then, feel the softening of your abdomen as you exhale. Do this for a several breaths.
When you become aware of any emotions you are feeling, notice where you feel them in your body, then gently inhale into this area of your body while you say to yourself, “I acknowledge my emotion.” Now, softly exhale while you say to yourself “I calm my emotion.”
As I wrote in a previous post, recent studies at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Wisconsin have demonstrated that regular practice of mindfulness meditation actually changes the structure of areas of the brain so that you can better cope with stress, manage emotion, and cultivate a more positive outlook. Moreover, I believe practicing mindfulness gives you a way to be fully present as you open up to the awareness that you still have a connection to your deceased loved one.
As Sameet Kumar states, “Grief only serves to highlight the depth of our capacity to love and be loved.” Engaging mindfulness brings you into the awareness of that love and is the first step I recommend in my book on transforming grief.
Next week, we’ll talk about the next step for transforming grief: Making Living Stories.
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October 23, 2012 at 5:48 am
Carolyn Seager
I truly like the idea of using mindfulness for grieving and I also totally agree with the waves of grief as opposed to the stages. The only thing that I found amiss was only applying grieving to the loss of someone who has deceased. In all my years of experiential therapy I learned and agreed with the concept of grief to apply to the loss of people or things in other ways. For example I was in a 6 year relationship with a man whom I thought I was going to grow old with. I suspected he was unfaithful and I discovered it on my own by figuring out his voicemail code. I’m not a person to typically do things like that, but there was absolutely no other way for me to find out. I didn’t do this until about 3/4’s of the way through the 6th year. At first I heard messages from a few different women. Then I heard one woman I’d never heard before a couple months later. Her message was totally different from the others and at the end she said “I love you’ and I knew that my ex-boyfriend was already in a fully committed relationship with another woman. I only found out 2 wks after he ended our 6 yr relationship on the phone, but I knew from knowing his past that the relationship had been going on for months. This was in 2001 and I still have times where I grieve the loss of the relationship. I think in many ways it’s harder than to lose someone through death because the person is still alive and the knowledge of that is extremely painful.
October 23, 2012 at 10:51 am
armstronglpc
Carolyn,
Thank you for your comments. I completely agree with you that the grief related to the sudden break-up of a relationship can be devastating and more complicated than the grief related to an actual death. I did not get into this in my blog because I mainly work with people dealing with the physical death of someone important to them. Again, thanks for this excellent point!
Best,
Courtney