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Healthy Ways to Process Grief

AHA Publisher — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 05:22:00 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #360) and blog, I am going to talk about grief and answer some of your questions about dealing with and managing grief. Since grief is inescapable and can come about for all sorts of reasons, it’s important to accept that it’s an intrinsic part of being human, instead of trying to avoid or suppress the emotion. Below are some of the main questions I have received over the years, and some answers and tips to help you better deal with and manage grief: -Why is grief such a difficult feeling to process? Dealing with loss and the grief that comes with this feeling often means facing something that is both final and unchangeable, which makes grief very hard to manage. And, contrary to popular opinion, time doesn’t just “heal” this feeling of loss. Rather, time helps to create the space necessary to come to terms with the inevitability of the loss. In many cases, feelings of loss and grief are compounded by a sense of regret or even guilt, which can also be very hard to process. -Why isn’t grief linear? The five stages of grief model, otherwise known as the Kübler-Ross model, suggests that people experience grief through a series of five emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although this model has gained popularity, it is not supported by empirical studies—many people argue that this model is incomplete and unhelpful for people trying to manage their grief. Research shows that grief doesn’t unfold along predictable lines and differs greatly based on a person’s makeup and circumstances. People naturally move back and forth through different stages and expressions of grief. Consequently, it can be harmful to force people to try to fit their unique experiences into a set pattern of grief. We all experience grief in waves and cope in different ways. We should not judge ourselves if we feel great one day and terrible the next. -What are some healthy ways to process grief? As mentioned above, we all experience grief in waves and cope in different ways, so you shouldn’t judge yourself if you feel great one day and bad the next day. Remind yourself that there is no one way of experiencing grief, and there is no one way of getting through grief. Remind yourself that grief is a part of life, and that it isn’t shameful to ask for help or need support. Don’t just assume that you must talk about and express your grief openly as soon as possible or you won’t get through it. This has been shown through extensive research to not to work as well as was previously believed. You may find a temporary distraction helpful when dealing with grief—it can give you time and space to deal with grief in your own way in your own time. Deep, meaningful connections can really help us manage and process our grief. Never feel ashamed of asking for help. We should all try to be there for someone who is grieving, so long as we DO NOT try to force them to get what they are feeling out or “get over it”. In these situations, it is far better to ask the person what they need instead of basing our words and actions off what we think they need. Remember, we are not experts on anyone else’s feelings! Therefore it’s important to acknowledge a person’s unique grief experience, which will help them activate the resilience they need to process and move through their grief in a way that works for them. You do you! No one should be pressured into trying to feel more deeply or be more expressive than suits their unique style and time frame. If you are grieving, I recommend acknowledging your grief, and then decompressing until you feel ready to face your grief. When ready, work on embracing, processing and reconceptualizing your feelings and experiences in organized cycles of 63 days, which is the time it takes to rewire new thoughts. Some people may need to do many of these cycles, and that’s okay! In the case of grief, people begin to feel stronger when they develop new ways of thinking about their loss and adjusting, so take all the time you need to get to this place! To do these 63 day cycles, I recommend using my Neurocycle mind-management technique, which I discuss in detail in my latest book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, and app Neurocycle. The Neurocycle is a way to harness your thinking power through mind-management that I have developed and researched over the past three decades. First, calm the brain down by breathing deeply. I recommend breathing in for 5 counts and out for 11 counts, and repeating this technique 3 times (for around 45 seconds). Then, GATHER awareness of the emotional and physical warning signals your body is sending you, such as tension in your shoulders, which can be a sign of fear of sleep. Embrace these signals; don’t judge them or try to suppress them. (Spend around 30 to 45 seconds doing this). Next, REFLECT on what these signals are pointing to. Ask, answer and discuss why you are feeling the way you do. Use specific sentences, like “I feel this sadness because …”. What are the details associated with this thought? What other thoughts are coming up that are associated with this thought? After reflecting, WRITE down what you feel and why. This will help you gain clarity into your thinking and behavior. Then, RECHECK what you have written, looking for your grief triggers and thought patterns you may have developed. For example, if you are grieving the end of a romantic relationship and feel sad, you might unconsciously think, “I could’ve done more to stop the breakup”. Why do you feel this way? What triggered this thought? How do you know this to be true? Or are you making an assumption based on how you feel now about something that happened the past? What is your thought “antidote”? How will you reconceptualize this way of thinking and feeling? What could you think, feel and choose instead?Lastly, take action to practice this new way of thinking. I call this step the ACTIVE REACH. This can be anything from a positive statement that validates your feelings to an action you do when you catch yourself ruminating on your grief. Based on the example above, you could practice saying, “I know the relationship was over, and that is okay. It is also okay to grieve the end of this relationship”. -How can someone feel/process their grief without becoming consumed or immobilized by it? Recounting your grief (again and again) is not necessarily required for your psychological health. There is a substantial body of research suggesting that the constant expression of feelings is not always the best way to manage grief and may even lead to more sorrow. In fact, when you are sad and grieving, your mind tends to access other sad memories stored in your brain, and you can get stuck in a cycle of negativity that will potentially drag you down. Similarly, wired-in neural networks of memories can be activated even when there isn’t a direct relationship to what you are going through, so ruminating can lead to all sorts of mental issues, setting off a cycle of pessimism that can affect your concentration, decision-making and motivation, which can make your problems can seem overwhelming. When this happens, you can become immobilized or consumed in your grief. However, there is a natural cycle of remission we can tap into, which is where healthy distractions can come in handy. Your ability to distract yourself until you are ready to process your grief, as briefly mentioned above, can be a good way to help you recover without feeling stuck or immobilized. Don’t try to rush the process if you don’t feel strong enough to work through everything. Yes, you don’t want to ignore your grief or avoid processing it, but you do want to get to a point where you are able to process everything that has happened without becoming immobilized, which usually involves having a support system in place and building up your own mental resilience. -What can happen if a person doesn’t process their grief or ignores it? This is often referred to as delayed grief. Although there is not much research on the effects of delayed grief, we do know that suppressing how we feel in the long term can end up making our mental health worse, as I discuss in detail in my latest book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. However, grieving is a complex process that we need to be allowed to move through in our own idiosyncratic ways. We don’t want to conceal our intense sadness from ourselves or others, but we do need to be allowed to process these feelings in our own way. -What are examples of things people might grieve besides death? Love, loss of childhood, etc.? Why is it important to recognize these types of grief too, outside of death-related grief? There are many things that we can grieve over, including being bullied, feeling lonely, the loss of time, the loss of friends, breakups, the loss of connections when moving cities, countries or schools, illness or injury, the loss of a happy childhood due to traumatic experiences and so on. It is important to recognize that grief is related to loss, even when there may not have been a death. Some people may not even realize that the deep sorrow they are feeling is actually grief! Experiencing a loss is a very hard emotional process, and recognizing it as grief can allow people to make more sense of what they are feeling and experiencing. In fact, recognizing different types of grief can help assuage feelings of guilt associated with loss. For example, if someone is feeling down from something like a breakup and is feeling guilty about being sad, helping them understand that they may be grieving can help them identify their pain and start the process of working through it. No matter what type of loss someone has experienced, they should understand that their grief is valid. -Can you explain how the pandemic has added another layer of grief to life? Besides the obvious impact of massive uncertainty and loneliness, many adults, teenagers and children have had to develop a whole new way of life, which has resulted in feelings of loss and grief for what could have been. Whatever we experience with the mind changes the brain (through the process of neuroplasticity) and body, right down to the level of the telomeres on our chromosomes, which shows up in how we function and feel mentally and physically. We do not live in a vacuum. There have been major changes in the mind, brain and body from the pandemic, and we need to help adults, adolescents and children manage these changes because unmanaged toxic stress from major adverse circumstances like the pandemic can result in physical and mental ill-health. However, if we constantly focus on the problem, it can get worse. As I always say, whatever we think about the most grows. We also need to focus on the solution, and I recommend doing this in a “ratio” of 1:3—one part “this is the problem/what has happened” and 3 parts of “what I can do about it”. It’s also important to not only focus on our feelings, because feelings are only one part of the mind—the other two parts are thinking and choosing. When we just focus on how we feel, we can get stuck because we are going against the natural functioning of the mind, which is to think, feel AND choose. When we consciously keep the balance between our thinking, feeling and choosing through self-regulation (or mind management), this can help us prevent overthinking and ruminating on the negative, which, in turn, helps us develop cognitive resilience and allow for the natural remission of grief to happen. We need to guide ourselves and our children to...

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How to Train Your Child to Understand, Process & Verbalize Intense Emotions

AHA Publisher — Wed, 12 May 2021 07:00:13 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #275) and blog, I speak with clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy about rethinking the way we raise our children, the importance of saying sorry to our kids, why it is never too late to fix the mistakes we make as parents, how to explain our own emotions to our children, and so much more! As Dr. Becky wrote in a recent Instagram post, we need to learn how to explain our emotions to our children. On their own,our emotional displays as parents or guardians, do not overwhelm our children. It is okay to have emotions as parents! Every parent has feelings, and our kids see these feelings. This is a good thing, because our children learn from us that emotions are part of being human. Children often feel overwhelmed, anxious and unsafe when our big emotional displays are partnered with the “aloneness” that comes with not having an adult explain or connect with them and let them know how they are feeling. As parents and guardians, we need to own our feelings and assert our permanence. We should do this by saying something like, “Just like we talk about your big feelings, adults have big feelings too. Sometimes I need a bit of time to myself to care for these feelings in my body. In these moments, I’m not leaving you, I’m not mad, and you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m still your strong papa/mama who loves you.” When it comes to our emotions, the most important thing is not what we do in the moment when we break down in front of our kids, but the before and after. We need to prep our children and let them know what we are going through and what we are feeling. As Dr. Becky points out, it is not information that scares children, it is the absence of information that scares them. If we don’t say anything to our children when we are struggling, they assume the world is crumbling around them and often blame themselves to regain a sense of control. The goal as parents is not to not have emotions. Rather, it is about teaching our children about emotions in a healthy and constructive way. When we do this, then the feeling gets stored next to the story in the child’s mind and body, and they start to understand that they are not a bad kid, and it is not their fault that dad is angry or mom is shouting or crying. We turn an unformulated experience into a coherent narrative (which is actually the process underlying therapy!). This helps the child better understand themselves and their environment. We need to remember that our children do what we do, not what we say. We treat others the way we treat ourselves. The more we practice facing and dealing with our own feelings, the more we can model this for our children and help them process their own experiences. This also includes apologizing, no matter how old we are or how grown up our children are. When it comes to apologizing, the “sorry” means less in the moment than your tone and intention. When we pair a sorry with a reflection, then we show our children we have a plan to be better—we repair, not just react. Repair is in fact a marker of secure attachment; as parents you will mess up, and if you can work from this, then that is a healthy sign that your relationship with your children is in a good place. Being a parent doesn’t mean that you can never mess up! Now, you may be feeling like, as a parent, you did everything wrong, especially after listening to this podcast or reading this blog. Remember, these two things are BOTH true: the early years of childhood matter, but it is never too late to help your child heal or change the way you relate to your children. It is never too late to say sorry to yourself and to your children. The inner child is always waiting for repair! We all do the best we can with the resources we have in that moment, but this doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes. We can learn, shift, repair, change and grow—no matter how old we are or how old our children are. We should try do the best we can in the moment AND we should always try to be better. It is also incredibly important that we teach our children from young about consent. As Dr. Becky noted in a recent Instagram post, if we want our kids to be capable of saying NO, STOP IT, I DON’T WANT TO & I DON’T LIKE THAT, we have to build early circuitry that supports self-trust, body sovereignty, and consent. For example, if your child wants to stay by your side at a party, tell them: “I’m here. You can stay by me for as long as you want. You’ll know when you feel ready to join.” When you say something like this, your child learns that they can trust their own pace and sense of readiness—they don’t have to be pressured into doing what they don’t want to do. Or, say your child is playing with a toy and her younger sister starts crying and demands the toy. Tell your older child that “You are allowed to have that toy. Those are your sister’s sad feelings, and I can help her with them. It’s not your job to make her feel happy.” Your older child will learn that they don’t have to suppress their wants to satisfy others. They will learn how to recognize someone else’s disappointment without feeling responsible for causing it or making it go away. When we doubt our kids’ feelings, they learn to doubt their own feelings. Essentially, they learn how to gaslight themselves, which makes it harder for them to validate to their own thoughts, feelings and experiences and say NO when someone pressures them to do or say something that makes them uncomfortable. Indeed, Dr. Becky notes how the attachment patterns we develop when we are kids affect us when we grow up. We SEEK OUT people who allow our most-practiced circuits to kick into gear. For example, if a child grows up in a home with constant emotional invalidation, with words like “dramatic” and “too sensitive” and “disproportionate reactions”, years later, they will be naturally attracted to adults who confirm the same stories. The body seeks what it is accustomed to. These are like parts of us that get frozen in time. Teaching our kids to look in and trust what is happening to them is critical to their confidence and ability to take care of their own needs. Children should be taught about self-care from youth, not just when they are entering into adulthood. We should tell our children that they are the only one in their body— they are the only one who knows how they feel and what is right for them. We need to validate their unique experiences and feelings and let them know that they can express these feelings and trust themselves. We need to let them know that they have sovereignty over their own body. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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