Month: November 2013
Our natural healing process
Our natural healing process
I had a bit of a revelation yesterday whilst thinking about what I would talk about on the Huffington Post live interview. It’s strange how these revelations can happen at the weirdest of times and I was driving the car when this one hit me.
I was thinking about healing, and it occurred to me that if we cut ourselves or injure ourselves physically we don’t instantly start running to the doctors to ask how we are going to heal. We don’t get worried about where we are in the process of healing, should blood have clotted by now? What should my haemoglobin level be to this cut to heal? When exactly will the two ends of this broken bone begin to need back together, what is the process and how long will each stage of that process take? We don’t bother with any of that, we just trust our bodies innate ability to heal these wounds at the right pace and at the right time.
So why do we think it should be any different with emotional injuries?
Could it be that if I just don’t bother wondering what stage of the grieving process I’m at or how long it’s going to take that my mind will just heal itself?
The more I think about that, or rather, the more I don’t think about healing the more peaceful it becomes. I can see there is no need to worry or be concerned about anything, I trust my mind and body to do what it needs to do, when it needs to do it.
I think that sometimes the temptation is to try to rationalise things and get our highly educated brains working on solving the problem of how do we overcome our grief. But the reality is when we do this we ironically get in the way of the healing process and our highly educated brains interfere with the natural healing process, much like we tell a child not to pick their scab on a recently grazed knee. “It’ll never get well if you pick it” I can hear my mother telling me now…
So I’m not going to pick this scab, I’ll let my mind do what it needs to do when it needs to do it, and that’s just fine.
1st Holiday Season Without A Loved One – HUFFPOST LIVE
1st Holiday Season Without A Loved One – HUFFPOST LIVE
Late on Friday afternoon I was contacted by the Huffington Post live broadcasting to see if I would be willing to participate in their HuffPost Live shows which will look at the topic of coping with the loss of a loved one over Christmas, I admit I was a little nervous because I didn’t really know what was going to happen but you know me, I just went for it and said okay.
Without any prompting from me the grief counsellor Dr Judith Johnson mentioned my favourite phrase ” live in the now”, well how nice it was to hear someone else say that this is what we should do. She took it a little further and said that it would be good to not have too many plans for Christmas, who knows how we are going to feel at any given point, and if we have made definite plans and don’t feel up to it on the day then it can be rather stressful if we are unable to say no.
So in the run-up to Christmas if I have agreed to be somewhere or to do something and I let you down at the last minute, forgive me. And likewise if you have agreed to be somewhere or do something with me and you let me down in the last minute, don’t worry about it.
My plan for Christmas is to have no plan and right now that’s just the way I like it.
Here’s that interview…
Do Nothing, it helps
Do Nothing, it helps
I’m reading an amazing book at the moment called Do Nothing, it’s not specific to grief and loss but is specific to life in general… So I guess it pretty much applies to me as I think I’m still alive!
The themes within the book are familiar to me as I spent the last two years on bit of a personal development drive and what I’m discovering in this book is helping more, let me explain.
Since losing Claire I have been very aware of the label ‘grief’. As soon as we choose to adopt a label like this then we can begin to act out everything we believe about that label, and so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Many people believe they are ‘an angry person’ or perhaps they believe they are ‘not coping’ – these are just labels and so guess what happens… Yep, they begin to believe those labels and act them out which serves to reinforce the belief in the first place – a never ending cycle of destruction.
What we really need to understand is that we have an inside world and an outside world. The outside world is everything that goes on out there, everything that happens outside of our own mind, which is pretty much everything. We then have an inside world where we think about things and decide what the outside world means. We notice things but the problem is we delete more things than we notice and so our inside world becomes distorted.
The biggest problem is that the inside world IS the world to us, it is all that we know and it taints our view of everything outside of us.
We do indeed create our own world inside our own mind through the power of our own thought… comforting stuff if you really think about it.
And the solution to all this?
Understand that this is the process that we go through every time we experience something in the outside world (perhaps like losing a wife), in order to make sense of it we have to filter it through our own thought patterns and our own ideas of what is wrong and what is right. Once we understand this thought process we can change it, and we can change it to do nothing.
When we truly do nothing we apply none of our own warped filters. It leaves us clean, it leaves us true and it leaves us at peace.
I can honestly say that with the power of doing nothing I am at peace.
Love is…
Love is…
This post has the possibility to be cataclysmicly misinterpreted, but I’m going to write it anyway because I want to document how I feel and I know others feel the same way when they have lost partners.
Words can’t express how lonely I feel at the moment, and that is very definitely ‘lonely’ and not ‘alone’. Those two words seem to have the same meaning on the face of it but they are so completely different, I’m surrounded by wonderful kids, supportive family and amazing friends who are doing everything they can (for which I am truly and eternally grateful) but it doesn’t matter what anyone does there is no substitute for the love that is shared between partners.
There is something about the love of a partner that is so very different from anyone else. There are conditions to the love from a partner, it’s not handed out because they are family or because they feel sorry for someone, the love from family and friends is unconditional, it’s kind of compulsory because of the relationship. But the love of a partner is conditional, conditional upon that love being reciprocated and it feels very different to all the other kinds of love.
The Love of a partner has to be worked at, it has to be noticed every day and it is completely two-way, and because it has to be worked at you feel it every time the other person extends their love towards you – and right now that love is missing. Not only missing from being given to me but missing in that I can’t hand it out, and that feels cold… so very cold.
There’s nothing that can replace noticing how beautiful Claire was, stroking her hair, giving her a peck on the cheek and then getting on with what ever I was doing. Even hearing the jingling of another woman’s jewellery brings those emotions flooding back, or seeing someone wearing some clothes similar to what Claire wore reminds me that I can’t just tell her I love her, give her a peck on the cheek – giving love and feeling love!
I posted this on Facebook last night, and I really mean it…
“If you have a partner, please go and hug them right now and notice how wonderful it feels to be so close to the one you love. I’m wishing I could do the same.”
I’m writing a book
I’m writing a book
I’ve decided to write a book. A few people have suggested to me over the past couple of months and I have been resisting as it seems like a lot of work! So what has changed my mind?
Looking around the Internet I’ve come across several similar blogs to this one, I’ve also been on several discussion forums for people that have lost their partners and one thing that stands out in all of these places is the incredible pain that is being suffered by so many people. I’ve also had countless e-mails from people that have read my own blog on grief so I know that there are lots of people out there suffering in similar ways.
I’m not suggesting I know best or even that I have the answer, but reading about what other people are going through makes my heart bleed, they are punishing themselves unnecessarily with negative emotions such as anger and one that so many people mention often is guilt. The pain of losing our partners is bad enough without adding to it by punishing ourselves with unnecessary emotions such as anger and guilt.
I just feel that if I could get my own thoughts down onto paper it would give me an avenue to begin to reach out to these people – a way of doing my own little bit to help other people in so much pain.
I know what that pain is like, I experience it often in huge waves, however what I have come to realise is that I have a choice.
When the grief hits me in a big wave I let it, I allow it to happen and do nothing to resist. It’s a natural process and its part of the healing which has to go on, and I know that as I allow the grief to hit me in a wave I have made a choice. Making that choice is empowering, I am not at the mercy of an uncontrollable emotion… If I feel a wave of grief arriving then so be it, I have a choice – let it in or fight it.
And if I genuinely have a choice I can choose to get back to doing what I was doing when the wave of grief subsides. Another empowering thought.
Listening to other people’s stories brings to my attention that people believe they don’t have a choice. Many people believe that the external world ‘makes’ them do things, many people believe that their responses to things happen automatically as an ‘effect’ of what is going on around them. I do not believe this to be true. I believe that what is going on around me happens, and I have a choice as to how I respond.
If those people that were punishing themselves with anger and grief understood that they had a choice too then their lives would change, dramatically!
The Plan
Of course the very act of writing I find therapeutic in itself and I know that I will come to new realisations as the book takes shape over the next year. My plan is to publish in November 2014 and at the moment I just have a broad outline (which I wrote this morning as part of my plan for this year), this outline will then form the basis of the chapters.
I’ve contacted a self publishing house and intend to publish the book with them, but if you know of any good contacts that could help in this venture please do feel free to comment at the foot of this blog post.
One of the things I’ve been struggling with since Claire died is finding out what my life is for again, everything I did I did for her, this book is part of my refocusing on what life is about and am looking forward to sharing it with you…
Diary of associated living
Diary of associated living
Since losing Claire I have become painfully aware of the fragility of our grip on life. Claire went from being perfectly well to dead in less than 12 hours which has led me to make some changes in my life.
All too often we spend our lives in a trance, we wake up, make breakfast, go to work, come home, eat, watch telly, go to bed and then do it all again the next day.
All too often we spend our lives thinking ‘it will be better when…’ And then suddenly years have gone past and we’re still thinking the same thing.
It’s time to stop, it’s time to change, it is time to begin to notice the wonderful beauty of life around us, right now. Right this split second.
If we fail to notice the extreme beauty of this moment then it is gone and lost forever. It can never be recaptured, we can never go back to the past, so let’s enjoy the present.
This section of my website is dedicated to creating a diary of all of the extremely beautiful things that I have noticed everyday. Things which would otherwise have faded into the distant past without so much as mention.
Life is beautiful, let’s spend some time noticing it…
What does it mean?
What does it mean?
It’s so easy to attribute meaning to things isn’t it? The things we wear, the things we say and the things we do mean different things to different people and it’s often hard to separate out the truth from the fiction. Does it REALLY mean that!
I read an excellent blog post recently by another widower named Michael Adams where he talks about the meaning behind whether guys in our situation should wear a wedding ring or not. You see a wedding ring means I am married, and yet as Michael explains the truth is I’m not. However for me I feel like I still am and so I continue to wear my wedding ring. Wearing a ring means one thing to one person and another to someone else.
Another one of these ‘means’ problems has being moving through the grieving process. On the one hand I know it’s good to begin to rebuild my life but on the other hand it means I’m moving further away from Claire and the life that we had. But does it really mean that? Is it possible to rebuild and draw closer to her? Does rebuilding genuinely mean moving further away?
It’s so easy to link the two halves of a ‘means’ statement and act out as if X truly does mean Y, when in reality it is just a sentence we have used to describe something and there is no real relationship between X and Y.
Of course I can rebuild my life and it is in no way connected with how close I feel to Claire.
Of course, whether I choose to wear my wedding ring or not is in no way connected with moving further away from Claire.
I may wear my wedding ring for ever, or I may not. I’m at the stage now where I can choose to do what I want and be happy with it – and that ‘means’ whatever I want it to mean – or perhaps it means nothing at all!