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Tag: grieving

How to support someone that is grieving

How to support someone that is grieving

How to support someone that is grieving

If we know someone that is grieving and want to offer them support, what can we say?

You may feel that the person you know is doing really well and want to offer them encouragement, however just saying to someone they are doing really well is not ‘seeing’ them.

As a human being we all want to be ‘seen’, we all want to be noticed and understood, sometimes when we grieving it can feel extremely lonely. If someone just says, “hey, you are doing really well”, it can feel like we’re not really being noticed, we can feel like “Oh no I’m not, I am struggling enormously and feel terrible”.

Acknowledging how a grieving person feels can help them feel ‘seen’, noticed, and understood and can help them with their grief and loss, particularly coping with grief very soon after the death. Rather than just say our grieving friend is doing well, if we ‘see’ them and notice their pain also this can help them through their difficult times.

Try saying something like, “I see how much you are struggling, I see how much pain you are in, I see how difficult this is for you and yet at the same time I see how well you are doing”, this time our grieving friend has the support and encouragement that they are doing well and we have also noticed the difficulties they are going through – they may now feel ‘seen’ , more understood and better supported.

Good luck…

A New Chapter By The Sea

A New Chapter By The Sea

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We went down to our new house over the weekend to have a chat with the guy selling it. Nothing is definite yet as we haven’t exchanged contracts, but as far as we are able to tell everything is good and we should be moving there late August or early September.

The house is in a small village in West Dorset and is about 0.8 of a mile from the beach. Claire informed me that we had been to the beach a few years ago, but I must say that with my man memory I have no recollection, and so I decided that we’d walk to the beach on Saturday to see how far it was from our new house to be.

We set off walking from a house and just 20 minutes later Thea, Millie, Toby, Olivia, Tommy (O’s boyfriend), Evie and myself were on the beach.

I was overwhelmed with emotion, both good and bad at the same time. It felt great knowing that we would probably be living a short distance from such a fantastic beach which we can visit at any time but at the same time it was so sad knowing that this was Claire’s dream, and she came so close to realising it herself.

Claire desperately wanted to live by the sea and we often spoke about when we eventually would. She saw our new house about a week before she died, so at least she died knowing that she would be moving to the coast fairly soon. It just makes me sad to think that she never actually made it.

Losing Claire has changed me so much. I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly and the only way I can describe it is as a “bollocks, I’m doing it” attitude! Facing mortality and death like this is bound to change our beliefs and values in our own life – and I think this is where the problem lay for people that don’t deal with their grief. The shift in our thinking changes so much that it becomes difficult to cope with.

Facing these issues head-on has become really important to me, I know that it would be easy to store up many negative emotions because it’s so difficult to deal with all of this change in thinking which has happened so fast. All that I know is that this is a process which happens slowly over time, each day we deal with a different issue and we move on. How long the process will take I have no idea and in fact I’m not going to focus on that at all. The problem is that we have no way of knowing that the process is finished and so why even bother asking ourselves the question, ‘is it finished yet?’.

If I’m working with a client as a coach that wants to be more confident or happy I will always ask them ” How you know that you are as confident or happy as you want to be, what will you see, hear and feel specifically?” – using this same logic on my own grief leads me to ask the question “How will you know that the grieving process has finished? What will you see, hear and feel specifically?” – unless I can answer that question with absolute clarity there is no point in me wondering how long will this will take because without clarity around that question I could end up feeling low for ever.

Moving house won’t sort all of this out I know that. But we started the process together as a couple, we were about to begin a new chapter in our lives and I’m looking forward to beginning a new chapter albeit in a rather different way to how I originally expected.

 

 

 

What is grief?

What is grief?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. I spend a lot of time online which is good from the point of view of finding out information, and bad because you never know if the information is good or not! We have a local hospice which offers grieving counselling and bereavement support, the doctor made a referral for the family to them at the beginning of May, but typically for government organisations we’ve not heard anything yet!

Just so that I could connect with other people in a similar situation I’ve been browsing a few forums dedicated to grief and loss, particularly that of the loss of the spouse. They are a mixed bunch really.

One of the things that seems to be standing out is that everyone is grieving struggles with the concept of what it actually is, and what they should do.

A person posted on one of the forums yesterday that her family thought she was obsessing about her late husband, she posted a whole host of things she was doing and asked the forum if she was indeed obsessive or whether this was normal.

The question is, what is normal? And who makes up the rules?

Reading through the posts that many of these people are making I’ve come to realise that in this situation we make up our own rules, and then beat ourselves up with them… What a crazy thing to do.

Each time I catch myself using words like should, must or ought I ask myself the question “Who says?” – and most of the time it’s me, putting my own pressures on myself.

Learning to ignore myself is a strange thing to do. I’m learning to accept that however I feel at any given moment is absolutely fine, I don’t have to do anything. There are no stages of grieving! People have said that everyone goes through seven stages starting with denial then anger then some other bull shit… Who says?

In my own grief I refuse to be defined by other people’s version of normal. I refuse to define myself as a grieving person.

As ever I’m writing this post off the top of my head and things keep coming to mind, and what comes to mind now is the political correctness regarding disabilities (okay, my mind leaps around all over the place). I always used to think that the person with disabilities was ‘disabled’ – and I remember advertising campaigns saying they are not a disabled person, they are simply a person living with a disability. It always seemed like a semantic argument, but now I understand. I’m not a grieving person, I’m a person living with grief – I refuse to let it define me.

One of the other things that other people on the forums seem to struggle with his guilt. I can understand this but choose not to do it myself. Sitting here writing, if I think about it, I can find lots of things to be guilty about. Guilty that I didn’t make Claire slow down a bit. Guilty that we didn’t move to her beloved  seaside a couple of years ago. Guilty that we didn’t take her to the hospital sooner. But I choose not to beat myself up over these things. What’s the point?

Guilt only serves one purpose and that is to destroy us. The reality is that Claire and I made the best decisions we could, at the time that we made them, knowing what we knew then. With the extra knowledge I have now, if I could go back in time, I would make different decisions. But when those decisions were made I didn’t have that additional knowledge, and so we made the best decisions that we could.

I’ve let those things go.

One of the things that someone said on a forum yesterday was that people die, but love doesn’t. I took comfort from those words which reminded me of what Claire and I had engraved on the inside of our wedding rings:

“Endless Love”

And it is…

Moving on and Grieving seem at odds

Moving on and Grieving seem at odds

I’ve not posted for a few days as we went down to Devon to spend some time with my sister and her family – thanks guys for having us – I must say I missed the therapy that writing this blog brings!

It was tough at the sea, being there without my Claire didn’t seem right. When ever we went we used to make a point of walking on the beach, hand in hand, often in the evening and talking about how nice it would be to live there – all a bit surreal.

We’re settling in to some new routines which, to be honest, doesn’t feel right. It feels as though we are re-writing our lives without someone who should be here.

On the one hand we need to move on and develop new routines, and on the other hand we need to… to…. to… I’m not sure sure what the words are. To respect, to grieve – yes that’s the one – ‘grieving’ and ‘moving on’ seem at odds.

So what is the highest positive intention of grieving for me? Protection>love>peace>amazing joy.

And what is the highest positive intention of moving on me? Surviving>belonging>peace>amazing joy.

So actually, grieving and moving on have the same highest positive intention for me of ‘amazing joy’ – so I wonder if I could allow all the resources that are available to the part of me that wants to grieve, to share those resources with the part of me that wants to move on. Perhaps they could share those resources in synergy and harmony, working together for the same highest positive intention of allowing me to have ‘amazing joy’.

Moving on and grieving have the same intention, so I can do both.

It’s OK to move on. It’s OK to grieve. Their purpose is amazing joy.

I can live with that!