Some Grief Exercises for Continuous Healing

Step Up For Mental Health @ Some Grief Exercises for Continuous Healing

Does Grief Expire?

It's been nearly three years since losing my dad, and sometimes it takes less than a second that i can start crying when my eyes fall across his inside a picture. Because my eyelids have grown to be dams, my fear of the inability to stop takes over. On the seat of fear sit my recurring questions: Can one be grieving? What are the differences between grieving and mourning? Performs this mean I should've taken more time from items to feel the loss?

When the possible lack of Answers Offers Something Better

When I pick up Kubler-Ross's book “On Grief and Grieving” I ask out loud, virtually towards the book itself, “Is there a webpage that has the expiration date for grief?” In certain examples of 5 stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) you will find different time frames. One person moves from depression to acceptance within a few years. Another starts crying ten years after losing her family member. Others linger within the phase of either anger or depression. (Something we don't want to do.)

So, Where shall we be held?

Ross can’t give me concrete answers, but what the book has is guidance on creating some tools which help me to carry on healing. Healing from grief is much like creaming hands – feeding skin nourishment just once does not mean we're done. Each day, a set of hands has different qualities (soft, warm, cold, dry, or dehydrated), and that we need to have a tendency to those qualities. The same can probably be said for the grieving mind: we need to tend to all stages of our loss.

Here is really a set of grief exercises inspired through the book:

1. Tell the storyline: When something exciting or traumatic happens to us, we tell many people about this. We repeat it. This is part of our continuous healing. Our mind is behind since the event happens so quick and that we find it difficult to seem sensible from it. If people who are around you grow fed up with hearing your story, tell yourself the storyline in the mirror, type it, and handwrite it. Expressing what we don't understand diversely might help us come to an awareness.
2. Acknowledge the hidden pockets of loss: Ross talks a lot concerning the other losses that include the loss of a family member. I believe of these as pockets on the heavy coat of grief: one pocket holds the lack of routine experiences, the current void, and also the foreseeable losses on special events. This can be a pocket of your time – the loss of the past, present, and future with the family member. My exercise for exploring these losses is to write a scene from each time frame that includes my dad. Making each a peaceful scene, I imagine what it looks like. At the end of the day, the actual and fantasized scenes are gifts from myself to myself in grief.
3. List your personal stages of grief: Reading with the summaries of each of the five stages of grief forces me to pause a great deal. I'll hug the book and sparks of me 3 years ago come to mind. These “sparks” turn into a listing of where I see myself coping with the stages: the moment, handling tools in the spare room, when I experienced denial; a minute of stillness within the living room after i experienced bargaining. Even if I wasn't sure if something was “acceptance” or “depression” I attributed a name as to the I had been feeling in those moments.
4. See Your “Selves”: You will find the losses in various time frames there is however also a lack of the old self. This self knows innocence and can’t know this level of sadness. Vulnerability gets control inside a “new self.” I think staring at the new and old selves together inside a mirror could be a powerful healing tool. Though the same eyes happen to be through innocence and sadness, what has changed about the subject? Has got the skin written a brand new self with lines?

Be on the Lookout

“On Grief and Grieving” states that we might revisit stages through time. As frustrating as it is to see that there is no expiration date on grief, it is only as comforting to understand we're constantly growing as we undertake life, and for that reason, healing tools that weren't accessible to us before may become accessible to us now.