Healing Strategies for Helping Families Grieve

It is important when working with anyone who is grieving to do the following:

• Become aware of your own personal issues around grief. This means becoming aware of your own fears, attitudes, and beliefs about grief. For example, if an individual were raised to believe that “We don’t air our dirty laundry in public,” then that individual may have difficulty helping a family who needs to vent and share their pain openly and/or with great emotion.
• Acknowledge the family’s grief. Label their experience as one of grief. Let them know they have a right to have their feelings.
• Be there. One’s presence can be the greatest gift given to a grieving individual. Sometimes holding someone’s hand, offering a hug, or just acknowledging, “This must be so hard for you,” can be enough to support someone in their grief process.
• Listen. Grieving people need to share their pain with another person who will not judge them or give them advice and suggestions. Listening to someone tell their story over and over can often be an invaluable gift to them in helping them sort through their feelings and release their pain.
• Offer “permission to grieve.” Teach grieving families that it is important to express the emotions of grief, but that there are ways to express the pain that are more healing than others. For example, an angry parent can learn to express their anger through physical activity such as yard work, tearing up old phone books, writing letters, or screaming in a pillow. The key is to help grieving people find constructive ways to release their feelings of grief rather than to take it out on others or themselves.
• Help families create a memory book. This might include photos, drawings, funny things someone said or did, etc. This is especially helpful to families who have experienced a death.
• Develop and encourage support groups. Support groups give families a chance to share their pain with others experiencing loss.
• Children love, therefore they grieve. Encourage children to participate in all of the above suggestions. By teaching children how to deal with the pain of loss early in life, we can teach them how to grieve the losses that are an inevitable part of their future lives, losses such as moving, divorce, the break-up of a relationship, or the death of a friend, loved one, or pet. Children can draw pictures or write letters to an ill sibling or grandparent as a way to express their love and concern.
• Encourage families to write letters to someone who has died or is ill. Frequently they can express many unresolved emotions in letters that need never be sent. Writing a letter or note to a family member who is in crisis respite may offer a caregiver a healing release of feelings of frustration and despair.

The New Stages of Grief

After the funeral and burial, mundane life patterns such as shopping and working must eventually resume, now in altered form. "Everyday life" often leaves survivors experiencing long-term reactions on top of the more familiar emotional and physical manifestations of grief.

Most common: yearning (intense longing for the person who has died), stress, and depression. These can prevail whether the relationship was happy or turbulent.

"Whatever unresolved issues you have, they get magnified and are elusive at the same time; you feel alone in the world," says Ellie, whose parents and sister all died within five years. "I felt so isolated in my grief."

Recommendations: 

Not rushing yourself. "Being without my parents knocked me down and kept me down for a long time; it was as if something had been severed in me," says Ellie. "Time and new experiences helped, but it was mostly a matter of putting one foot in front of the other."

Ignoring the "grief police." Don't let others rush your adjustment. Turn a deaf ear to the well-meaning comments people make that miss the mark -- including "It's time to move on."

Getting help as needed with practical tasks. Handling finances, cooking, yard work, and so on can swamp a bereaved person, especially if they're unfamiliar duties. This just adds to stress and prolongs pain.

Inching toward new ways of doing things. One woman who had a standing Saturday morning long phone call with her late mother felt bereft at that hour each week. "I switched my walking time to then and called my sister while I walked, which shook up my routine and dulled the pain."

Not expecting you can medicate the pain away. Antidepressants have a place in helping someone who has a chemical imbalance causing depression. But antidepressants can also impede the grieving process, and they can't remove the yearning that's associated with depression. The goal should be to think about the deceased with less pain, over time, and to derive a measure of comfort from such thoughts.

5 Easy Ways to Combat Overthinking

Do you ever become trapped in an overanalyzing rut?
I tend to think a lot in general, but sometimes, I find myself looking at a subject way too closely and way too much, and the ruminating takes on a life of its own. (It might even revolve around an abstract concept as opposed to an actual event that’s occurring.)
When introspection becomes stressful, there are antidotes. Here are some of my personal suggestions…

1. Adopt a hobby.

Maybe if your spare time is filled with an activity that you love, overthinking spells will be pushed to the curb. I’ve started to re-immerse myself in the French language since I’m a total Francophile. Weekend hours are set aside for verb conjugations and charming vocabulary. Oui, oui, oui.

2. Write it down.

I have journaled to lighten my mental load, where I can flesh out thoughts and feelings. (I find that the physical act of writing into a notebook is a more effective cathartic release than an online diary, but to each his or her own.) For someone who isn’t interested in writing, journaling may be viewed as a burden, so it certainly comes down to individual preference.

3. Keep your hands occupied.

According to this article, the psychological theory proposes that when we’re stressed, we absorb information through two channels. “One is the basic, primal sensory channel: the sights, sounds, sensations, and smells of the situation. The other is an intellectual channel: our brains are trying to make sense of what’s going on, and put it into words and a context that we can talk about.”
Researchers explain that if the sensory channel is occupied, the intellectual channel is muted; therefore, stress relief techniques that incorporate the hands “will use up more ‘brain cycles’ and pull processing power away from intellectual activities.” A stress ball may do the trick, along with drawing or knitting. (I’ve experimented with colorful rugs via latch hook!)
The article also presents another theory, which states that large muscle groups contract in preparation for flight when we’re consumed with stress. Muscle fibers in your arms relax and reduce tension when squeezing stress balls or keeping your hands busy with objects of a similar nature.

4. Move around.

I revel in long walks around the neighborhood – preferably in beautiful weather – and have found that walking unleashes mental chatter and induces clarity. Exercise, rolling blade, or any other movement can help as well.

5. Talk to someone.

Sometimes, being honest and vulnerable with someone you’re comfortable with will clear your mind. After exposing your overanalysis to others, it suddenly doesn’t appear as daunting. And who knows, maybe they can relay insight about the topic at hand, which could provide further guidance. With this further guidance contact Dr. Losito 24/7 to receive the reassurance of what is on your mind.

Overthinking can be unpleasant, draining and debilitating, but hopefully, the tips noted above can disrupt these incessant cycles.

Anticipatory Grief

Anticipatory grief is the normal mourning that occurs when a patient or family is expecting a death. Anticipatory grief has many of the same symptoms as those experienced after a death has occurred. It includes all of the thinking, feeling, cultural, and social reactions to an expected death that are felt by the patient and family. Anticipatory grief includes depression, extreme concern for the dying person, preparing for the death, and adjusting to changes caused by the death. Anticipatory grief gives the family more time to slowly get used to the reality of the loss. People are able to complete unfinished business with the dying person (for example, saying "good-bye," "I love you," or "I forgive you"). Recommended Related to Cancer General Approach to Care for Children with Brain and Spinal Cord Tumors Important concepts that should be understood by those treating and caring for a child who has a brain or spinal cord tumor include the following: The cause of most childhood brain tumors remains unknown.[1] Selection of an appropriate therapy can only occur if the correct diagnosis is made and the stage of the disease is accurately determined. Children with primary brain or spinal cord tumors represent a major therapy challenge that, for optimal results, requires the coordinated efforts... Read the General Approach to Care for Children with Brain and Spinal Cord Tumors article > > Anticipatory grief may not always occur. Anticipatory grief does not mean that before the death, a person feels the same kind of grief as the grief felt after a death. There is not a set amount of grief that a person will feel. The grief experienced before a death does not make the grief after the death last a shorter amount of time. Grief that follows an unplanned death is different from anticipatory grief. Unplanned loss may overwhelm the coping abilities of a person, making normal functioning impossible. Mourners may not be able to realize the total impact of their loss. Even though the person recognizes that the loss occurred, he or she may not be able to accept the loss mentally and emotionally. Following an unexpected death, the mourner may feel that the world no longer has order and does not make sense. Some people believe that anticipatory grief is rare. To accept a loved one's death while he or she is still alive may leave the mourner feeling that the dying patient has been abandoned. Expecting the loss often makes the attachment to the dying person stronger. Although anticipatory grief may help the family, the dying person may experience too much grief, causing the patient to become withdrawn.

Significant Differences Can Repair Life.

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the term “Mindful Recovery?”

Is it Addiction? Trauma? Depression? Or maybe something else?

Maybe it’s all of those things, but I’m going to pose this moment to be a time to look back on the last year and ask yourself, “What afflictions have I suffered this year that I am in recovery for?” Maybe this last year you let stress get the best of you? Maybe your relationship slipped this past year as you got roped into more television programs or Facebook addictions. Maybe you did slip into abuse with drugs, alcohol, sex, work, or overly accommodating people in life who abuse you.

What’s going to be different in the coming hours, days, weeks and months ahead?

Perhaps the simplest path is to make the intention an awareness of the moments you get sucked into these destructive behaviors that you want to change. In this space of awareness we draw a second intention which is to get curious about what the feeling is that you’re trying to escape from.

I think where we make our greatest error is when we make those resolutions that say, “I’m going to go the gym more, meditate more, start playing guitar or bring the romance back.” This jumps the gun. There are so many steps that occur before taking action with any of these things. There’s already a built up resistance to them and to skip over that is a recipe for failure.

What if these changes you wanted to make were couched in less immediacy? It’s helpful to actually understand what going on with the auto-pilot that lives within each one of us.

Here’s 7 steps to get underneath the hood and give yourself the change of making real change last:

1. Set a date to do whatever it is you want to do. Whether it’s the gym, yoga, spending more time with family, or getting all the alcohol out of the house.
2. When that time comes, don’t do anything, just take a seat or lie down.
3. Open up to the body, what is being experienced? What’s the urge? What emotions are there? Just open up without judgment, exploring this with curiosity, as if this was the first time you were getting to know yourself.
4. Know you are the ocean, not the waves and urge surf. In other words, watch the sensations and emotions rise, peak and eventually fall.
5. Put your hand on your heart and thank yourself for taking time out of all your daily busy-ness for your own health and well-being.
6. Engage with whatever it is you wanted to engage with even if there’s only a few minutes left.
7. Repeat the practice several times over and over again.

See if you can release whatever judgments are arising in your mind right now about whether this will or will not work. Don’t let yourself be enslaved by the judgments, instead let your experience be your best teacher. This is your year for a mindful recovery

What Is Mouring and Grieving?

What is grief?


Grief is the normal internal feeling one experiences in reaction to a loss, while bereavement is the state of having experienced that loss. Although people often suffer emotional pain in response to loss of anything that is very important to them (for example, a job, a friendship, one's sense of safety, a home), grief usually refers to the loss of a loved one through death. Grief is quite common, in that three out of four women outlive their spouse, with the average age of becoming a widow being 56 years. More than half of women in the United States are widowed by the time they reach age 65. Every year in the United States, 4% of children under the age of 15 experience the death of a parent.

Although not a formal medical diagnosis, prolonged grief, formerly called complicated grief refers to a reaction to loss that lasts more than one year. It is characterized by the grief reaction intensifying to affect all of the sufferer's close relationships, disrupting his or her beliefs, and it tends to result in the bereaved experiencing ongoing longing for their deceased loved one. About 15% of bereaved individuals will suffer from complicated grief, and one-third of people already getting mental-health services have been found to suffer from this extended grief reaction.

Anticipatory grief is defined as the feelings loved ones have in reaction to knowing that someone they care about is terminally ill. It occurs before the death of the afflicted loved one and can be an important part of the grieving process since this allows time for loved ones to say goodbye to the terminally ill individual, begin to settle affairs, and plan for the funeral or other rituals on behalf of the person who is dying.



What is mourning?


As opposed to grief, which refers to how someone may feel the loss of a loved one, mourning is the outward expression of that loss. Mourning usually involves culturally determined rituals that help the bereaved individuals make sense of the end of their loved one's life and give structure to what can feel like a very confusing time. Therefore, while the internal pain of grief is a more universal phenomenon, how people mourn is influenced by their personal, familial, cultural, religious, and societal beliefs and customs. Everything from how families prepare themselves and their loved ones for death, and understand and react to the passing to the practices for preserving memories of the deceased, their funeral or memorial, burial, cremation or other ways of handling the remains of the deceased is influenced by internal and external factors.

The length of time for a formal mourning period and sometimes the amount of bereavement leave people are allowed to take from work is determined by a combination of personal, familial, cultural, religious, and societal factors. Mourning customs also affect how bereaved individuals may feel comfortable seeking support as well as the appropriate ways for their friends and family to express sympathy during this time. For example, cultures may differ greatly in how much or how little the aggrieved individual may talk about their loss with friends, family members, and coworkers and may determine whether or not participating in a bereavement support group or psychotherapy is acceptable