Care Giver and Bereavment

Grief is our normal, natural, and necessary response to loss. Its flip-side, bereavement (or mourning), is the process of responding to, and ultimately surviving loss. Both grief and bereavement are individualized experiences, and experts say everyone's experience is different.

How We Grieve

We tend to grieve along a spectrum of grieving styles. One end of the spectrum has been called "intuitive grieving," characterized by outbursts of emotion and the need to talk about one's feelings. The other end has been called "instrumental grieving," characterized by a focus on doing things that help one cope.
But it's not one or the other for most people. Healthy grieving almost always is some combination of both styles.
Since the 1960s, people have talked about the stages of grief and bereavement -- denial, anger, bargaining,  depression, and acceptance. But for most people, grief isn't a linear process of moving from one stage to the next. Instead, stages tend to loop around and come back again and again.
Many factors, including how the loved one's illness progressed, how long the caregiver provided care, and whether the caregiver has a good support system, have an influence on how long people mourn.
Grief symptoms associated with an expected death -- anger, numbness, crying, sleepless nights, mood swings, aches and pains, forgetfulness -- tend to peak around the six-month mark, then taper off.
When symptoms don't fade over time, a person may be suffering from what psychologists call "complicated grief." If it's been several months since the loss and your feelings are still so strong that you can't resume your normal routine, it's time to talk to your doctor or to seek psychological counseling.

A Helping Hand

For caregivers whose loved one is in a  palliative care program, the team's social worker, grief counselor, and spiritual counselor are available to help and support caregivers during their loved one's illness and after the loved one has died.
Part of what the palliative care team does is look for situations or triggers that might indicate a caregiver is having difficulty or that might complicate the grieving and bereavement. Then the team will help the caregiver look at options and alternatives to ease the grief and sense of loss.


Most caregivers who lose a loved one will experience a normal sense of grief and bereavement. Normal, though, does not mean free of emotional, physical, and spiritual pain. Here are things you can do to help with those feelings:

• Know the triggers. The first year will have many emotional triggers: first birthday without the loved one, the first Thanksgiving, the anniversary of the death. When these "firsts" occur, the waves of grief can come crashing back.
• Know your priorities. It's important to maintain friendships, routines, activities, and other things that nourish you physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
• Plan for the unexpected. One way to do this is to think about and rehearse your responses to the questions others might ask. Doing so can keep you from being blindsided.
• Don't bottle things up. Talk to the palliative care social worker, counselor, advance practice nurse, and physician. Talking about things helps you acknowledge your feelings and enables you to say good-bye and find emotional closure.
• Don't try to do it alone. Before your loved one is gone, make sure you've put together a support system made up of people you can count on to be there, lean on for support, and depend on for help with chores and other things that need to be done.
• Don't make big changes. During the first year avoid doing things that will mean a major change in your life. Don't move, don't get divorced, don't cut off communication with people you are close to. Experts say you will be a different person as time passes.
• Take care of your health. That doesn't just mean eat well, get a good night's sleep, and exercise. It means doing things that ensure emotional and spiritual well-being, too.
• Don't isolate yourself. Loneliness breeds loneliness. Don't turn down invitations, even though going out may be the last thing you want to do.
• Deal with anger. Anger is self-perpetuating and can snowball. Grief counseling can help you understand and deal with the anger you feel.
• Keep the faith. Religion won't "fix" things, experts say. But it can help normalize them. And belonging to a faith group means you have a community for support.
• Take up new activities. New activities help you form new patterns of doing things and new interests that are not associated with the person who has died.
• Make humor part of your coping routine. Humor can help provide perspective on the way your life is changing.

Please contact  Dr. Losito for any of these symptoms, feeling uncomfortable let him know at gsusan2004@hotmail.com   

The Sun Shines Again

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

A Rebuilding of Healing.

“For many people, an affair is deeply traumatizing [and] some marriages can’t recover from it,” said Jason Seidel, PsyD, founder and director of The Colorado Center for Clinical Excellence in Denver. But if you decide to work on your relationship post-affair, you must accept a hard truth: Another affair can happen. This is the paradox of healing, Seidel said.

Often, partners who’ve been cheated on will demand full access to their spouse’s email, cell phone records, Facebook and other accounts (or they’ll sneak around to get the access), he said. They see this as legitimate and essential to helping reestablish trust in the relationship. A common belief is “How could I ever trust you again unless you give me full access?”

While this thinking is understandable, it simply doesn’t work.


The real issue, at the core, is self-protection. Partners cling to the idea that if they have all the information and control enough of their partner’s life, they’ll somehow be spared another betrayal, Seidel said. (Some partners also will take this distrust into new relationships, where they automatically doubt the person and almost prepare themselves for infidelity, he said.)

But the reality is that “no amount of access satisfies the need,” and it’s a “false sense of security.” While it might seem contradictory, to fully heal and rebuild your relationship, partners need to relinquish control of their spouse’s behavior.

Clutching to controlling ways only distances you more from your partner and stalls progress. It “undermines your partner’s willingness to own up to their behavior” or feel remorseful or accountable. It creates a counterattack that disrupts healing, Seidel said.

Of course, other work is required, too. “Affairs don’t happen in relationships that are strong to begin with,” Seidel said, who works with couples on a number of issues that plague the relationship. This “may take a tremendous amount of effort.”

One of the key elements of recovering and healing from an affair is to “drop into your grief and grieve the relationship you thought you had.” It also involves “grieving the loss of your naïveté.” The other partner must honor this grieving process and not rush it, he said.

In time, the “wounded partner” also needs to look inward and decide whether they’re able to open their heart to their partner again — and whether they’ll be OK if another betrayal occurs. But this doesn’t mean closing your eyes if you sense your partner is being dishonest or “not working on making amends or really understanding what happened,” he said.

Seidel’s other advice to betrayed partners is to accept that your powers are limited, get clear on your own boundaries and build up resources like social support.

The partners who cheated also have a difficult time post-affair. Unless the affair is done in “a callous and cavalier way,” they often struggle with a “sense of devastation, deep shame and fear.” They lose their sense of self, in part because they didn’t believe that they were the type to commit adultery. The best way to heal and “process these particular emotions may be in individual therapy where the unfaithful partner can sort through them with less defensiveness,” Seidel said.

Again, healing after an affair and rebuilding the relationship requires the effort of both partners, along with the difficult acceptance that ultimately another betrayal could happen, “and if so, where will you be in terms of your resources and your sense of strength to move on?”

Post Relatonship Emotions

There are times in our lives when we may question everything, even ourselves. There are no guarantees about anything in life and all we can do is do our best. Beyond doing our best, everything else is not in our control. Sometimes when things turn bad for us it wears us down and makes us question ourselves and others. That is the very time you must take care of yourself, stay strong, eat healthy because staying healthy helps us mentally, emotionally, and, of course, physically. Sometimes we wonder things like, "How can a significant other ever return into a relationship?", how will I ever get through college, how will I ever have a relationship again is I've lost my true love, etc. We wonder what others will do and what we will do. All I can say is stay strong, do your best, stay healthy, and things will work out. If a relationship is meant to be, it will be. If the love is there a relationship will begin or continue. Love conquers. Love still stands when all else has fallen.