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.

8 ways to forgive yourself and let go of your past

 Question:   I enjoyed your articles about forgiving other people, but how do you forgive yourself and move on when you have made many mistakes? That is what I struggle with.

Answer:  You are not alone. Most of us hold on to past mistakes and let them affect our self-esteem for way too long. This is not healthy and does not serve anyone. Here are eight suggestions that may help you to forgive yourself:

1. Look at the past experiences as locations on your journey through life, instead of letting them define who you areIf you were on a road trip and drove through Texas, would the time you spent there make you a Texan? Of course not. It was just the location you drove through; it doesn’t change who you are. Your value is the same no matter what you experience along your journey. Mistakes teach you important lessons, but they don’t define who you are — at least they don't have to. You can see them as locations on your journey if you choose to.

2. Give yourself permission to be a work in progressChoose to see life as a classroom, not a testing center. You have the option to believe that your value isn’t on the line here and you are not being graded — you are just here to learn and grow. Seeing life as a classroom helps you focus on the lessons so you can forgive yourself and try to do better next time.

3. Understand how pointless shame isI believe "shame" stands for: should have already mastered everything. That is ridiculous. You are a student in the classroom of life. There is no way could know it all, all the time. Give yourself permission to be an imperfect work in progress. You are learning and growing and that is enough.

4. Figuratively get rid of it for goodYou could write it down on paper and burn it. You could write what you did, put it in a box and bury it in the backyard. Then make a rule that you can’t bring it up again, unless you dig the box up first. (This exercise is great for couples who keep fighting about the past too.) Bury that stuff deep and let it die there. There is no sense wasting energy on things you can’t change. Focus on the future instead.

5. Learn some new skillsFocus on making your future brighter. This is in your control. Be present and find ways to improve yourself daily. Learning new skills is great for your self-esteem.
6. Imagine there is a dark room in your house where you can stash negative thoughts and emotionsEvery time negative thoughts show up, which aren't worth processing anymore, visualize putting them in the dark room and slamming the door. You can always go in there, if you need to process it some more and dwell in self-pity. But you could also leave the negativity in the dark room forever. This empowers you to have control over what to do with those feelings.

7. Clean out your closets and your houseMost people, who hold on to old stuff, are also holding on to old ways of thinking and feeling. When you get rid of your old stuff, you can send your old beliefs, mistakes and fears out with it. Cleaning your house out will make you feel fresh and new on every level.

8. Change it up and try new thingsBreak out of your old ruts and change some things. Try new outfit combinations, new foods, new restaurants, new sports or new kinds of movies. The more you break out of routine and change it up, you will also open yourself up to feel differently about yourself and your life.Steve Maraboli, in his book "Life, the Truth, and Being Free," said “Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don’t.” The past is out of your control; there is nothing you can do to change it. Let it go.

Choose joy for today.

You can do this.