Mental Fitness Formula
23. The Grief Process: Anger, Sadness and Acceptance

23. The Grief Process: Anger, Sadness and Acceptance

by | Dec 9, 2021 | Exploring the Mental Fitness Formula

Dolly was a beautiful long-haired dachshund with a personality that we knew from the start would one day break our hearts. After almost eighteen years, that’s what happened. I must tell you about her. In this picture she’s still got the shorter coat of a puppy. She would tip her head as she looked at you and charm you to tears. She’d play under a sheet like a cat, on her back batting at your hand and rolling around as you tickled  her through the sheet. She would stand over our our chests and try to kiss us. She turned her head sideways so she could gently surround John’s nose with her jaw. She was two months old when we got her and the only other dog she tolerated was Henry, her Black and Tan older dachshund “brother.” We’d have to pick her up and restrain her to keep her from rushing to go for the throat of any dog we encountered. Henry loved to fetch a stick in a river or lake. She’d only do it a few times as if to show that she could.

You get the picture. We were in denial that we would lose her the last couple years and carefully dosed her with pain meds for her back pain. We even looked into back surgery for her (bargaining?). We weren’t angry over her death, but we were devastated with how it happened. Her back suddenly went into terrible pain and it was traumatic taking her, shivering and distraught, to be euthanized. John still cringes over seeing her go limp. I still feel pain in my chest when I think of her eleven years later. It was hard not to feel disloyal as though she could see me (continuing denial?), when two years later we adopted five-year old Dixie. John, who used to think he didn’t like dogs, is intensely bonded with Dixie and of course I love her unique, gentle and sweet temperament. Like Henry, she doesn’t know much about playing, just lots about love. Grief is a personal and unique journey for all of us. I’ll never lose all the pain of losing Dolly and I’m glad I still have that much of her left in my heart.

Continuing with this objective discussion of the grief process: Anger happens when you actually recognize what you’ve lost. You may have counted on someone to be there for you who wasn’t (Belief # 10). You may be very upset when others don’t share your standards for how to behave (Belief # 3). You may hate a person who gets the job you expected because of your many years of service (Belief #7). If you hadn’t worked hard for the promotion, you’d be angry because you expected special treatment (Belief # 11). You may be angry with yourself (guilty)  if you don’t get extremely upset over a loved one’s problems, even when you provide a lot of support (Belief # 6).

Your Adult can help reduce the intensity of your fight-or-flight reactions by challenging the beliefs that keep them fired up. As an adult you can handle more than your Critical and Indulgent Parents tell you in these Toxic Beliefs. Your Adult can look for your Child’s “I can’t stand it when…” and “this is unbearable,” in response to their influence. Adult self-management (mental fitness) can help you calm down and move into the next step of grief.

Sadness happens when you feel the effects of your loss. The previous stages of grief reduce this feeling and even protect you from it. The pressure of your Parents’ Toxic Beliefs can leave your Child very much afraid of knowing how s/he really feels. Our society’s general support for these Twelve Toxic Beliefs supports this fear. Clients I worked with who cried during doctor appointments often left with medication to suppress their grief. Especially for men, it’s still often considered a shameful weakness to be very sad for very long. Anger and denial are generally  better accepted for them.

Sadness is called trauma when it leads men and women soldiers to take their lives after what they’d experienced in war. People are traumatized when they are abused as children. Trauma victims may repress their memories for many years, shoving them aside without realizing it. Our human brain-body systems protect us as much as they can, from what they believe could cause life-threatening destabilization.

There’s a difference in the degree of wounding and pain between what is considered trauma and sadness. For both of these our society’s embrace of Toxic Beliefs makes resolving grief more difficult. People often won’t seek help when they need it. They may revisit denial, bargaining and especially anger for years as they fend off their (sometimes buried out of their awareness) fear of what sadness might do to them. However, grief can only be resolved when you complete the whole process. Connecting with people who have a strong Wise Parent, friends, a counselor or a support group can help your Adult when your Toxic Parent-Child interactions overwhelm you with fear. With the right support your Adult can gradually free you of these influences and build a Wise Parent to comfort you and soothe your sadness.

Finally, you could be ready to move into the last stage of grief that’s most often called acceptance. People all need to find their own understanding of how to resolve their grief each time they experience it. One client said she found adjusting to fit better for what she felt. This expressed for her the fact that acceptance doesn’t mean you have to decide that something was fair or just, but simply that it happened and it’s over. This is what’s possible when your Toxic Beliefs about your loss are revised into reality-based versions which are readily accessible from your Wise Parent. For some, especially those who have been traumatized, mind-body work is needed to reset their fight-or-flight sensitivity. Many can only resolve their grief when they turn their wounds into action to prevent similar pain for others. This is called transforming grief and will be discussed in future posts. For a more thorough discussion of the grief process, trauma resolution, and depression, see Claim Your Own Mental Fitness, Part II, chapters 4, 5 & 6.

 

 

25. The Grief Process for Human Relationships

25. The Grief Process for Human Relationships

by | Dec 8, 2021 | Exploring the Mental Fitness Formula

In my practice I saw many people struggle to manage fight-or-flight reactions in their work relationships. In these settings, since there were both friend- and livelihood-related issues at stake, their reactions were often intense and long-lasting. Sometimes they would get physically sick and often they felt trapped. They needed a bridge to take them over their grief either to adjust to their situation or cross over to another healthier one.

It was helpful for them to learn about the grief process in these situations and lower their stress levels. First we’d look at the first two stages, denial and bargaining, which usually occur without your awareness. At work when you encounter a person whose behavior hurts or frustrates you, you often can’t just walk away. First you assume that he actually could understand what you’re experiencing and help with the situation. When these efforts fail, instead of grasping that he, for some reason, can’t understand, you may deny this possibility. You struggle to reach him too long (bargaining) because you just don’t want to accept that this is true, especially when you must deal with him often. Then your supervisor might also use denial (knowing it or not) and insist that you cope anyway. Sound familiar?

You can maintain denial indefinitely as you suffer anxiety or frustration in these situations. Your Adult can reduce this tendency if it expects your flight into denial. As the graph above Post #24 suggests, denial doesn’t prevent stress, even though it temporarily suppresses intense fear, anger or sadness. When a manager in a work setting won’t engage his Adult to face that he has an employee whose dysfunction is serious, he diminishes the energy of his whole team. It’s hard to manage his own fight-or-flight reactions at the same time that he tries to interpret what’s going on with others. Effective managers can do this. Other managers often don’t know how to manage their own reactions and may also lack the Adult support from their own managers to take appropriate action. “Don’t make waves,” if you want to be promoted, is a formula for institutionalized denial.

After a while, it’s perfectly understandable that the third step in the grief process, anger, would emerge. First you get angry at the frustrating person for failing to understand, no matter what you try. You might even believe that he does understand, but is deliberately antagonizing you. Then you get angry at those who refuse to face the reality of his deficient functioning. You might even get angry with yourself because you can’t resolve what you’re expected to manage on your own. As I noted in Post #23, it’s possible to get stuck indefinitely in the angry stage of the grief process. This is especially damaging, because anger takes so much of your energy and harms your body with toxic surges of fight-or-flight chemicals. It can also lead to more stress and loss if you displace it into other relationships.

Therefore, I recommend that your Adult and Wise Parent help you move on to the fourth stage of the grief process which is sadness. It’s sad that this other person can’t walk in your shoes or find ways to cooperate with you. It’s sad that he may lack the brain functioning (because of his wiring and/or his experience) to use his Adult when he interacts with you. It’s sad that many supervisors don’t use their Adult capacity to manage properly. Sadness is less damaging than anger because it takes your mind and body closer to acceptance of the reality you face. You recognize it’s not within your power to change the situation and you may release your frustration through healing tears.

I haven’t seen people stay for long in pure sadness. They return to angry bargaining or move ahead to the fifth stage of grief, acceptance or adjustment. If you keep going back to “bang your head against a stone wall,” you’re likely to develop depression. With depression you fluctuate between anger and helpless sadness until you exhaust yourself. This can happen without your full awareness unless you keep your Adult alert to where you are in the grief process.

If you have a very toxic work situation it’s usually best for you to move on to another job, after you’ve tried for a reasonable time to cope. If you’re confused or overwhelmed, be sure to find a counselor or wise friend to help your Adult sort this out. Once you accept the sad reality of these non-mentally-fit associates, you can leave strategically, with dignity and less discomfort for yourself and your loved ones. It’s helpful to stop bargaining and getting angry with them. I told my clients how often I’d seen a simple change in work environment end the symptoms that had put them on medication, ruined their relationships or damaged their physical health. The Wise Parent phrase, if I don’t have the power to change a situation, I can’t have the responsibility is good to keep close at hand.