by wp-admin | Dec 9, 2021 | Exploring the Mental Fitness Formula
The graph above describes an intuitive view of the grief process, based on how much energy grief seems to require at each stage. The way energy flows in your process may be different, but what’s important is for your Adult to learn how to recognize the five stages as they happen. Grief can prevent mental fitness and the kind of joy that makes life a rich adventure. It sucks out the hope human beings need to keep engaging in life. Seeing grief in five stages allows your Adult to track your progress and observe when you’re moving forward, sliding back or getting stuck. Humans do seem to share this five-stage process while they grieve in their own way.
In this post we’ll look at the first two stages of this process and the next three in the following post. Toxic Beliefs create unrealistic expectations for what life brings you. You have a loss to grieve each time these aren’t met. The beliefs of your Critical Parent may cause you to lose confidence in yourself as well as others. For example, Belief #3 encourages you to set standards for yourself and others that may be unrealistic. Your Indulgent Parent embraces Belief #8, that happiness depends on what happens to you and other beliefs that make you expect more from other people than you’ll receive and less from yourself. Each of these Parents sets you up to expect things that your Adult could recognize are unrealistic.
Denial and bargaining are the first stages of the grief process. They can happen outside of your awareness for just awhile or for years. In many cases Toxic Beliefs that interfere with your Adult functioning were somewhat valid when you were a child. If your parents had outgrown these, they might have offered role models for how to revise them as you grew up. If not, you’ll need to do this on your own, possibly with the support of wise, mature friends or a counselor. Your watchful Adult can learn to recognize their influence and help you face and heal your losses. Your Wise Parent can become your Child’s reliable internal support, replacing your Critical and Indulgent Parents as it comforts you with revised beliefs. This support will allow your Child to tolerate the next stages of your grief process and reduce tendencies to revert back into previously visited stages.
Denial begins when your Child can’t believe or accept that what she counted on doesn’t happen. Perhaps your mother didn’t make you feel loved and Belief #1 that you must have the love of a significant person, haunts you years later with fight-or-flight reactions in close relationships. You need a way to grieve and heal this wound, but your Adult can’t tackle this problem as long as you deny its impact. Perhaps your father’s job helped reinforce his father’s embrace of Belief #3, that his standards must always be met, and he was unfairly critical of you and others. Maybe your grandmother’s Indulgent Parent encouraged you to feel like you deserve to feel sorry for yourself when things don’t go easily for you and you’re upset to be disappointed over and over again (Belief # 11 or # 12). As long as you deny or minimize these very painful facts (with or without awareness), your Adult can’t revise your beliefs, and you don’t build a Wise Parent to comfort you.
Bargaining happens when you use irrational strategies to maintain your denial. Belief # 1 could lead you to minimize what one parent did to hurt you, because you feel like you must have at least one parent who loved you when you were a child. As an adult, this belief might keep you from being assertive with a friend or partner as your Child trembles with the fear of losing him. Belief #3 could make you try to pressure others to behave according to the standards you’ve learned and get very disappointed when they don’t. You might block out or lie about memories from the past if Belief # 5 leads you to fear that your past determines what your present life can be. This internal bargaining might delay loss of a friend or a job, but it may also set you up for more loss when you friend or associate loses respect for you and doesn’t want you around any longer.
You’ll note on the graph that these denial efforts do cost more energy than when you’ve resolved the grief process. If you remain in denial and bargaining, your Child’s sense of security remains lower and your Indulgent and Critical Parents respond with heightened signals for fight-or-flight. When a new loss occurs, your Adult will have less ability to sort out what’s going on as your feelings of fight-or-flight escalate. If your Adult can keep resolving your grief as events happen, you’ll be resilient for future disappointments, frustrations and trauma. This requires you to move out of denial and on to the next stages of grief, anger, sadness and acceptance.
Social anxiety is another common issue for HSPs. It is a chronic form of Personalization that can be isolating and very harmful. It’s the feeling that the people around you are always looking for ways to find fault with you. I remember feeling sick to my stomach as I sat among the 20 kids in my kindergarten class for most of the year. As a young teenager I’d easily be triggered into the same feeling when I had to cope with several kids. This problem was worsened because my family often enjoyed teasing me until I cried and ran away when we sat at the dinner table. They justified this by telling me, “The world’s a harsh place and we’re trying to help you stop being so sensitive.”*
Although most of my HSP clients weren’t tormented, social anxiety was prevalent for them. I was so miserable by age twelve that I began reading to find some answers. I received my first Bible and loved to read about the kindness that Jesus taught people to offer everyone. I read my dad’s copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People and discovered that people need you to focus on them and listen well. I journaled every night, noting whether I had done that. I was a lonely, intense and talkative kid, so this was difficult, but I learned to stop sharing much about myself with anyone but a couple friends and to listen well.
One fascinating thing I discovered during this self-improvement effort was how really focused on themselves most people (including me) are. It was such a relief to realize that I could be invisible to most people simply by not talking. As I shared these strategies with my HSP clients, I received the most surprised reactions when they tried this experiment: When you’re in a group of people you don’t know well, engage another person in light conversation (“small talk”) by asking about them, their family, their hobbies, their job, what they’ve done for fun lately. Encourage them to talk for a while and then add a very brief comment about yourself related to what they’ve been sharing. See how long it is before they look at their watch. My clients usually were skeptical, but would return and exclaim that they couldn’t believe how quickly others actually did that, and then moved on to talk with someone else. We agreed that those who actually kept interacting might be friend material, unless they were leading up to a marketing proposal.
When I worked for the Dale Carnegie classes in Chicago I was taught how to engage a boss to listen and sometimes make the choice to pay for an employee to take the classes that embodied what I’d read in his book when I was twelve. It brought me to tears to see how others were transformed in the fourteen-week, four-hours-a-night class. Gradually, I overcame most of my remaining social anxiety as I grew in my interpersonal skills and discovered that others’ responses really had almost nothing to do with me. I never became a great salesperson, but what I learned has meant so much more than money for the rest of my life.
Another problem HSPs have is that too often when they tell their doctors about their anxiety and how it cripples them, they’re offered addictive medication (like the valium I was prescribed and didn’t take). Usually they aren’t clearly referred for counseling, where they could learn how to cope without this, even when the meds begin to cause serious problems. I’ve worked with HSPs addicted to these medications who went thru hell to get off of them because of their HSP sensitivity to these drugs.
*In Elaine Aron’s video, Sensitive, she describes how often family and friends may try this damaging approach with HSPs and provides a thorough description of what a “Highly Sensitive Person” is. It’s available for about $10.00 at her website, www.hsp.com .
principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated. (From the Dale Carnegie Course, 1976)
Here’s a new take on compassion and assertiveness! For a stronger Adult, a wiser Wise Parent and a more secure Child, consider the story of “Compassion, Assertiveness and the Pop-Bead Puppy.”
As I sat feeling exhausted in my doctor’s sunny waiting room, an older man holding a string of gold-colored pop-beads came over to me. He said “I want to give you something.” I was touched by his kind, gentle manner and invited him to sit next to me. Before retiring he’d traveled all around Louisiana working for Carpenter Tractors. Gradually he’d discovered that what he loved best to do was “put a smile on a someone’s face.” He said giving tiny pop-bead animals to people was his way to do that and he twisted the golden beads into a puppy for me.
I asked the Bead Man what he did when people got annoyed and treated him like he was trying to do something harmful to them. His face darkened and he said, “That’s bad.” After a moment he added, “but I know He (pointing upward as his face brightened) knows what I’m doing. I shared with him how I’d spent my life trying to find ways to do the same thing. I thanked him and as he left we laughed about how we both “just couldn’t get enough of those wonderful smiles.” This left me to ponder the issue of how humans react to what others offer them.
This gentle man felt really bad when people turned their eyes and hearts away from him as though he were panhandling for loose change. He wanted so much for people to give his gift a chance and could only keep going because he believed that a Higher Power recognized and appreciated him every time. Let’s consider what his motives might have been to perform this unusual behavior. Was he really panhandling for something else that would take from others much more than it gave? We’d call that self-serving and turn away. We could stay open to a friend who did that for a while, but not a stranger. Perhaps we’d fear that if we “gave him an inch, he’d take a mile,” and try to expand the contact into asking, say for a meal or a donation or more listening than we wanted to offer.
The Bead Man told me he just did this to see me smile. Why would he want to do that? He could be one of Elaine Aron’s HSP’s with “sensory processing sensitivity,” whose mirror neurons in their brain get more excited by smiles than the other 80% of the population, so he’d just be sharing what he loves. Chefs, artists, car dealers and most of the rest of us like to do that with others who enjoy the same things. They learn not to take rejection of their gifts as a rejection of themselves and to accept that what they offer may have limited appeal. Finally, he may have found this as a way to somehow transform grief from his life, like the mothers whose children were killed by drunk drivers joined to form MADD, with profoundly rooted zeal and determination to keep fewer children from dying this way.
When someone offers you a gift with an extra urgency that could make you suspicious and turn away, try staying open and allow your Adult to consider thoughtfully where this earnest person is really coming from. Unless there could actually be life-or-death consequences, let your Wise Parent assure your Child that your assertive Adult can set effective limits as needed. Remember that all of us want recognition and appreciation from each other, whatever our styles and the gifts we offer. You may find a kindred spirit along the way to brighten the path of your journey and soothe the pain we all find as we travel.
by wp-admin | 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.
by wp-admin | 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.
by wp-admin | Dec 29, 2015 | Exploring the Mental Fitness Formula
If you see what’s wrong and you try to make it right, you will be a point of light! Randy Travis
Grief has much more impact on us than we realize. We can recognize many things that make us sad: the loss of a pet, of a child, a job, a spouse or parent, our hearing or mobility, a relationship, financial well-being, etc. Any of these can cast us into deeply felt grief and even trauma. But in modern times we’re also aware of terrible suffering all around the world that can overwhelm us. How do you resolve this grief that can render you helpless? How do you keep from being so overwhelmed that you withdraw and avoid any but your closest friends and family? How do you avoid “compassion fatigue? Mrs. Fixit will try to help your Adult transform your grief by breaking this process into bite-sized pieces.
Focus inward with your Adult. Ask what you love to do. What are you pretty good or even expert at doing? Consider what skills or knowledge you’ve developed that you could share with others, like musical proficiency, computer skills, patience with children or impaired adults, skills for organization, counseling, cooking, building, leading, mentoring, nurturing, etc. Ask your friends to help you identify your strengths. Encourage them to share as well. You might even discover a friend who’d be able and willing to join you in some venture. Consider your weak points too; they help focus your search. Contemplate how your skills and passions might mesh. When these come together you can expect to have satisfaction, joy and the respect of others as you pursue your bliss.
Next, have your Adult look outward to discover opportunities in your community or online for you to participate as you’d like. If you love to read, you could start a book club, volunteer at your local library or literacy programs, read to children at your local school, older adults with impaired sight, or children in a local hospital. You might find some activities that inspire you to engage in them long-term. If you enjoy leadership, you could find ways to help extend the programs you love and guide or train others. If you have artistic or musical skills, there might be opportunities to share these. You can decide from the beginning what you most want to offer to others and look for activities that will allow you to share some of these.
It’s valuable to be aware of how you’re processing your grief, but it’s not helpful to do it for hours a day. Focusing on others who need what you can offer may be the most universal way humans can distract themselves from their grief and get a new perspective. You might need to start with small steps into a new group or activity and find your way gradually. Grief can soak up a lot of your energy. But as you get familiar with the people and learn the ropes in the new setting you may find yourself interested and moved by those you help. Most of the people who help you get started and serve with you will welcome you. Some will become friends as you discover other things you have in common. A few will lack the mental fitness to avoid feeling threatened, but when you volunteer you don’t have to stay, if this persists. You can never escape the impact of raw human nature!
Whether you’re healing from a painful loss or not, volunteering is probably the easiest way to join others. It’s especially helpful if social anxiety has been a barrier for you. You’ll be busy doing specific things and won’t have to create conversation from scratch. When you discover how you are able to help others, the helpless feelings of grief are blunted. You’ll have more energy and confidence as you participate.
There will be more things to grieve as you venture out instead of trying to hide from pain in your own world. As you share your feelings with newfound friends your sadness can move into some kind of acceptance. You’ll realize that you can only be one point of light but when you share it you’ll inspire others to keep their own burning. In my Mrs. Fixit mode I transform my grief over past, present and future concerns even as I write this post. It feels wonderful to share what I’ve learned, often the hard way, to help others suffer less. It’s healing to think that I might help some of my readers become points of light themselves. My Wise Parent says, you can’t improve anything if you let yourself get stuck in grief and despair.
