22. The Grief Process, Denial, Bargaining and Mental Fitness
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.
