Finding The Path Through The Bewildering Experience Of Loss
July 23, 2010 in Acceptance, Balance, Career Coaching, Communication, Compassion, Grief, Grounding, Healing, Intuition, Knowledge, Love, Motivation, Perception, Purpose, Rainbow Bridge Coaching and Healing, Spiritual Connection, Thought, Uncategorized, Understanding, Wisdom
Parents who lose a child are often left feeling as if they have survived a catastrophe and are left standing at ground zero with no clue as to where to go or how to begin getting their life back. It is difficult to know what to do from where they are at and on top of it they are left feeling stunned and reeling from the intense feelings of loss and pain. Our society I have found offers little help in this area and the things people tell us such as time heals all wounds and he’s in a better place anger, frustrate, and stir up the anxiety and confusion we already feel. What I was fortunate enough to have found is that there are tools we can use that make a huge difference in how quickly and easily we are able to merge our lives before we lost our child with the life we have now without that child. Although forever changed we can learn to adjust and be happy again. We can each use our own creative and intuitive abilities fine tuned to us to help us find the peace we need. We just need to be taught how and my experience was that with a grief recovery coach I was able to learn not only what these tools are but was coached on how to use them. Some of the help I found came from a book I read called: The Infinite Thread: Healing Relationships Beyond Loss by Alexandra Kennedy. In it she mentions 7 steps for the process of recovery.
They are:
- to express all the feelings over this loss: anguish, longing, relief, anger, depression, numbness, despair, aching, guilt, confusion, and often unbearable pain
- to let the nonnegotiable and excruciating reality sink in that you will never again be in the physical presence of your deceased loved one
- to review your relationship from the beginning and to see the positive and negative aspects of the person and the relationship
- to identify and heal your unresolved issues and your regrets
- to explore the changes in your family and other relationships
- to integrate all the changes into a new sense of yourself and to take on healthy new ways of being in the world without this person
- to form a healthy new inner relationship with this person and to find new ways of relating to him or her.
Kennedys book reinforced how it’s important to actively work to integrate and resolve our grief, not to just passively experience our reactions to it. She states that, “Grief carries us until we learn to carry it.” Reading that phrase helped me understand that we do not need to stay victims of grief we can be survivors and even captains of our destiny again if we wish!
Peace & Light,
Stella Wichman
Certified From Heartbreak to Happiness Coach
www.parentsgriefrecovery.com
“Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself?”
Thomas Jefferson
Soon after my son’s murdered remains were found I was filling out a form and came to the question, “How many children do you have?” I remember feeling panic at that moment at how to answer this question I had previously answered easily for over twenty years. Logic said three girls but my heart thought no, that is not right, that seems like denying my sons existence. Next I thought, I have three girls and one son, four kids, no, that isn’t right either, is it?
Immediately after I found out my son had been murdered people starting telling me “time heals all wounds”. I am sure they told me this because they wanted to say something to make me feel better or because they had heard the phrase before and it seemed to fit or because they did not know what else to say. I can honestly say that at first when you lose a child it seems like time is the enemy. The impossibly long harrowing days blended into even longer agonizing nights of pain, loneliness and confusion make one wish that time could be stopped and even better reversed to a point when your child was still happy and with you. Then there is the sudden realization that now that your child has died you will never see him on this earth again. That all you really have to hold onto if you are religious or spiritual is that you will eventually be together again but you also soon realize that it will be a long time in coming and in another place. And that thought puts you at odds with time as well!
When my son died an additional hardship was deciding how to tell his sisters as well as how to balance my own grief along with supporting them in theirs. The following is an excerpt from my diary and upcoming book 
In January I touched upon the subject of recovery after the death of a child. When I say recovery I do not mean a neatly complete type of closure but rather a regaining of the ability to function at a previous level, an integration of one’s loss and a successful resolution of the situation. In some ways, though, we can never recover totally, because we will never be exactly the way we were before. The loss of a child, changes us in many ways. What we can recover are our attributes and our capabilities, even though other aspects of us are different. We now have a slightly different self, due to the changes in us and our world as a consequence of our Child’s death.
Embrace Your Spirituality 
What a great question! A wonderful young man asked this lately and it brought to mind the problem many of us have that have lost a child. Not only is everyone else ignoring the mess on the floor but we as grieving parents often are too. It’s too hard. The mess is all we have left of them. We feel it is our last connection with them and are reluctant to even touch it. Not to mention most of us don’t know the first thing about fixing it. We are thinking if we ignore it, it might just all go away. Hoping against all hope it will just all go away, too tired and too much in shock to deal with it. 
