Terra, yes you and me have both found EMDR helpful I think. Interested in what you say about 'active' grief work...can you say a bit more about what that has entailed for you?
Have others found other kinds of therapy useful for grief?
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Have other people also had significant losses either in the couple of years pre BD or the couple of years after?
Treasur, it took a long time to isolate my father loss as the deepest and core grief. When he died, I was not permitted to express any of it. Even forty years later, I’m punished and shut out for speaking my feelings about my dad.
That’s been cruel and ridiculous for decades. What do you do when it’s your own mother and family ostracizing you — for having legitimate feelings, and legitimate need to express the anguish, fear, bewilderment, etc. and to receive support or comfort for that?
I received the total opposite. So made a choice to end all relationship to my mother and others in the family. That was the first work: finding a way to end a really unhealthy dynamic.
The second work was to sit with the father loss grief and really feel it, for the first time in my life, now that I’d carved a protected space for it. And I was ready to defend and protect that new space at all costs, no matter what anyone thought or said. Between h’s moveaway BD and the various destructive events with my FOO that same year, I was not going to survive another year if I didn’t at least get clear on the father loss grief.
This year was the first time I could even
think “I miss my dad” without some kind of external recrimination. The next step was to feel that, both the missing him and the new safety of being able to think it without any of the usual players seeing it on my face and knocking me around about it.
And after sitting with these feelings a while, I carefully said it out loud, to myself: “I miss my dad.”
I really miss my dad.
Saying it out loud, finally, was a real game changer. That was the third work, actively pronouncing those syllables and doing so until it was clear the truth is mine to say out loud and to say with authority every time I feel the need to express that pain. Maybe that’s silly, or minor to someone else. But it was important to get to the actual saying of it, and repeating it, because for decades it was trapped and stuck and externally disallowed.
This exercise resulted in a lot of very clear anger at those who blocked my grief expression over the years. H is one of them, but as with my grief hierarchy, there is an anger hierarchy. The bulk of my anger is at my mother. She took pleasure in punishing the father loss grief and still did, decades later. The last punishing was the last straw. As a mother myself, I can’t see any scenario in which I would ever cause my own daughter this level of derangement even once. It is very specifically about my father loss and now that I’ve said my fact aloud and finally own it, it won’t be silenced or shut down or disallowed ever again. It shouldn’t have been in the first place. And a mother should not have done it.
Maybe the anger placement was fourth active work. But beyond that, I lose count.
The next work was to revisit the agent of my father’s death. That required review of old files and narrowing down a search until I located that person. I am satisfied with the result but had to sit with that a long while also. And then it was time for collecting records.
The records collection task has been multi-layered and involves a few locales and streams of information that I have to parse and then write and present. Sometimes out of area, so, planning trips and itineraries and readying myself for those formal arenas. And that maybe doesn’t sound like grief work. Most people outside those systems or tasks think it’s much smaller or easier than it is. It occurred to me recently that these people probably don’t have experience with that specific loss topic (yet) or with the systems I need to work with to get answers or resolution or to move forward. So another grief task is identifying how much to even say to anyone, how to say it, and how to identify who is safe to say it to.
Most of the active grief work is sitting with the feelings and really feeling them. Noticing whether they are articulate, or non-verbal, and when it’s non-verbal, why is that different? And is there a physical gesture or action that might express the feelings that don’t have words? And if there
is a physical gesture or action that might express a non-verbal feeling, make the gesture or take that action. The grief has to be expressed and let out. It can’t be locked and stuck anymore.
All of that can take a long time, and I have given myself carte blanche this whole year to just grieve. Have forfeited paid employment to do so, and have no regrets about that at all.
Most of my FOO and also h and maybe really anyone would consider this all “navel gazing” or melodramatic, or victim behavior, and highly irresponsible of me. I know exactly what it is and this year I won’t be spoken against. It’s my right to grieve and no one is going to hinder it. I won’t survive functionally if I don’t complete this work.
One last or crucial part of the active work is to seek and secure support people who can help, hold place, companion you, and/or comfort you as you move through your grief experiences, actions, and expression. Grief is NOT something we have to do alone.
Where you asked about other helpful therapies, it can be helpful to look at your total body of grief and at the timeline of losses in your overall life, age 0 to present. A genogram and a 1:1 track with “grief recovery method” specialist helped me winnow out what deserved my especial attention and what did not, and why.
I will tell you, key people in my life all HATE that I feel it is important to attend my own grief. My siblings, D15, and two or three friends are the only ones supporting it.
Your memory books sound so soothing and valuable beyond words. I love that you have found that action and are doing the work this way. I hope I can get to that point; in the meantime, I seem to be in movement a lot so am taking photos and collecting bits of moments, so that when the time comes, I can put something together visually for myself, the whole picture.
Author
Topic: 
Grief and the LBS