Do You Know Grief?

How To Know Your Grief 

Grief is a tricky subject, especially for me, since I am still fairly new to figuring these emotional handicaps out. If you know me you understand. I lost someone very important to me a couple days ago. He was the only person that ever made me feel like I belonged somewhere. He was more than what people could see and judged plenty before he was known. Although he didn't give a fuck. He was content. That is a hard thing to be for some. Very hard. So I am learning how to experience my grief for this loss so that it serves its highest good. 

We all have some healthy grief and could fall into some unhealthy grief if not carefully thought out,  the lines can easily get blurred for the grieving. You are all sideswiped by feelings and emotions. For me dealing with that is quite a feat. Our healthy grief releases feelings rather than allowing them to get stuck in our bodies. If you try to block out these emotions altogether, that just makes it harder for when they do come out. Your body will hold on to those emotions and feelings. They have to come out sometime. So it's better to just get it over with and feel it when it's actually happening. Our healthy grief is what allows us to heal from the loss and move on in our lives.

Grief is not always about healing. Many of us have known people or maybe been the person to get stuck in our grief. We stay focused on the past and locked in tight on our grief, never moving forward. What is the difference between those who feel it and those who get stuck in it? The difference lies in what they believe they have lost. A source of their love, that could feel unending.

I have a friend named Gary. He was in a relationship for 3 years with Teri. Teri decided to end the relationship. Gary, of course, was devastated. In this relationship. Gary was a taker always trying to get love, but unable to give or share the love. Teri gave him a lot of love but often felt lonely with him. Gary lost his source of love when she left. He was not grieving the loss of Teri, but Teri's love. He was grieving as a lost wounded child, rather than a loving adult.

As a result of this, Gary became stuck in his grief. He was stuck in feeling like a victim, stuck in the "poor me." Gary never did the inner work to develop the adult part of himself that could bring love to himself and enable him to share it with others. He felt lost, abandoned, and hurt. I, like Gary, have been here. No matter how many tears he cried, no healing ever occurred. He was abandoning himself. He kept up at feeling alone and despairing. Sometimes he was angry at Teri for abandoning him, and others he was mad at himself for not being a better partner. He had many thoughts that plagued him, and his constant inner refrain was "If only I had listened to her more maybe she wouldn't have left." "If I would have told her she was beautiful, she would not have left." 

I then have another friend who at the same time was experiencing the loss of his wife. Whom he loved very much, and he missed her horribly. He missed sharing his love with his wife, he missed her laugh. He missed her as a person. This friend also had no regrets because he was not a taker. He was grateful for the time he had with his wife. My friend was going to be okay. Yes, he was going to miss his wife and feel emotion when he thinks of her, but he is healing in a healthy way. His grief will come in waves and eventually subside.

My friend did not make his wife the source of his sense of self. He had a strong sense of self-connected to an inner adult who was connected with a spiritual source of love and wisdom. I would find myself directly connecting my pain with anyone, but myself. Like Gary, I never healed from the grief I was experiencing. When you hand over your sense of self, you feel abandoned when they leave with your sense of self with them. Gary continues to find himself in another relationship and then grieving because he still has not found his sense of self. 

Do you see the unhealthy and healthy differences in how we heal? Is it now a wonder how everything is connected to the next and will affect you in your entirety if you do not know proper self-care. This has been a battle of mine for some time. I do not have it all perfect but is a steady work in progress. I did learn that I do not want to any more time to waste by in an unhealthy way in any of my relationships. Time is taken away, much before we are ready, and comes in to take a loved one way too fast. I love you Dad and will miss you more than you know.