In this guest blog I am sharing the wisdom of Grief Recovery Specialist, Russell Friedman, from The Grief Recovery Institute. I hope you find this blog helpful.
We frequently cite the ancient proverb, “I was unhappy about having no shoes until I met the man who had no feet,” to introduce the dangerous issue of comparison as it relates to grief.
Using the proverb as a guide, if you have 10 people in a room, and you start with one whose mother died, but the next person has had both their mother and father die, and the next mother, father, and child, then you soon see that there could only be one griever in the room, the one with the longest list of losses. And you immediately realize how wrong that is and always will be.
While the proverb may be helpful to teach children to value the things they have, it fails when it is used to compare losses because it bypasses a basic emotional truth which is that:
ALL GRIEF IS EXPERIENCED AT 100%, THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS!
The fact that all grief is experienced at 100% doesn’t mean that all grief is experienced at the same level of emotional intensity. But, in the event that someone meaningful to you dies, it means that the grief you feel will be based mainly on the following four factors:
- The absolute uniqueness of your one-of-a-kind relationship with the person who died.
- The combination of time*, intensity, and value the relationship had for you, which could include negative value as well as positive.
- The degree to which you felt emotionally complete with that person before they died. Many people who had bad relationships with someone who “should” have been a loved one are often left with a great deal of undelivered emotional communications.
- Even though you may have felt emotionally complete and had communicated nearly everything important before an important person in your life died, their absence can affect you profoundly. This includes the fact that they may have been the one person you shared your feelings with, and he or she is no longer here.
*There’s at least one relationship that may have had a very limited amount of time, but maximum emotional impact on you. That is your relationship with an infant child who died. A great deal of your relationship with the baby was based on the hopes, dreams, and expectations you had for them and your life together. This also applies to relationships with a child who didn’t make it full-term, with whom you may have had a powerful relationship, even though you hadn’t met them yet. That is part of the reason that miscarriages are so totally devastating to the parents-to-be.
Comparison of grief is also dangerous in regard to divorce and 40 other losses
Earlier in this article we focused on death in order to introduce the topic of comparison. But there are more than 40 other life events that produce feelings of grief, and near the top of that list of losses is divorce and grief. Even though the bullet points we started this article with were relative to the death of someone important to you, they have the exact same effect when divorce is the topic, with only some minor changes in wording:
- The absolute uniqueness of your one-of-a-kind relationship with the person to whom you were married.
- The combination of time, intensity, and value the relationship had for you, which could include negative value as well as positive. [When there’s been a divorce, negative is usually the dominant value you feel at the end of the relationship.]
- The degree to which you felt emotionally complete—or incomplete—with your spouse before the formal end of the relationship, and often for many years prior to that. While the divorce ends the day-to-day bickering or the separate lives lived together, the divorce doesn’t end or complete the unfinished business.
- In the rare circumstances in which you may have felt emotionally complete and had communicated nearly everything important before the marriage ended, the absence of your former spouse can still affect you profoundly. This includes the fact that they may have been the one person you always shared your feelings with, and he or she is no longer the person with whom you can do that.
Regarding comparison: The primary points remain the same between your response to the death of someone important to you, and the death of the romantic relationship you had with your spouse. They are your uniqueness, the uniqueness of the other person, and the uniqueness of the combination of you and that person. Those three aspects are not the same and can never be the same for any other individual or any other pair of people.
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Canadian Advanced Grief Recovery Method Specialist, Tammy Adams, loves to problem solve, inspire and motivate others who are ready and committed to change. Tammy has spent over 30 years in the field of education and as a Certified Life and Executive Coach Tammy teaches individuals to challenge and conquer their limiting beliefs and insecurities to create the life of their choosing. As a Grief Recovery Method Specialist Tammy understands that unresolved grief can limit an individual’s capacity for happiness and is gifted at supporting individuals through the pain and isolation cause by an emotional loss, of any kind, to a place of happiness they believed no longer existed. A Tammy client testimonial, “Tammy helped me unpack the baggage and put a smile on my face in the process. It’s a rare quality for someone to fully listen without judgement but yet still steer you in the right direction.”
To learn more about Intuitive Understanding please visit www.tadams.ca or contact Tammy by email at tdadams@rogers.com