Anxiety- The Missing Stage of Grief

by Claire Bidwell Smith

  I assured her that she would, and together we worked on finding new ways to stay connected to him that didn’t involve remorse. I encouraged her to write letters to Bernard, which she began to do regularly and found much relief in. I also spent more sessions encouraging her to tell me more stories about their life together. We looked at photos and other old memories to revisit the loving man Bernard had been.

  From time to time, Ruth would circle back to her old belief about how horrible she was for not being there the night Bernard died, and again we would do a little work to disprove this belief. Sometimes she just needed to tell me the story one more time, as a way of getting it out of her system.

  Ruth, too, learned to forgive herself. In our sessions she recounted what a kind and patient man he had always been with her, and she finally understood that she was the only one reinforcing the negative thoughts. I also shared with Ruth how common it is for people to feel guilt after they lose someone and how many clients I had worked with who had also not been able to be there at the time of death or who had made decisions they regretted because they were feeling overwhelmed or scared. Knowing that she wasn’t alone in her experience helped soften her stance on herself, and she finally began to move forward.

  Now that you can see that there are many different ways to begin to understand how the things you may feel guilty about were beyond your control all along, it’s time to really do the work to release it altogether. There are several steps to releasing this kind of postgrief guilt and to being able to move forward, but I’m hoping you are starting to see how helpful it can be to do this work.

  STEPS TO RELEASE GUILT

  Recognize that feeling guilty after losing someone is a common experience.

  Understand that releasing your guilt does not mean letting go of your loved one.

  Examine the beliefs around your guilt and break them apart to see which are justified and which are not real.

  Use creative exercises to say the good-bye or apology you didn’t get to say.

  Find ways to stay positively connected to your loved one.

  Over the years, working with so many clients who have all needed to find various ways to make amends, I’ve come up with some creative ways to repair the things you may feel remorseful about. Here are some of my favorite exercises that I think you will find really helpful.

  Write a Letter to Your Loved One

  As I’ve mentioned, for years I wrote letters to my dead mother, telling her how sorry I was that I wasn’t there the night she died. Even though I wasn’t sure if she could somehow read these letters, it still felt good to write them and to have the opportunity to say, “I’m sorry.” This was also one of the primary ways that Ruth used to make amends to her late husband and to forgive herself.

  You can write your letters by hand or on your computer. Choose a day in which you have some privacy and a time that is not followed by any demanding activities, as you may feel a little raw or drained after writing the letter. Sit down and begin with their name, and then write whatever comes. You may want to apologize for something, or you may want to say good-bye in a way you weren’t able to. Take as long as you need to write the letter. Anticipate that you may feel quite emotional as you do this exercise.

  Write a Letter to Yourself Forgiving Yourself

  Imagine stepping outside of yourself just a bit, and sit down to write a letter to the person you were when you made the mistake. Forgive yourself. Be kind and reassuring to yourself, and try to feel real compassion for yourself, even though you may be disappointed in the actions of your past.

  Visualize Saying Good-bye or Being There If You Weren’t

  This is one of the most powerful exercises I recommend. Find a quiet place where you can lay down uninterrupted. Close your eyes. Take some deep breaths, and let yourself fully relax. Now visualize your loved one before you. Take a moment to really feel their presence. Next take as much time as you need to say all the things in your mind that you need and wish to say to them. Say good-bye if you didn’t get to say good-bye. Apologize if you need to apologize. Tell them you love them, if that feels good. You can return to this exercise as often as needed.

  Do Something in Honor of Your Loved One

  I think one of the most beautiful ways of making amends is to do something in honor or in service of your loved one. Perhaps they were passionate about a particular cause that you can contribute to in some way. Or you could simply support an organization that they would have felt good about (for example, if they were an animal lover, donate to a local shelter or wildlife conservancy). You will find that doing any kind of good deed in their honor will feel good and give you a sense of reparation.

  Visualize Your Loved One Forgiving You

  Similar to the exercise above in which you visualize speaking to your loved one, this time you will focus on hearing from them. Find a comfortable place to do this where you will be uninterrupted. Lay down, close your eyes, and begin to relax. When you are ready, invite your loved one into your mind’s eye and be open to the idea of receiving a message from them. Perhaps they have a message of forgiveness, or advice, or simply love. Receive your message, and feel it throughout your heart.

  Each Time You Find Yourself Having a Negative Guilt Thought, Replace It with a Positive Memory

  Sometimes when we’ve focused on a negative thought too many times, it can be difficult to make that thought stop popping up, even when you’ve done the work to actively release the belief behind it. Retraining your brain to stop the thought from occurring takes a little work in the beginning but then quickly becomes easy. In this case, each time you have a negative thought like, “I should have been there,” stop yourself from going further with the emotions of that thought and replace it with a positive memory of you and your loved one. We’ll cover this kind of work on a much deeper level in Chapter 8.

  Find Someone You Can Talk to About Your Feelings of Guilt

  Talking about your feelings of guilt to a therapist or a bereavement group who understands can greatly alleviate the heaviness of carrying those feelings around. Finding these outlets can provide a healing place for you to process these feelings and help you normalize your experience.

  THE RELEASE

  I want you to close your eyes right now and take a deep breath. Then I want you to allow any feelings of guilt or remorse or regret rise to the surface. Next I want you to recognize that having these thoughts is a normal part of the grieving process. You are not alone in feeling them. You are not a bad person. If there are mistakes that you made, they are simply those—mistakes. You can and will learn from these mistakes, and you will live a more meaningful life as a result of growing from this experience.

  But I want you to take one more breath and ask yourself if holding on to your feelings of guilt is truly serving you. If letting go of them feels scary, remember that releasing guilt does not mean you are letting go of your loved one. Releasing regret does not mean you are dishonoring your person. There are many more beautiful and healthy ways to remain connected to and honor the person you lost. You also need to honor yourself. And by letting go of these feelings, by forgiving yourself, you will also release yourself from anxiety and sadness.

  A NXIETY C HECK-I N

  Let’s check in with your level of anxiety. In the last chapter, we learned about feelings of guilt and regret and how these can affect both our grief processes and our anxiety levels. Are you holding on to guilt as a way of holding on to grief? If so, remember that there are ways to stay connected with your loved one while still releasing some of the more difficult emotions that come with grief.

  When we take time to really face our fears and disappointments, we are able to grieve in a healthy way that helps decrease anxiety.

  Rate your current anxiety level on a scale of 1–10 (with 10 being the highest).

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  Check the symptom boxes that currently apply:

  Panic attacks

  Insomnia

  Naus
ea

  Dizziness

  Heart racing/palpitating

  Obsessive worry

  Hypochondria

  If you are experiencing regular panic attacks or obsessive worry, skip to Chapters 8 and 9 to begin learning how to calm your anxious thoughts. Otherwise, let’s go on to the next chapter and learn about how taking charge of our lives after a loss can eliminate stress and anxiety.

  5 | Taking Charge

  Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.

  –P EMA C HODRON

  W HEN WE LOSE SOMEONE SIGNIFICANT, OUR LIVES SEEMINGLY fall apart. It can feel as though a tsunami has hit, taking everything in its wake and leaving you standing in the midst of great destruction. Where do you even begin to pick up the pieces? Pondering this enormous task never fails to bring on incredible amounts of stress and anxiety. Finding ways to tackle the issues at hand will alleviate that pressure.

  So much of the grief literature focuses on the emotional changes that come with a loss, but there are many other shifts that occur when we lose a loved one. Our finances may change, living situations can become unstable, and childcare can be affected. In particular, the death of a partner usually has a severe impact on finances, especially for women. According to Sheryl Sandberg, author of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Facing Joy, widows of all backgrounds are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as married women. In addition, children who lose a parent also suffer from a change in financial and physical support more than others.

  These changes can impact not just the big picture but the long-term picture as well. You may have lost someone significant ten years ago and are still struggling in your life as a result. The good news is that it’s never too late to start picking up the pieces and making vital changes that can impact your well-being, both physically and mentally.

  In this chapter, we’re going to explore the resilient grieving model and help you find ways to get on your feet again, while still honoring your grief process. Doing this work will bring a level of peace back into your days that will greatly help reduce your anxiety.

  WHAT IS RESILIENT GRIEVING?

  Resilient grieving is the idea that we can take active measures and steps to find strength and learn coping tools in the face of loss, even when the pain seems unbearable.

  An evolving field of research has recently acknowledged our capacity for resilience, the natural human ability to face trauma and loss by finding ways to thrive, become more in tune with our lives, and create new ways to make meaning out of our experiences.

  DR. MILLER ON RESILIENT GRIEVING

  Some people would presume that grieving and resilience don’t go together. For instance, if you’re grieving, then you’re a sad sack; you’re wallowing. Which sounds like the opposite of resilience.

  The problem is that we can love our suffering; we can use it as a cross to bear. I think there are hazards in both directions. But the way through is to see how related grieving and resilience are. When I think of my own regrets, I know I have a shared big regret around my own injuries, and also my sister’s death, in that I didn’t really honor the grieving period. I didn’t grieve. I took the bait that the strong, admirable thing to do was pull myself up from the boot straps and get back on the horse as soon as possible. That was the sort of heroic tradition I thought was a template.

  I now feel embarrassed to have bought into that absurd kind of cinematic idea. Yes, we can always grieve, we can always return to a relationship with the person who has died, one way or another, but I do think there’s a temporal period after the loss where you are just viscerally, hormonally, in a different place. You’re just in a different zone. And that window seems to be a period when you are tender and open. I feel like by short-changing my grief period in both instances, I literally damaged a relationship. I didn’t listen to my own grieving. I didn’t honor it.

  So where is the right balance between grieving and resilience? From my way forward, it feels like the highest way to honor anything I’ve lost, the highest way for me to honor what still exists, is to keep coming back to loving life. That’s the highest way to honor it all. So if I check myself, or if I check with my patients, and their way of grieving is by clinging to it or loving the grief a little too much, as if it’s honorific and therefore cutting themselves off from other relationships with living beings, and not being present, then to me, that’s the muster.

  Ask yourself, is the state you’re in, over time, serving life? Is it helping you be present while you’re still here? If it satisfies those criteria, then I’m all for it. But if you ask those questions of people who are either numb to their grief or overloving it, that question can be an organizing force to pull you through it.

  As someone who has seen hundreds of clients move through the grief process, I know that resilient grieving isn’t for everyone. I believe there are certain personalities and circumstances that more readily lend themselves to this philosophy. But I also believe that there are tools and ideas within resilient grieving that all of us can use. More important, many of these techniques serve to reduce anxiety.

  Resilient grieving is about being proactive in your grief process. It’s about letting yourself cry and mourn but also taking a look at your coping methods and earnestly beginning to reshape your life. It’s about not letting your world fall irrevocably apart as a result of this loss. For some people, this may feel out of tune with your natural grief process—some people feel that dusting themselves off and getting on with their lives means letting go of their loved one, but that’s not what resilience is about.

  There are ways to stay connected to your loved one and also live a meaningful life without them, as painful as that may sound. I really do believe there is a way to balance the mourning process with resilience and that building resilience will serve to reduce your anxiety and leave you feeling less overwhelmed. Again, this kind of rebuilding can begin to happen in the first year of loss or even years out.

  This work is particularly important as it relates to anxiety, because it is precisely when we do not do this work, when we let our emotions go unchecked and smothered with false distractions, that anxiety begins to surface.

  In this chapter and the next, I’m going to introduce you to two women I know, Susan Hannifin-MacNab and Tembi Locke, and use their stories to illustrate the practices of resilient grieving and also the importance of taking inventory of your life after a loss. Both Susan and Tembi lost their spouses when they were young mothers, and they each went through their own experiences with grief and anxiety.

  Susan’s husband, and the father to her then five-year-old, died in a car accident. He’d gone out for a Sunday drive in the local mountains and never returned home. Susan filed a missing person’s report, hired a private investigator, and searched for him for days. Weeks later, a local nature photographer spotted his car at the bottom of a ravine, near a beautiful lake. Police and highway patrol recovered his body on Susan’s wedding anniversary. The next day was her birthday.

  I met her two years later at a grief retreat I held in Ojai, California, and I was struck by her strength and calm confidence. But I could also tell how much deep sadness she carried with her. Most of all, Susan seemed frustrated and angry. She was angry that her life and that of her son had taken such a traumatic turn, and she seemed intent on finding a way to not let it destroy both of them.

  While at the retreat, I worked with Susan on stepping aside from her anger so that she could begin to face the grief and sadness that ran beneath it. Allowing herself to be sad was difficult for Susan and not something she felt she could readily do when she had a small child to care for. But that weekend she was able to allow herself to tap into her grief and work through some of her anguish.

  Susan went on to write her own book, called A to Z Healing Toolbox: A Practical Guide for Navigating Grief and Trauma with Intention. Susan had always struck me as someone who was natura
lly inclined to use resilient-grieving methods. Susan explained to me that she thinks “resilient people will reach out and get help to understand and tame their anxiety. Resilient people will not judge or berate themselves for being anxious—they instead will find resources and tools (people, classes, groups, experts, techniques) to help themselves cope.” She also believes:

  Just as sadness and depression are a normal part of the grief process, they are also part of human resiliency. We have to let ourselves feel what we are feeling first. That’s the initial step. Sadness and depression are usually in direct proportion to how much we love/loved our person. So, when we love hard, we grieve hard. I loved my husband fiercely, so I have grieved him fiercely. Personally, I don’t think someone can reach the resiliency stage or posttraumatic growth stage until they have done the initial work of being sad, angry, and/or lonely. I have a sign on my wall that says, “Don’t forget that you’re human. It’s okay to have a meltdown. Just don’t unpack and live there. Cry it out and then refocus on where you are headed.” This reminds me that it’s okay to feel it, cry it, scream it, yell at it—and then move it forward.

  This is where I see my clients get stuck all the time. They find themselves caught between a place of trying to be brave and soldier through the loss instead of letting themselves feel all the deep emotions that naturally come with grief. And when we ignore those feelings and don’t do the work of feeling sad, angry, and lonely, we create great discord within ourselves that manifests in anxiety.