What it takes to truly heal after a death in your life – the right and the wrong of grief

What it takes to truly heal after a death in your life – the right and the wrong of grief

Lately I find myself sharing a lot more stuff on my Facebook page and personal Facebook page.  Sometimes small thoughts, sometimes suggestions and ideas, and sometimes I get so frustrated with the grief industry and what I see going on around me that I go off on a bit of a passionate well…..yeah ‘rant’ is an appropriate word.

I can get a little Medusa-like in the privacy of home (it aint pretty. I’m serious – snakes and everything)….but when I calm down I share some of the thoughts that emerge from these frustrations….and it seems like these outpouring of passionate thoughts (rants) resonate with a lot of people, so I thought I’d share this one with you too.

What to do if you want to truly heal from grief

“Just been having a conversation with a good friend and both sharing our serious frustration at seeing page after page, blog after blog, quote after quote being shared about grief and grieving all over the place – because they are generally lies. Lies that almost everyone believes…but lies nonetheless.

Here’s the deal: if you want to heal – I mean TRULY heal, get totally beyond pain, live a life worthy of you and create a legacy worthy of those you love who have died – you have to let go of everything you currently believe around grief. Everything.

Let go of traditional ‘wisdom’, let go of what may seem like common sense, let go of what everyone might tell you about grieving lasting forever, let go of what you thought you learned from hours of counselling, let go of all the books on grief and forget everything Kubler-Ross wrote.

If you truly want to heal you will need to start from scratch and assume nothing about grief.
Our conditioning around grief is so strong that once you have come out of it you will be gobsmacked at how wide-reaching, pervasive, and damaging it is.

To heal, start from a place without old assumptions, without limits, and with total possibility for anything to happen and anything to change.
Only from here can you start down the path to healing and beauty that you won’t even be able to imagine until you see it. xx”

Now inevitably I got messages afterwards telling me that there is no right or wrong way to grieve, that everyone does it their own way, and that this is totally ok.

I completely agree.

And I completely disagree.

If your goal is to live with, manage, or cope with grief then by all means there is no right or wrong way – read all the books or not, join bereavement groups or not, spend years in therapy or not, believe in the 5 stages or not.  There are many different ways to live with grief so I guess there is no right or wrong.

But I’m not talking about living with grief. I am never talking about living with grief. I’m talking about healing from grief. And once you’ve healed there is no need to cope with, manage or live with grief…as there is no more grief.  Only love.

So if true healing from grief is what you want (and if it’s not then you are in the wrong place and talking to the wrong girl!) then I agree there are no right ways, as long as the path you are following will lead to healing.

My dear friends Tabitha Jayne and Leo Searle Hawkins have both healed completely and totally from grief. No pain, no grief – just love.  And both have processes that are totally different to mine and totally different to each other, to help others get there.  But all three of us live in the same space around death and get our clients to the same destination.  There is no one right path to healing…as long as the path you are on is actually heading in a healing direction.

And this is where I disagree with the ‘no right or wrong’ thing and believe that there are wrong ways to deal with grief if you want to heal.  If you don’t then continue doing whatever you like….but I know that isn’t you.  I know that you do want to heal.  Or you wouldn’t be here.

If you do wish to heal you need to let go of everything I mention in the text above. Let go of everything you’ve been told about grief – that it lasts forever, that it never goes away, that it is love, that it is connection, that it is memory, that there are 5 stages…or any stages of all – none of these things are true and these beliefs will be the massive barriers that stop you healing (just like they have stopped the people who told you them in the first place from healing).

Think of this like getting fit.  If you decided you want to get fit, there isn’t a right way (do yoga, or start running, or join a gym, or take up swimming, or join acrobatics, or pole dancing, etc etc) but there are wrong ways (sitting on the sofa for entire days in front of your computer in your trackies….like I’m doing right this second, not doing any exercise at all, joining a support group for people who want to get fit but only talk about it to each other and still don’t do any exercise, watching endless yoga videos without any ‘doing’ or just reading fitness books but not taking action with them).  When I say ‘wrong’ I mean that if getting fit is your goal then these practises won’t get you to your goal. In fact they will take you further away.

I am yet to meet a single person who has totally healed from grief after a death who hadn’t had to let go of all of their old un-useful ideas and beliefs and ‘common sense’ around grief to get there.  The same as getting fit – these old ideas and practices won’t get you closer to healing. In fact they ensure you stay well away.

It might sounds hard to do – to drop all these beliefs – and I’ll grant you that it takes some work….but it may just be easier than you imagine and all it has to start with is a question.

What if all I think I know about grief isn’t true? What if all I think I know about grief isn’t helping me heal? What if all I’ve been told about grief I no longer need to believe in?

What if it is possible to totally heal…and I just never knew it?

Take it from someone who has been there, down in the dark depths of grief, and who worked their way completely out of it…it is.

Much love,

Kristie

xx

Tagged as: bereavement, death, grief, heal from grief