The question that can transform your grief
(and transform your life)
There is so much truth in the saying ‘it isn’t what happens to you. It’s what you do with what happens to you’. You may not believe you have a choice in what life dishes up to you, but you absolutely have power when it comes to how you experience life.
This question can be used absolutely anywhere. I used it to help heal my grief. Depression too actually. Two things we are repeatedly told cannot be healed.
Here it is:
How does this help me?
How does this…(fill in the blanks)…help you?
So let’s talk about death and grief. How do you use it there?
Grief is complicated in that there is no set pattern or formula (no matter what you’ve read or been told)- it’s very much an individual journey of meaning-making, different for everyone.
And meaning changes when perspective changes.
And experience changes when meaning changes.
This question was one of the many tools I used to help me heal my own grief completely and permanently after 6 deaths in my family in 4 months.
It took my dad’s death (the first of the 6 and the most powerful and devastating at the time) from being this awful heart-breaking, family-destroying, me-diminishing, father-stealing event….to me realising it was the catalyst for massive family transformation. And massive self-transformation. To becoming a gift.
I am who I am and I do what I do not despite my dad’s death, but because of it.
How does this help me?
Some people take this from a spiritual perspective. If that doesn’t work for you then just look at it this way: Everything in life has a good and bad side. Everything. The more you focus only on one side, denying the other, the more you fall into victimhood. This is about looking for the other side, the side you haven’t seen yet.
When I asked that question over and over and over (and over and over and over and….you get the picture) I was finally able to see my dad’s life, including his death, as profoundly beautiful, important. As perfect exactly as it was.
That healed my grief. It changed my life. And it created an amazing legacy for my father of a daughter living a life she loves as a direct result of his life and his death, instead of just a daughter left in pain, quietly coping, ‘accepting’, hurting, missing.
So ask that question of yourself. Of this death or this grief. Or anything in life. Ask and answer it enough and watch your life change.
Kristie
xx
