"Why would you even want to get over grief?"

I have been asked this question a lot. I remember the first time anyone asked me. I was on a course a few years back and I had recently just stepped from general coaching into focusing on where my heart lay - working exclusively with death. I was discussing my work with the group I was sitting in and a woman there, whose mother had died, looked at me like there was something a little wrong with me and asked "why would you want to get over it?".

I was stumped and it was only thinking about it later that I could understand what had happened. What she was really asking was "why would I want to get over my mum?". And that is a very good question - why on earth would anybody want to do that?!

And that right there is one of the reasons many people hang on to their grief, clinging to it for dear life in some cases. This belief that to get over the pain would be to get over the person. If you believe the grief and the person are one and the same then of course you won't want to let go of the pain, ever.

Here's the thing - your pain over the death of someone you love is not them. It isn't a part of them. It isn't a memory of them. It isn't your love for them. It isn't a link to them. It is only your emotion. Your emotional reaction to their death.

The pain in your broken arm is not your arm. Your toothache is not the same as your tooth.

To get over this pain is not to get over them. To heal from this pain is not to heal from them. To no longer have this pain is not to no longer have them.

It actually works the other way around. The more pain (your emotion) that you are in, the harder it is to think about them, to remember them, to love them…and the less of it you will generally do over time. This is where the idea that 'time heals' comes from. Time doesn't heal - it just buries…and it only buries thoughts, feelings and memories because there is a need i.e. they are painful. For most they do not feel better about a death after a period of time…they simply think about it (and the person who died) less and less. Like with the toothache or the broken arm…if you leave that pain where it is you will stop chewing on that tooth, you will stop using that arm….and after a while it won't seem to hurt as much, not because the pain isn't there but because you are avoiding the thing that causes the pain.

When you realise that your pain is not them or a link to them…in fact it is the very thing keeping you cut off and disconnected from them…you can loosen your hold on it and start to let it shift.

Let your pain go….so that you can keep them.