When my best friend died unexpectedly a few years ago, it was a shock and tremendous loss. My early life experience of avoiding loss by stuffing emotions never served me; the unresolved emotions tainted all of my later relationships in ways that it took me years to recognize. Much later in my life (through therapy and subsequent professional training) I have learned the value of grieving.
I now know that it is necessary to have an ending before you can have a new beginning. After the loss comes the emptiness, or wilderness period. During this time we must be willing to work through our feelings about the loss we have experienced (to feel and express the grief – meaning the shock, denial, anger, bargaining, and finally arriving at acceptance). When we allow ourselves to go through this natural process, we are healed and will emerge ready to move forward in our life.
If we try to avoid doing the inner work, we may experience related problems later. The emotions we have avoided may emerge in some unexpected and unconscious way that is projected onto other persons who really have no, or minimal, connection to them except perhaps to act as a trigger that draws out our own dysfunctional emotional reaction.
As you go through such losses, be gentle with yourself, give yourself time and permission to experience your feelings. Sharing them with someone who will listen and not feel compelled to fix you, or get you to stop feeling, is also extremely helpful.
I found these things especially helpful in my grieving:
1. Prayers for my friend
2. Self-forgiveness exercises for my perceived failures in sometimes not being as good a friend as I would have liked
3. Writing letters to my friend in spirit expressing all that I wished to have said to him
4. Rituals with others that helped me get in touch with my emotions; such as sitting together with his picture and each person taking time to say what made him special for us, then scattering his ashes together in a place that he loved
How has your life been changed as a result of your ordeal?
This helped me to reach a place of feeling closure and completeness with my friend, and with my loss. I know that had I been able to properly grieve as an adolescent following the death of my mother, my later relationships with the women I tried to love would have been much better.
What would you advise another facing similar circumstances based on what you have learned?
Perhaps to be open to some of the things that helped me. Also, to know that had I gotten stuck in an emotion that did not pass in a reasonable amount of time, I would have sought therapy to work through it. It is easy for people to get stuck and move into prolonged grief, often because they have difficulty feeling and expressing a specific emotion such as anger or sadness. Thank you – if you would, please tell us a bit about yourself. My family of origin did not express emotions easily so I learned to hold them inside and not share them with anyone. I had to act like everything was okay even when my world was falling apart. Mine was a lonely life because even when I was with others, I could not share who I really was inside; that was a tragic way to live, always feeling alone and disconnected.
