“It’s okay for you, you have a lot of resilience so you’ll bounce right back from this. It would be so much harder for other people to have this happen to them.”
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow – I could not believe what I was hearing!
I was in the grocery store two weeks after losing my home due to a neighbor’s ill-conceived construction project that had caused a 60 foot sinkhole in my backyard just a few feet from the back door. Cheryl, the woman who had so blithely dismissed my loss, was someone I thought I knew well as we both belonged to an artists’ group that had been meeting almost weekly for more than 15 years. Cheryl knew that during that same 15-year time period in addition to losing my home, my sister, father, mother-in-law and two good friends had died. And she knew that my father-in-law was nearing end-of-life and my mother had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Yes I was well aware that people often say insensitive and careless things to those in grief because they can’t figure out what to say but I was still stunned into silence by my friend’s trivializing words.
When I was finally able to speak I said in a barely controlled voice, “Cheryl I have resilience. But I also have feelings. And it will take me time – maybe a long time – I don’t really know right now – to heal the pain of losing my home.”
Then I walked away.
And then I began to cry.
Loss Highlights the Ways in Which We Are - or Are Not - Resilient
I recently saw a post on Facebook that saddened and disappointed me: “Through grief we discover resilience and new perspectives that shape our reality.” My friend Cheryl could have written those words. Facebook post aside, the truth is this: we do not discover resilience through grief but rather it is through grief and in navigating the mourning period we discover in what ways we are – or are not – resilient; and we also discover our current capacity for embracing new perspectives born out of a new from-this-day-forward forever reality.
In the grocery store that day what I wanted but was too shocked to say to Cheryl was this: having greater resilience doesn’t mean you don’t feel the pain of loss. What it does mean is that you have developed tools and an internal capacity from which to draw strength and resolve when loss occurs. Resilience provides a more proactive and ultimately constructive starting point from which to dive into the turbulent waters of grief: “I feel the pain of loss and know I can get through this” as opposed to “I feel the pain of loss and doubt my ability/ don’t know if I can make it through this.”
Defining Resilience
Stress resilience can be defined as the capacity to prepare for, recover from and adapt in the face of stress, challenge and adversity.
Grief resilience can be similarly defined as the capacity to prepare for an anticipated loss, as well as adapt and eventually move forward in the face of the stress and challenges experienced due to loss. Grief resilience requires that you take active measures to find strength and learn coping skills even when the pain of loss seems unbearable.
The Four Domains of Resilience
There are four primary domains of resilience: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. In this four-part series we will explore each domain.
The domains of resilience are interrelated, each domain affecting the others. Being flexible allows for adaptation and moving forward from loss and is the defining attribute regarding the ability to increase capacity in any of the domains.
Proactively learning skills and strategies for coping can improve your grief resilience by helping you adapt to the reality of your loss, process difficult emotions, learn skills for living in a world without your loved one in it, and finding a path forward as you heal.
Some people are more resilient in one domain than in others and initially rely on their strongest domain to carry them through after loss. For example, I have strength in the spiritual domain and often spend the beginning of any grief journey in meditation and prayer for long periods of time as it brings me inner comfort. However to be fully resilience it’s important to pay attention to the effect the stress of loss has on each domain, beginning with the emotional domain where loss is experienced in a primal felt sense, deeply affecting and influencing what is happening in the mental, physical and spiritual domains.
Emotional Grief Resilience
In addition to flexibility, emotional grief resilience is characterized by the ability to: tolerate or be with as well as accept the discomfort of uncomfortable emotions; ride the wave of uncomfortable/draining emotions as they arise until they are released; and to, over time, access a positive outlook (“This is hard but I know I can get through this loss with time, help and learning”) as grief is navigated and healed (“I would have preferred this didn’t happen but I will learn something valuable from this experience.”)
When processing grief emotions it can be helpful to remember:
- Your emotions – all emotions - are here for a reason. Although most grief emotions like sadness, anger and anxiety feel bad (meaning draining and uncomfortable) they are not bad but rather informative, telling you something you need to know regarding how you are traversing the terrain of your unique grief journey. Knowing all emotions arise to inform can help you let go of self-judgment when you feel emotions such as anger that are often deemed unacceptable or wrong in many family cultures and society at large.
- Our emotions have a limited time span, typically lasting for only thirty to 90 seconds when allowed to flow. Knowing this can make it easier to sit with uncomfortable emotions until they pass; learning to sit with discomfort is often called “riding the wave of grief.”
- Learning to welcome uncomfortable emotions with an attitude of self-kindness, self-compassion and curiosity can provide you with inner soothing or a way to self-soothe, lessening the depleting effects caused by a wave of grief.
Below are two practices that can help you find soothing and relief when dealing with grief emotions.
Notice and Ease: A Simple Tool for Learning to Accept and Feel Emotions
The intensity of grief emotions can often feel overwhelming. The Notice and Ease tool can be used to help you ride the wave of grief by lessening the intensity of an emotion, as well as identify the expression of your hurt so that you can begin to work skillfully with emotions related to that hurt.
When a wave of grief comes over you:
- Pause and notice and admit what you are feeling.
- What you feel first is most often a physical expression of a grief emotion such as unpleasant, uncomfortable, flip-floppy stomach, inner tension etc.
- Try to name the feeling.
- Is the emotion/ feeling fear, anxiety etc.? If you can’t name the emotion then just be aware that discomfort or unpleasantness is trying to tell you that in this moment you are feeling grief or the pain of loss.
- Once you have noticed, admitted and named an emotion to the best of your ability: Tell yourself to E-A-S-E as you gently focus on your heart; relax as you breathe and E-A-S-E the expression of your grief out and release it. Do this for 30 seconds to two minutes.
Indonesian Finger Holds: An Easy-to-use Emotional Balancing Tool
Indonesian Finger Holds is my favorite go-to resilience practice because it is so easy to do and therefore can be easily done in the midst of a wave of grief.
Finger holds are based on the same principal as acupuncture. Through each finger runs a channel of energy. As grief often highlights, emotions are energy. With strong or overwhelming emotions, energy can get blocked or repressed or overloaded, resulting in pain or tension in the body and mind. Holding each finger while breathing deeply (or a little slower and deeper than normal to comfort) can bring emotional and physical release and greater inner comfort.
Each finger is related to a certain emotion and the balancing and draining of that emotion; I think the most powerful part of finger holds is that the 90 seconds to two minutes that each finger is held can teach you how to tolerate the discomfort of uncomfortable emotions. You can do the finger holds using either hand. As you hold a finger, you may feel an energy pulse or throbbing sensation usually within a minute or two. This indicates that the energy is now flowing and more balanced, and usually the strong or stored feeling or emotion is passing.
Each finger corresponds to a specific emotion; gently wrapping your hand around that finger will help balance these emotions:
Thumb: hold the thumb when you are experiencing tears, grief and emotional pain
Index finger: hold the index finger when you are experiencing fear or panic
Middle finger: hold the middle finger when you are experiencing anger or rage
Ring finger: hold the ring finger when you are experiencing worry or anxiety
Little or pinky finger: hold the pinky finger when you are feeling unsure, a lack of confidence, doubt, or a lack of self-esteem
Building Emotional Resilience
Here are some additional ideas for building emotional grief resilience:
- Vary your activities. It can be easy when grieving to become stationary and stagnant; purposefully varying your activities will foster emotional flexibility
- Vary boring tasks with tasks you like. Boring tasks allow the mind and emotions to rest as the tasks can be done in a more automatic way while tasks you find interesting or like can give you something to look forward to. Also make sure to give yourself breaks from dealing with activities related to the loss of your loved one (paperwork, cleaning out the house etc.) with more renewing or easy activities (read a book, take a walk, work on a puzzle).
- Don’t take on too much at once. Even when not experiencing grief it is easy to become overwhelmed and emotionally overloaded by the responsibilities inherent in daily life. Flexibility is also about knowing your limits - your bandwidth - for activity and doing when grief emotions are present. Express your limits to others so that they too are aware of your current limits for social interaction, work and recreation.
Related Remembering A Life Blog Posts
The Four Tasks of Mourning
The 5 Stages of the Soul and Grief Processing
Journeying Through Grief: Death, Memories & Healing
The 5 Things We Cannot Change
From Death Denial to Death Acceptance
Grieving and Healing After a Loved One Dies by Suicide
Faith & Grief
Healing Place Meditation
The Process of Accepting Difficult Grief Emotions
Grief and the Language of Emotions
Related Remembering A Life Podcast Episode
Grief Re-imagined: 50 Creative Strategies to Build Resilience
Other Resources
The Grief Recovery Handbook by John W. James and Russell Friedman
Grief and God by Dr. Terri Daniel
The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren
10 Helpful Tips for Resilient Grieving by Claire Bidwell Smith
www.self-compassion.org
www.heartmath.org
www.heartmath.com
