Emo Res: How Mourning Heals

A synopsis and my reaction to Chapter 7 of Emotional Resilience by David Viscott.

~ Mourning means facing the truth of a loss and accepting it as a part of your life. It means letting yourself hurt and cry, it means letting go of the past and accepting the present, and it means releasing the defenses we all use to avoid the important, if painful, step of mourning.

~ Mourning goes through 3 basic stages: Denial (the shock of loss, feeling the initial injury), Coping (using various Defenses– more on later chapters), and Acceptance (bit by bit allowing the truth to infiltrate the present.)

~ Denial is the stage where you just can’t believe some loss has occurred, is occurring, or will occur (some losses we see coming, but are helpless to do anything about, for instance– like Global Climate Change.) These days, denial can be quite stubborn in some people for some circumstances. “If you don’t cry, you don’t mourn.”

~ Coping begins as soon as Denial begins fading. “Mourning hinges on letting go of hope.” We’ll begin the various stages of grief and try to deal with loss and the loss of hope over the loss, but sometimes it can be a very bumpy ride as various defense mechanisms kick in. Coping includes blaming others, making excuses, rationalizing issues, having regrets and guilt, and nurturing resentments.

I have to say, given how obsessed our entire culture is with the whole HOPE thing, I’m guessing modern peoples in the U.S. are really bad at moving out of the denial stage. I’m also guessing the same holds true when it comes to facing anything negative at all, so coping is fraught with issues as well. We’re all supposed to be happy successes at all times, and very little patience or sympathy is granted to those dealing with a loss these days.

One reason many cultures mark out the grieving (like wearing all black) is to signal others that someone is especially fragile emotionally, and people were sanctioned to take a step back and let the grieving mourn properly. I rather wish we had a return to something like that– and I don’t mean just for a day or a funeral, I mean several months to a year like how it used to be done. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be given time and space to go through our mourning stages? Nowadays, everything seems so rushed, no one is allowed time out to deal with major losses anymore. At most, you get a week.

~ Resentment and bitterness kick in when we feel anger at being wronged in some way, but have no place to express that. So the negative emotion just sits and stews… unfortunately, this often means we’ll assign our own issues onto others or else have exaggerated reactions to lesser issues that evenly slightly resemble what it is we have yet to mourn.

~ Acceptance comes when we stop fighting the truth of the loss and what it meant to us. It means releasing the issues surrounding the loss, and facing the future once more without the loss dominating the background of our life. Often, acceptance comes in stages and can take years. We may have lingering bits of mourning that pop up from time to time, but the power behind it fades and it simply becomes a part of our life that we can acknowledge and deal with as the truth of how things are…

Pretty straightforward chapter actually. I don’t have much commentary really, other than reminding myself that its true we have to accept and embrace our need to mourn. Not doing so for whatever reason (shame, inconvenience, social pressure) leads to more problems– as I learned one day in actual therapy several years ago: lucretiasheart.livejournal.com/366817.html [bottom half of post has part I'm referring to...]

Ever since that discovery— that I was too prone to censoring myself for daring to have improper emotions, I’ve been actively working to switch that around and embrace my moods. Not to dwell in them endlessly or anything, but to accept my feelings and allow myself to have them. Self-control comes in with behavior, not feelings. Feelings are just our body/brain communicating to us that things are going well or not-so-well, and so we have to feel them to assess them and get to the next step. Its taken years of practice, but I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of it and now counsel others to allow themselves to feel truthfully and give themselves space and time to react and process.

Which is what much of this book is about.