Escape from Emotional Hell – Stop Grieving for the Living

We are never emotionally closer to the people we love than when we lose or are about to lose them to death.

I have been to a few funerals – the two that hit me most were those of a one-year-old who died of cot death and that of a colleague in her thirties bright-as-a-button-alive one day and gone the next due to a DIY accident.

Recently I heard of the passing of a lovely ex-boss and I spent a bit of time in the doldrums as a result – but I do not mind this kind of pain.  In fact, I would be upset if I was not upset, if that makes sense?

There is no such thing as a right way to grieve.  I have found at every single loss like this my emotional responses were different every time.

My most intense emotional experience of grief is having a full-body burning pain.  I feel intensely hot, accompanied by an urge to curl up around a ball of pain in my stomach.  Alongside this appears a sense of holding onto the person lost and not wanting to let go; followed by crying.

Strangely enough, however, I have not had this most intense grieving reaction to losing others to death – but to the living who have, for whatever reason, been taken out of my life.  And then come back again.  And then left again.  And then come back again … I resent the kind of situation whereby I am forced to go through the same grieving process repeatedly due to the callous behaviour of others.  How about you?

In this situation when such folks reappear every few years and then disappear again we can end up in a state of continuous low-level mourning that threatens our long-term emotional stability.  I am talking here about such people as ‘first-loves’ and close relatives.

You can become bad tempered towards the people you care most about when they keep re-triggering this response through their carelessness or when others who do not have your best emotional interests at heart use the threat of this response to manipulate you.

In my experience there are three main levels of relationships that lead to this ‘grieving for the living’ process:

• indifference


• functionalising


• alienation strategies.

Indifference

"Never make someone your priority, when they only make you an option."

You could drive a truck through the gap between how you behave towards each other but, for whatever reason, you choose to ignore it.  Problem is, your feelings can not.

This indifferent relationship is one way.  You are useful to this person but they have no emotional link to you nor have they any intention of being equally as useful to you.

When you ask them a question regarding the quality of the relationship they become avoidant or annoyed.  They only want to talk about what they want to talk about.  They ‘butter you up’ occasionally to get you meeting their wants but turn nasty as soon as they are satisfied.  Occasionally they may do something so completely outrageous (such as steal from you or break some other form of trust) you are shocked by how obviously relationship-destroying this could potentially be – but do not worry because you will make it right again with forgiveness, eh?

You grieve for the relationship you are not having.  When you talk to them about whether or not they sense this gap they reply no.  Nothing you say or do gets through to them.

They do not see you for the sake of seeing you – they always want something and often their first words of the conversation are a put-down or a blatant insult or a request for the thing they want from you.

When they do not want something from you they ignore you – they ‘send you to Coventry’.

Would you treat them like that?  I doubt it.

You see, people like that do not read material like this.  It would mean they would have to change and they are not open to change.  They would rather the world around them changes; they would rather you keep changing to adapt to their whims.

One day, regardless of who they are, you find yourself ending the relationship because you cannot stand the discomfort of the gap any longer.

When you tell them you have decided to end the relationship you expect them not to be too bothered because after all, they repeatedly made it clear for years they do not care one way or the other.  You were always a bind to them.

You leave the relationship full of questions about what really just happened but will never receive full and honest answers from the other person.

Functionalising

In functionalising a person relates to us only because we perform a function useful to them.  Take the function away by losing the ability to deliver it or fully satisfying the need of the user and the relationship is over.

When the user wants the service again there will be a brief period of interest with the promise of the wonderful relationship you want to come but then it dies down again after the service is no longer required.

We tend to set ourselves up for this kind of relationship by validating ourselves only when we provide the given service.  This process dehumanises both parties involved.

Again, we grieve for the missing relationship.  We are so much more than just:

• parents providing money


• car drivers providing taxis


• husbands and wives providing protection and comfort


• faceless employees serving anonymous companies.

But if you see yourself or others in this way you set yourself up for failing relationships.  I call this being ‘doom-boxed’ – you or the other people involved have a set of mental templates and together you work at building a restrictive box into which you then willingly shove each other.

What you greave for is your lost humanity.  You feel crushed and invalidated every time you fail to perform the particular functions of choice and everyone else joins in on your humiliation and belittlement.

Climbing out of your doom-box is an extremely difficult thing to do because you feel ‘useless’ and you have programmed yourself to be of use.  You will find the word ‘use’ used quite a lot in such relationships (if they can be called relationships).

Once you know such potential situations exist you will spot them coming and avoid them (for example, in the dating world if the first question you get asked is ‘what car do you drive?’ or ‘do you like sex?’ I would pay attention to the doom-box alert this triggers.

Social Alienation

Alienation is a painful experience in which a member of a group to which they would naturally expect to belong is gradually disconnected from that group.  It can happen to anyone in any group.

Known as shunning when a whole group decides en masse to do it jointly from a specific point in time it can also be done subtly without the person on the receiving end being able to logically identify or accept the power of this process.  They feel terrible about themselves and everyone else in the group agrees they should but cannot quite pinpoint why.

Some alienators are so skilled at doing this the person on the receiving end believes they are doing it themselves and starts fighting their own emotional responses and behaviours when, in fact, they are doing just as they should be doing if they were in a normal caring relationship.

It can take years before they are able to see the situation they were in was not normal and when later they find themselves in a different relationship discover they are able to behave in exactly the same way but with no relationship problems arising.

Alienation can be used as a punishment or as a precursor to forcing the person out of the group completely.  One of the most painful forms of alienation is Parental Alienation Syndrome.

Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS)

The paradox of becoming a parent is the moment you create new life you become much more aware of the threat of death.  Not your own, but that of your child.

Children are clueless when it comes to life-threatening danger.  During toddlerhood you find yourself jumping out of your skin every time you find them poking something into a power socket or falling down the stairs.  The fear of losing them because you just plain failed to notice and deal with a risk can turn you into a nervous wreck.

Imagine added to this pressure is a co-parent who makes it obvious they regard you as superfluous to requirements.  Who has affairs; who every now and again ups and disappears with your child; then resurfaces again.

I have a friend who runs his own carpentry business who this happened to.  His daughter will be about ten years old now – he has not seen her since she was two.  As part of a divorce settlement he paid his ex a large chunk of money – but apparently it was not enough.

She moved to another part of the country and sends him letters regularly telling him if he ever wants to see his daughter again he has to hand over the home he  now lives in.  He is emotionally stuck and cannot move on – he is frozen into grieving for a living daughter he would not now recognise if he saw her on the street.

I came across a blog the other day where another father in a similar position had been writing for several years about his battle with an ex who had done a similar thing.  All his energy; all his life; was going into this battle.  Comments on the blog supported him in this ‘self-sacrificing quest’.  My thought after reading was if the daughter ever does come back what kind of father will she find?

It is as if these people are at a funeral that never stops.

I know of a couple, grandparents, who have ten grandchildren but have only ever met one of them because of a silly dispute with their own adult children.

What we grieve for here is the lost relationship that now may never be – even though the living child is right here; either close by or right in front of us.

How To Deal With Grieving for the Living

The first step is all yours – you must decide if it is time for you to accept and end the grieving process if you are stuck in it.

The pain of grief is completely overwhelming when you are positioned just in front of the most intense phase of the process but we are designed to experience it and there is no way around this fact.

The fear may be that by going through this process you will ‘toughen you up’ and disconnect from the relationship, losing it altogether, and unfortunately there is an element of truth in this.  Going through the grieving process ‘kills’ the previous relationship – but it also frees you up for any new relationship possible later if the other person changes their behaviour.

The starting point: Acceptance

You accept:

• you are powerless to make the relationship or relationships work – you may have tried various ways to resolve the painful state and you just get the same non-cooperation in return


• you have the same right to mutually rewarding relationships as do the people you have been attempting to relate to – give yourself the same rights you give to them – this includes the right to walk away when our relationships are imbalanced; would you want them to go through what you are experiencing?  I thought as much


• you care deeply about these relationships and you are the kind of person who values the time and lives of others but there is a time to cut the attachments – even if it means at a later date starting fresh with the same people.

The Process: Shifting Viewpoints during Emotional Release

During this process you alternate between feeling grief from a Subjective Viewpoint to observing and re-developing your self-image from an Objective Viewpoint.

We do this so that as you come through the process you fully release the pain and feel mentally good about yourself.

1. Set aside a safe place where you will not be disturbed but can have some pleasant distraction every now and again when you get a bit too tired


2. Go into the feelings and the thoughts attached to them and feel them as intensely as you can – explore everything in there including your past attempts at reconciliation and how the other people concerned responded or did not respond


3. Re-experience your helplessness in the situation; now step outside of it into the Objective Viewpoint


4. To enhance this affect imagine you are looking at someone else going through the same experience – see how much they care; see how much they value these relationships?  Then see how little the other person or people involved contribute


5. From the Objective Viewpoint tell this more distant ‘you’ how it is OK to feel these feelings and how you admire them for the intensity of their feelings – see how powerful they are?  This is the glue that binds us all – but in this situation you are releasing the glue; releasing the energy


6. Re-enter the Subjective Viewpoint and feel the full force of the feelings again – feel all the pain and symptoms of the loss; think about the wonderful relationship you might have had if things had been different – it was not your fault it did not work out


7. If you did play some part in the situation, however, feel any guilt you may be feeling but return to the person who wanted that pleasant, peaceful relationship


8. if you feel rage come up based on the resentment you have to go through this process due to the behaviour of others just feel the rage and do not self-judge; just feel it out safely and work towards achieving a state of non-blaming by the end of the process


9. Go back into the Objective Viewpoint and watch yourself from the outside – look at how much this person values their relationships again


10. rest – alternate the feeling and releasing process with periods of rest or distraction as this can be exhausting.

Eventually you will come out – and when you do come out you may want to re-evaluate how you deal with the relationships you currently have and those you have in the future.

You will lose your fear and resentment of the grief process (grieving for the living) but will create strategies to make sure you do not have to endure this more than necessary in the future.

Regards - Carl