There are crucial differences between caretaking and caregiving and you will notice, the healthier the relationship, the more you are caregiving than caretaking. I see caretaking and caregiving on a continuum. We usually are not one or the other. The goal is to do as much caregiving as we are able to and decrease our caretaking as we can. Caretaking is a dysfunctional, learned behavior that can be changed. We want to change it because we will experience more peace, more contentment and more fulfilling relationships if we do. The people in your life may resist your healthier actions, but modeling caregiving is a huge gift you are giving your loved ones.
I often hear people qualify their days after experiencing a death or other loss as good or bad based on whether or not they cried with the crying days being the “bad” ones. I don’t look at it that way. I see crying a good and positive thing and a healthy person’s response to emotional pain as well as a necessary part of the grieving process*.
When we think about trusting someone, we tend to think of it in terms of all or nothing. Either we trust this person or we don’t. We trust ourselves or we don’t. We trust that we will be taken care of or we don’t. I label trust that is black and white like that “unhealthy trust.” We think it’s like a switch we can turn on or off on a whim. It’s not. And if you change the way you think about trust and learn the difference between healthy and unhealthy trust, you will save yourself a lot of heartache because trust is at the core of all of our relationships.
I will agree that we need time to grieve and mourn, but it is not time that does the job of healing. If we do not do the necessary grief work (accepting the reality of the loss, experiencing the pain, making the necessary adjustments and creating meaning from the loss), we will end up with what Alan Wolfelt calls “carried grief.” Carried grief is when you do not mourn your loss and take the pain with you into everyday of your life.
Healing isn’t just something that happens. It’s not like one day you’re in dysfunction and the next day you’re not. You actually have to make the choice to do your personal growth work to heal.
We’ve all heard that communication is an important factor in relationships. We know this, but why is it so hard? I believe it is because there are three obstacles we face in achieving goal to better our communication.
We simply cannot live our potential while we are harboring resentments against ourselves and others. But, it’s important to know that the practice of forgiveness is actually an act of self-interest and not about another person at all.
In my work as a grief counselor, I have found that while many of my clients already know the stages of grief, it does not seem to be enough for them. The stages are something that happens to you. They aren’t something that can be controlled or predicted. Most people find that not only do the stages not occur in the “right order,” but more than one can be experienced at the same time and it is likely that one or more of them are not experienced at all.
You are living out one of most people’s greatest fear. This is why some of your closest friends or family might be acting standoffish or even disappear. They don’t mean to be mean or neglectful, but it doesn’t hurt any less. Many times they want to be there for you but simply don’t know how. However, if you let them, there are people in your life who can be there for you, champion you, stand by you and will not be afraid to talk about this or go through this fully with you.
One of the most painful aspects of the grieving process can be loneliness. We expect to be sad, but the feeling of loneliness has its own and subtly different kind of pain. It can be unsettling and scary. What you need to know is that you are not alone in feeling these feelings. They are quite common in women.
One of the feelings that I find difficult to explain to my clients is the sense of “feeling little” following a devastating loss. This is the “childlike terror” mention in the quote – it’s like we struggle to stay our adult selves – we feel lost and alone. We feel scared.
“Disenfranchised grief” is when your heart is grieving but you can’t talk about or share your pain with others because it is considered unacceptable to others. It’s when you’re sad and miserable and the world doesn’t think you should be, either because you’re not “entitled” or because it isn’t “worth it.”
One of the comforting things about being human is that we are both completely unique AND quite the same. This is true with physiological processes (like a physical wound) and emotional processes (such as grieving).
