How do you face loss? Grief and transitions

I am trying to write a post on acceptance but I realise that before we get to acceptance we need to understand grief and how it hits you. We think of grief as something that we only have when someone in our life dies, but you face grief when other things end in your life: your relationship, a friendship, your job. Some people grieve when they retire as they can't get used to leaving their old life behind, others grieve their freedom when they have a child.

There are many stages of grief that people go through when they face a loss. The classic stages that you hear the most about are from psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' book On Death and Dying*:

• denial
• anger
• bargaining
• depression
  
• acceptance

There are other feelings you may come across as well when grieving a loss: confusion, anxiety, numbness - just to name a few. You may not notice these in concrete 'stages' instead your feelings may be a jumble, feeling five things at the same time one day, and then one another day.

A therapist explained it to my by drawing a tunnel on a sheet of paper:

'It's like a wind tunnel, with all the stages flying around. One day you are in denial, the next day you are angry and anxious. There is no clear set process that you will got through, each person's grief is individual.'

Transition

If we look at grief, we need to look at endings. One of the most helpful books I have ever read about facing change is Transitions - making sense of life's changes, by William Bridges.

I have picked up this book time and time again when life throws another change at me - it got me through the end of a relationship, the end of what I thought of as my naivete as my ex had cheated on me, the loss of two babies through miscarriage, leaving my job, changing my career and relocating. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Bridges talks about change as being the event in your life - your partner leaving, you getting fired, you having a baby, you moving cities - and transition being the internal process of adjustment. He explains that there are three stages:

• The End - we often don't give much thought to the ending, what we are leaving behind, but Bridges explains that it is important to understand what we were before.
• The Neutral Zone - we go into a period of not being the old person and not the new person either. We need time out from the world, while we adjust. It can be an uncomfortable time, but also a time when we tap into different (and distant) perspective of our lives while we stand back. Bridges explains:

  "For many people, the experience of the neutral zone is essentially one of emptiness in which the old reality looks transparent and nothing feels solid anymore."

• Then finally we move into the new beginning, ready for our changed life.

Many of us want to skip right past the first two stages, hungry to move onto the new exciting part, but without the full transition process we are left with surface changes only. We have not gone through the transition process.

My story of transition:

I had the most wonderful opportunity to travel last year. We had an exciting 5 months living in the US and then 2 months traveling through Europe. A dream trip, and even more excitingly I was pregnant! Having been unsure if it would even happen, we were ecstatic. Two weeks before we were due back, and 11 weeks into the pregnancy I lost the baby. It seemed so unfair as we were one week short of the magic three months. We were in Turkey, not sure what to do and after an agonizing 10 hours, finally made it to the (wonderful) American Hospital for the operation I needed.

We arrived home and I felt empty. Physically empty as I was no longer pregnant, and feeling like my future was empty. For three months we had planned the year, and in fact the next 20 years ahead. Those dreams were gone and I didn't know what I should be thinking. I was numb a lot of the time, depressed and frail. I wept like a character from a Victorian novel.

I knew I was in the Neutral Zone, when I would just sit and look blankly out at the beautiful forest by our house. I knew it was OK to feel nothing about the future, to not know where I was right now, to not understand what my dreams were to be. In the middle of this raw sadness, there was a glimmer of possibility but it was like smoke, impossible to hold onto.

Understanding that there is the Neutral Zone doesn't make it any easier to get through - but it helps to know that if you feel nowhere, that's OK. It helps because you don't rush to fill the void and instead go with it - as Bridges says 'The way in is the way out.' , This is not about recharging your batteries, it is about renewal.

I had a second miscarriage a few months after - and these two losses were the hardest thing I have ever faced. I still wish that I didn't have to go through them, but I accept it like a rough scar after an accident. It is there, it is part of me although still too new to know what it means in the 'history of me'. I'm out of neutral now, looking to the future and my new beginning.

I've put up an example of the stages of grief I faced during my last breakup on my blog

* This is a wonderful book that I thought I would skim for my research, but ending up reading it cover to cover in one sitting. Touching stories about the terminally ill and their families told in their own words.