Although we acknowledge that death is part of life, who among us spend any time preparing for it? Not many!
None of us want to think about any sort of loss during happy moments.
We carry in our mind the picture of the life we want when we grow up, the type of kids we want to raise, where we want to wind up, and the list goes on….
Then all of a sudden, it happens, life hits us with a huge blow.
It might be the loss of a child, spouse, or someone so important that we feel incomplete without their support.
At that moment, all our plans take a new turn and we are left with so many questions making it hard to move through grief.
How am I supposed to handle this? How do I get through this? And so many more.
Some might even lose themselves in the midst of such tragedy without being able to move on.
For example, my mom had a stroke six months after my dad passed.
It occurred because mom was so depressed. She just didn’t know how to live alone with all the responsibilities dad left behind.
Every day she looked great, put on a good smile.
We thought all was fine, she finally got over it. She accepted her fate and moved on without realizing she was slowly dying on the inside.
Mom put on such a good face to distract us from noticing the pain on the inside.
And it worked. And it wasn’t until she had a stroke that we came to realize she wasn’t anything like the image she had portrayed.
That was the first time I recognized I had to learn to read people.
Because I had begun to understand that people often times are not how they seem.
There’s a lot going on inside all of us, and unless we accept and acknowledge that and learn how to deal with it, especially when faced with the pain of loss, it will continue, eventually leading to our own destruction.
If my mom had reached out for help in learning how to deal with the tragic loss of her beloved husband, chances are she wouldn’t have had a stroke and everything would have been perfectly fine.
Ever since then I’ve vowed to learn how to read others and myself, so that if possible I can help myself and those around me to avoid experiencing what happened to my mom.
You need to do that too, you need to learn how to deal with life’s tragedies and your secret inner feelings and who knows; someday someone might be saved by your wisdom. To do that you’ll need to learn how to:
Stay open to your pain
From an early age, we’ve been programmed to follow the rules, never complain, and just keep our negative emotions to ourselves.
So in most cases when tragedy or death happens, we try to suppress our emotions. We pretend to be fine, after all, that’s what everybody wants. As long as you appear to be okay, no one notices if you’re happy or not, right?
Why it can be hard to move through grief
By suppressing our emotions, we are not getting over anything.
Rather, we’re storing this emotional pattern into the deepest part of our subconscious mind.
And there it sits, waiting until the moment of illness or anxiety strike so that this emotional pattern can flow to the surface, inflicting even deeper pain into our psyche.
Making things even worse.
To honestly deal with, get through and move on from grief and other negative emotions, you must be willing to stay open to your pain, hard as that might be.
Notice your pain, bring it into your consciousness and do everything you can to allow it to flow through you.
Of course you must grieve, grieving is normal.
What you would wish for
Someday, sometime in the very distant future someone will grieve for us.
And when that happens, what will be our wish for those people?
And what would your loved one who passed away want for you?
For most of us, the answer is that everything will eventually okay and we will move through grief.
Our big challenge with all of this is that we don’t or can’t see in our moments of grief.
However, by choosing to reflect on all of the treasured memories when of adversity hits, by staying open to your pain, knowing that you’re not in this alone you’ll be allowing those emotions of grief to flow instead of holding them within and making yourself sick by pretending all is well.
One day you might even look back with gratitude with this hard experiences of life, realizing you wouldn’t have made such important changes in your life had you not experienced their trauma.
Understand the two layers of grief
After I lost my dad and my mum had a stroke I began taking life more seriously.
I came to realize that if these awful experiences had not happened, I wouldn’t have made such progress in my life, I wouldn’t have experienced more inner strength and empowerment.
Even though I lost one of the most precious people in my life, I’m still grateful knowing there’s a lot I can do to impact my environment and make things better.
Truth be told, if you don’t learn how to respond to bad things when they happen, you’ll be creating the worst circumstances for yourself.
Bad things will always happen at some point in life, so the best you can do is to use them as motivation to get stronger, better, and healthier.
If you look deep enough, there’s always a reason why everything has happened and the most any of us can do is to stay open and respond in the best and most positive way we can at the time.
If you do this, you will discover that grief happens in two parts, the first is loss and the second is the remaking of a life. Don’t miss out on the second…you deserve nothing less.
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