22 September 2017 By Jonathan Gibbs at The Body Matters in Psychotherapy

Surviving bereavement and other losses

Grief following bereavement is something that humans have always experienced – as demonstrated by quotes of philosophers of the ancient world. Yet for the individual experiencing grief, this knowledge does not make the experiencing any easier.

In fact, it may be that, in modern times – with families spread further apart geographically and with many people not looking to religious texts or institutions for support, grief is often harder to bear. Sometimes, people fail to grieve, for one reason or another – and this can make life more difficult later on. Factors that make this more likely include the particular circumstances surrounding a death, the previous losses that a person has experienced, the way their personality works, their support networks and so on.

Typically, bereaved people go through four stages of grief – Denial, Anger, Depression & Acceptance. Working through these stages is sometimes called ‘grief-work’ and often happens perfectly naturally. However, grief can be exceedingly difficult to deal with and people can become ‘stuck’ in the process. For example, the Denial stage is made more difficult if the death in question is sudden and so there is little time to mentally prepare for it. The Anger stage may be more difficult to pass through, if an effort has been made for some reason to repress this anger. Working through Depression here, involves the bereaved person adjusting to their changed situation – which involves the person’s mental/emotional state as well as how they interact with the world. There’s certainly no reason to suppose that doing this should be easy! When Acceptance of their loss has been achieved, a person can, more easily, move forward with their life, knowing that they have mentally ‘re-located’ the deceased in a way that allows them a continuing bond with that person. In fact, an indicator that grief has been worked through is that a person can think about their loved one without pain.

In New York in 2001, Queen Elizabeth II said that “Grief is the price we pay for love”, and there is no doubt that strong feelings of love can make the pain of loss particularly intense.

BrainWorking Recursive Therapy (BWRT®) is a recently-developed therapy that is highly effective for dealing with grief in all its forms. So why choose BWRT® rather than the more familiar approaches such as Counselling? Some clients prefer BWRT® because it doesn’t require them to reveal private information and personal secrets – it only requires the client to know how they’d like to feel. Others opt for BWRT® because they’ve seen the change in friends who have benefitted from it astonishingly rapidly. It’s also completely logical, practical and down-to-earth.

In addition to the standard techniques used by BWRT® practitioners, there is a technique called the ‘Loving goodbye’ technique specifically for bereavement, which can help a client to move to where they’d like to be. In other words, the bereaved person, when they think about their loss, can be helped to feel just the way they would like to feel – just the way that is best for them. This doesn’t mean that the loved-one is to be forgotten – on the contrary, it is easier for the deceased to be thought about – clients often report that the possession of photographs and other mementoes can now be enjoyed and anniversaries are no longer times of distress. In this sense BWRT® techniques are absolutely person-centred – and merely require, as with other BWRT® techniques, that the client knows how they’d like to feel.

BWRT® can certainly help individuals to have fuller and more meaningful lives. But how soon should help be sought in the case of bereavement? And is it wrong to want to want to come to an acceptance of a loved-one’s death – wouldn’t some level of continued pain be a way of remembering the deceased? Because humans are so fantastically complex, it is impossible to say how long grieving should take. In fact, many therapists would discourage clients from thinking about their thoughts, feelings and behaviour in terms of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’. However, if you are bereaved, I am happy to offer you a free 50-minute consultation to discuss your loss and to explore with you whether therapy might be of use to you.
It might just be the perfect time to get help!

As the Greek philosopher Xenophon said “Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not”, whilst the Roman Cicero said “It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness”.

And finally, it has to be remembered that as well as bereavement, we face other losses over the course of our lives – such as the loss of youth, health, jobs and status (through retirement or redundancy) and financial success. In addition, there’s the possibility of divorce and the ending of relationships which can lead to grief. Of course many of the events listed above are ones that we cannot avoid. Yet although change cannot always be avoided, we can often change the way we feel about such changes to a way that makes it easier for us to live a full and meaningful life.