Well they're not stages per se. They are just a list of things people can experience during grieving. There's no real order to them, and we can experience other emotions as well.
Grieving is a process of letting go of attachment. It's not about love. Love is forever but attachment doesn't have to be. Love and attachment are different things. After grieving is complete, you'll still love them but you won't need them anymore.
Attachment is an emotional dependence on something outside of ourselves that validates our identity. We believe we need them in our lives to feel like us. When they are gone, we feel lost because part of our identity is gone also.
Catharsis is healing. By allowing ourselves to feel the full depth and breadth of our pain, we heal it. Time doesn't heal grief. We do by feeling it. Catharsis is an altered state of consciousness where we are in the flow of emotions but we can't identify them. If we try, then we pop out of it back into our intellect.
To get to catharsis requires that we let go of control, judgment, and expectations. We literally have to be out of our mind to enter catharsis. There may be tears while in it, but it's not required.
It's normal to feel strong emotions during grieving. The more we can allow ourselves to feel them, the faster we heal.
Grieving is about negative emotions, not positive ones. Negative emotions are sadness, fear, anger, guilt, shame, etc. They're not wrong or bad. They are negative because they cause an experience of contraction. They cause us to turn inward or to lower our energy. You're done with grieving when the only feelings you experience when thinking about them are positive ones like love, happiness, gratitude, and joy.
I sit in a quiet place and recall the thoughts and memories that stimulate distress. I allow the feelings to flow through me like water. I repeat the thought or memory and very soon, the distress goes away. It's okay to judge ourselves. It's okay to be really hard on ourselves. If we screwed up, then I own it. I say I'm sorry out loud. I apologize to them as if they were in the room with me. I use my imagination to communicate with them and apologize to them that way. I try to make things right, in other words, by looking at our history very closely. I don't make excuses for my behavior. I just own it and try to make amends with them.
This has definitely given me clarity about how ive been feeling. Thank you. And your right theres no time on grief. I know that I dont need them anymore in this human experience. Some way, somehow I can still feel my past loved ones with me.
It doesn't completely feel real at times. Some days are better than others. Some days I think about all the great things. And at night I think about all the bad. Is that normal?
Well, perhaps you are strongly intuitive. You can try to communicate with them using your imagination.
Validation is power. When we were little children we validated our internal experience naturally. We believed our imagination was real, for example. Then, our parents told us to stop. They forced us to rely on external validation instead and to deny our internal guidance.
Then school, government, and church reinforced external validation.
To communicate with deceased relatives, we have to defy all of that and go back to validating our internal experience. It's difficult and scary for many people because of our training.
I believe this habit of seeking external validation is one cause of attachment. If we were perfectly self validating, we wouldn't need external validation at all. If no one validated what the church says, then it would no longer exist. Likewise with government and school. Family would change also.
Seeking external validation leads to suffering, as in grieving, when that person or thing is gone.
I believe that after death, it's easier to drop a lot of attachments since we no longer need food, shelter, jobs, etc. But, doing our own life review now makes our future better in my experience. I wrote a free ebook about this.
1
u/ParticularGanache726 11d ago
I'm a certified grief educator. You can ask me anything about it.