I talk a lot about the importance of connection and belonging here at Remembering For Good. I believe it’s critical for the integration and transformation of grief.

It’s not just people who are grieving who need connection and belonging though. As humans we’re social animals that are wired for living in tribes. We have a strong psychological need to belong.

Our families are one of the key places where we want to experience belonging, so when families break up or change shape through divorce and/or re-marriage, this triggers our fears about not having a place to belong and this fear easily turns into shame – the painful feeling of believing that you’re flawed and therefore unworthy of belonging.

Divorce and re-marriage often trigger a potent mix of grief and shame for all family members involved. Grief over the loss of the original family (and often there are other losses too, like having to move house and change schools, neighborhoods, friends, etc) is painful enough on it’s own, but with shame layered on top, it can become despairing and quite unbearable because shame causes us to distrust and disconnect from our true selves and from each other. At the very time that a new family is trying to form and bond, shame is getting in the way and creating disconnection.

Barbara asked me some really great questions and I talked about:

• The challenge and creativity of creating a new, meaningful story and sense of family after the original family story is broken.
• Why each person’s experience of grief is individual and unique, so there’s no “5 stages” or “7 tasks.” Grief is messy, unpredictable and takes as long as it takes.
• The impact of shame on the grief experience.
• The one universal need that we all have when we’re grieving, in spite of the individuality of our grief experiences. (In fact this is a universal need even if we aren’t grieving!)
• Why the stepmother offering “unconditional acceptance” by being nice all the time doesn’t work and what she should do instead.
• How a stepmother can support the other members of the family who are grieving (hint: don’t try to be their grief coach!)
• The difference between ruminating and remembering, and the power of bringing creativity to our memories.
• Why children don’t have to “let go” of or “get closure” on their relationship with their biological mother in order to nurture a healthy relationship with their stepmother.

Listen to our call (60mins)

Grieving is ridden with double-binds.

People tell us that we should be talking or crying more – doing more evident “grief work” and expressing our emotions, because this is how to grieve in a healthy way. We must not keep our emotions pent-up inside! If you’re not talking or crying enough about your loss, you are in denial. Basically, the message is, “You’re not grieving right.”

But here’s the double-bind… when we do talk about or express our grief through tears or by sharing honestly about our pain, people around us quickly react with:

• optimistic re-frames (These usually start with the words, “at least…” As in, “At least you have other children.” “At least your father lived a long life.”)
• “let-me-fix-you” advice about how to grieve, how you need to “let go” and what you should do to “get closure.”
• suggestions that you should see a counselor (who will advise you about how to grieve).

The underlying message of this response is also, “You’re not grieving right.” Grieving people navigate a world of double-binds where, regardless of the way they do or do not experience or express their grief, they’re given the message, “You’re doing it wrong.”

Shame: the natural consequence of double-binds.

“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.” – Brené Brown

When we consider that grieving people are receiving the message, “You’re doing it wrong,” on a daily basis and in multiple relationships, alongside societal language that describes grief as something to “recover from” and a general cultural perspective that views grief as a sign of mental illness or broken-ness, it’s easy to see how people who are grieving begin to feel ashamed in their grief. (“Perhaps I am flawed… And if I am so flawed, perhaps my greatest fear has been realized and I’m not worthy of acceptance and belonging.”)

Shame is an excruciatingly painful emotion, so that’s reason enough for my interest in helping grieving people to experience “shameless grief.” But the destructive effects of shame go deeper than that.

Shame makes us want to hide parts of ourselves, or even all of ourselves, so we withdraw emotionally and perhaps even physically in our relationships with friends and family. Social support (meaning the informal support provided by friends and family, not professional support!) is the undisputed most significant resilience factor in the trauma and grief research. Shame disconnects us from that rich source of resilience. Perhaps worse than that, shame fosters a distrust and judgement of ourselves. We begin doubting and fighting ourselves and we disconnect from our intuitive wisdom – the very thing that we need most when we’re inventing our lives again after loss.

Shameless grief is hard enough, but shame-filled grief is pure loneliness, disconnection, vulnerability and despair.

How to free yourself from double-binds and shame.

• The place to begin is with noticing the double-binds. If you’re getting advice from people that is in direct opposition of other advice you’ve been given, then it’s probably a double-bind.
• Understand the inherent freedom in double-binds. Double-binds feel like we’re being presented with 2 options, both of which will confirm that we’re doing it wrong and we’re broken or ill. This can feel like a horrible, constrictive and painful trap. But the real truth of a double-bind is that it represents a situation where you have more freedom than ever to choose your own path. If there are divergent experiences and perspectives then this means that grief is different for each person. This means that you can’t do it “wrong” because there is no single “right” or “wrong.” You’re free to choose your own way!
• Commit to trusting in your own natural resilience and resourcefulness. Depending on how much shame has piled up on top of your grief, this might sound easy and simple, or it might sound like a long journey. What I can assure you is that you are already naturally resilience, resourceful and creative. This is not something you have to learn or work for. It’s something you just have to remember and choose to believe in. Self-trust will always demand courage. But that’s okay – you have an abundance of that too.
• Ask yourself what you need and give yourself permission to do, have or feel that – even if other people around you think you should do, have or feel something else.

There. Can you feel how much lighter that is?

Here’s more about ubuntu if you’re curious to learn more about what ubuntu is, and you can see photos of the slides I painted for the talk over here.

Big thanks to Jessica for allowing me to share her story. If you’ve been inspired or comforted by her story, please drop her a line and let her know. Getting that sort of feedback is a wonderful en-courager that fuels the courage to embrace vulnerability, share our stories and nurture more connection!

Shelly Immel of The Big Life Project interviewed me a few weeks ago about wholehearted living after loss. I use that phrase a lot around here, but after this interview I realized that I’ve shared about it in bits and pieces throughout all my articles and there isn’t really a short summary about wholehearted living after loss on my site. This interview is a great summary of what wholehearted living after loss is all about and how to create a wholehearted life after loss. It includes a creative exercise you can do yourself, and I also shared about many of the values and beliefs that underpin both my personal journey and my work here at Remembering For Good and with Kara at The Creative Grief Coaching Studio.

In the interview, I shared:

• Brene Brown’s concept of “Whole-Hearted Living” and how it applies to “wholehearted living after loss.”
• The creative power of “AND” thinking (rather than “Either/Or” thinking)
• A creative exercise you can use to invite other experiences and feelings you want (peace, meaning, joy) into your life after loss – even if you feel like your grief is overwhelming.
• The best protection against a broken heart. (Hint: It’s NOT holding back your love.)
• How and why connection is integral to wholehearted living after loss.

Click on this link or the video image below to watch the interview at Shelly’s Big Life Project.

Remember With Us: Remembering For Good on Pinterest

We naturally remember our loved ones after they die and they continue to impact our lives. I’ve created a collaborative Pinterest board where you can add photos and stories about the people you’re remembering, so that we can remember together, share stories and celebrate the significance of these people’s lives, even after their death.

Pinterest is a free social network. In order to be able to pin on the Remembering For Good board, you need to have a Pinterest account, and then drop me a message (send me a tweet at @cathduncan or email me at cath at rememberingforgood dot com.) with the link for your Pinterest account so that I can follow you on Pinterest and add you as a collaborator on this board. After that you’ll be able to join us and pin images and articles to the Remembering For Good Pinterest board.

Remembering For Good Grief Workbooks: Buy your hardcopy version and I’ll donate another copy

After many requests, I’ve made my Remembering For Good Grief Grief Workbook available in hardcopy. When you purchase your copy, I’ll give another copy to a public organization (hospitals, hospices, medical centres, etc) or non-profit that works with bereaved people.

I’ll add a remembrance sticker to the front of the book that I donate and anyone who reads this book will know that it was donated by you, in remembrance of your loved one. You can even choose where I should send the donated copy, if you wish. Here’s what the remembrance sticker looks like:

The Remembering For Good Grief Workbook is still available as a digital version (but it’s no longer free), or you can order a hardcopy version that I’ll ship out to you. Either way, I’ll donate another copy in remembrance of your loved one. More details and order your copy here.

Wholehearted Living After Loss: Next 8-Week Online Group Starts 3 April

If you’d like to connect with a compassionate community, work more closely with me and learn more about living wholeheartedly after loss, there are still a few spots available in my next 8-week online Wholehearted Living After Loss group.

The group will be a combination of “meet-you-where-you’re-at” live discussion and coaching on the weekly phone calls and in the private forum, as well as some weekly teaching about the “what and why” of wholehearted living after loss. You’ll receive a manual and workbook and each week you’ll learn creative self-coaching exercises to help you to find peace and create a more wholehearted life after loss.

You can find out more about the topics we’ll cover each week and sign up for the group over here. I’ll be accepting a maximum of 12 people into this group so that we can keep it intimate and allow for space and time to get to know each other well.

Words create assumptions, expectations and experiences

The words we use matter because our words create our expectations and also the permissions we do and don’t give ourselves, which ultimately mediates our experience of grief. The word “work” invokes assumptions that grief work is focused, productive, rational and difficult, but ultimately if you’re brave and diligent about doing your grief work, you’ll be rewarded and you’ll “resolve” your grief or “achieve closure.”

The notion of grief work is so attractive to our modern Western minds that we have a word for the experience of people who don’t do their grief work in a timely fashion and are later seemingly punished by a back-lash of intense grief. This has been called “unresolved grief” or “delayed grief.” You’ll often hear counselors cautioning their clients against “avoiding” their grief, and prescribing grief work as a difficult but necessary process that they have to go through in order to heal.

Also linked to the idea of grief work is the idea of “anticipatory grief” – the notion that we sometimes start grieving in anticipation of a loss. While grief psychology explains that there will always be some grieving after the death actually happens, there is still often a tendency for people to believe that if they start the grieving process early they can somehow be prepared for the death (and protected from the pain of loss), and get their grieving completed or “resolved” sooner.

“Grief work, grief tasks, unresolved grief, achieving closure…” Can you hear the modern Western industrial cultural influence?

When we come at grief with this approach, we’re affirming grief as something to be controlled, fixed or resolved. Healing is something to be earned or achieved and conversely, not feeling healed (or appearing to have not yet completed your “grief tasks.”) is often interpreted as a sign of weakness of character, avoidance or incompetence. These are all potential triggers for guilt and shame about your grieving experience.

Relax. You don’t have to do grief work

The idea that grieving could involve 5 sequential stages or 4 tasks that can be completed is attractive. It sounds so neat and orderly. Best of all is the idea of “closure” or “resolution” – the notion that we can complete our grieving, and the underlying promise that we can avoid future pain after that. But as compelling as those industrious, proactive metaphors are, they’re not an accurate reflection of most people’s experience of grief. The latest grief research shows us that grief is messy and unpredictable – even when you’ve done it before, because it’s different every time. And we’re never really finished with grieving because as we learn and change and have new life experiences, those experiences give us new lenses through which to view our losses.

The new grief research shows us that grief naturally oscillates or pulses. Grief arrives for a bit and then it leaves, only to arrive again a bit later. It’s not linear and it’s not productive! It’s natural for your grief to come and go and to change it’s shape. It’s not natural to elicit your grief or try to summon it in order to try to express it, work on it, fix it, resolve it, control it or purge it.

The latest grief research also shows that there’s no real evidence that “delayed grief” exists, and that we shouldn’t prescribe grief counseling to everyone as a matter of course because not everyone benefits from it and for some people the outcomes are even worse when they have counseling.

So what should I do if there’s no need to do grief work?

Perhaps this is the nub or it and the reason why the idea of grief work became so popular. It gave us something to do when we were feeling lost, confused and clueless about what to do. “Work” is where so many of us in the modern Western world establish our identity and it’s what we instinctively think will fix everything. But you don’t have to do grief work.

Grief pulses. It will come and go. When the “dark” grieving emotions arrive, just be present to them and feel for yourself what you might like to do with them. When you do this, the “dark” grieving emotions will visit a short while and then move on. (Until they visit again, and then leave again. That’s their natural way.) Seek to relate to and relate with and collaborate with your grief, rather than trying to control or eliminate it.

How can you be present to your grief? You can name your grieving emotions and talk about them with a professional, but you don’t have to and, even though “talk therapy” is promoted as the main way to grieve and heal, talk therapy is not the only thing you can do to be present to the “dark” grieving emotions. Here are some other options:

• Observe your thoughts and feelings. Just sit and watch your grieving thoughts and feelings and notice what they are. Be genuinely curious, and notice how watching your thoughts and feelings shifts them.
• Draw/ paint/ collage or write about your thoughts and feelings.
• Create a lament mandala.
• Make a playlist of music that expresses how you feel.
• Talk with a friend who’s earned your trust and will be a non-judgemental and compassionate listener.
• Go on a quest.
• Dance or sing.
• Practice Tonglen.
• Walk, run, do yoga, dance… just move your body in whatever way it feels like it wants to move. Hard and fast or long, deep and slow.
• This isn’t a complete list. What other ideas can you think of?

Notice that this list sounds a lot more like play than work! “Grief play” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but I’ve found that play is a much more liberating and peaceful way to approach grief than “grief work.” What would it be like if you knew that you could transform your grief through play? How would you grieve and play then?

And in those spaces, when the “dark” grieving emotions aren’t visiting, don’t try to anticipate them, prepare for them or worry about them. Just get on with doing and being what you love. There is no guilt or shame in focusing on other things beyond your grief – pulsing in your grief experience is the natural way. When the grief emotions aren’t there, this is the space to find your “new normal” and to create more new small joys in your life. The small joys you create will provide a contrast against the losses, until you become convinced (through your own experience) that a full, wholehearted life is full of both the awful and awe, and it’s all okay.

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” – Plato

“If animals play, this is because play is useful in the struggle for survival; because play practices and so perfects the skills needed in adult life.” – Susannah Miller

Get your hard-copy of my Remembering For Good book and I’ll donate a copy in remembrance of your loved one

I’ve been giving away my Remembering For Good book as a digital book since August 2010, and all through those months I’ve had emails from people, asking if they can order a hard-copy of the book so that they can write in it. Well, I’ve finally made a plan to make that possible.

As of today you can order your copy of Remembering For Good – either as a hard-copy version that I’ll post to you or as a digital version that you can download right away. When you order your copy – whether digital or hard-cover – I’ll donate another copy of my book to an organization or non-profit that works with people who are grieving. The donated copy of my book will have a remembrance sticker in the front of it and you’ll be able to let me know the name of a loved one who’s died in whose name you’d like to donate the second copy. Click here to get more details and see what the remembrance sticker will look like.

Seeking approval in our grieving

Do you find yourself seeking approval in your grieving, and wanting your friends and family to validate the choices you’ve made about how to grieve? Do you keep quiet about some of your loss story or some of your reactions to loss and the strategies you’ve chosen for soothing your grief because you think that other people wouldn’t approve of them? Do you sometimes feel ashamed of your grief reactions and then try to adapt and put on a “social mask” to hide your real thoughts and feelings because you fear that your friends and family would be uncomfortable with you or even reject you if you revealed your true thoughts and feelings or asked them for what you really need?

Well, you’re not alone in that. We all do it. We shame ourselves about some aspects of our loss and grief experience in our attempts to seek approval and avoid judgement and rejection from our friends and family.

But here’s the thing… we’re ashamed of shame. So we don’t talk about our approval-seeking, fear of judgement and rejection or shame. It takes the kind of self-awareness, consciousness, courage and self-confidence that Dana and Rebekah have to talk about our shame.

The risks and pain of shame

When we feel our need for approval and our shame, it’s stressful and painful. So we do all we can to avoid feeling it and we work especially hard to avoid letting on to others that we’re feeling ashamed or wanting their approval.

We try to convince ourselves that we’re independent and we don’t need anyone else’s approval – what they think about us is “their business.” When that doesn’t work, then we try to numb our shame with everything from food to sex to medication and alcohol. And through it all, we’re on “high alert,” trying to anticipate what we can do to get approval and to persuade others that we’ve “got it all together.”

We’re constantly adapting ourselves and hiding parts of who we really are, and with each social mask that we add, our true self gets a little more disconnected from our friends and family, and – perhaps worst of all – we get a little more disconnected from our own selves. And really, not even being on your own side is the loneliest way to live.

Work at dissolving the shame, not the grief

In the modern Western world, we tend to approach grief as though it’s an ugly, unnatural and even toxic thing that has to be purged from our bodies. I once even heard a grief counselor say that, “Crying is like vomiting… nobody likes to do it, but you always feel better afterwards.” The metaphor conjures up the idea of grief being like bad food or unnatural toxins that the body needs to purge. And it points to our shame and social fears too – we’re about as willing to cry in public as we are to vomit in public!

We’re mistaken though. Grief is not the poisonous, unhealthy and painful toxin that needs to be purged. Shame is the poisonous, unhealthy and painful toxin that needs to be purged.

When we allow ourselves to notice our fears of judgement and rejection, and our shame about our grieving experience or the person we’re wanting to become after loss, then we can start to choose self-compassion and authenticity instead of letting shame rule our lives. Grief can feel very painful, but without shame, it’s a bittersweet, heart-expanding pain. Shame turns grief into a stressful, lonely, meaningless and sometimes even hopeless kind of pain.

What we’re really looking for when we’re seeking approval

When you read this article, many of you will feel ashamed about seeking approval. It sounds like such a lame thing to do (at least that’s what I find myself saying to myself when I notice that I’m wanting someone else’s approval.) But here’s the thing… approval isn’t *really* what you’re seeking. There’s a deeper need below the need for approval. What you’re really seeking is connection, relationship, intimacy.

As humans we’re wired for connection with our communities, because it’s the best way to be resourceful and survive. Perhaps more importantly, I believe that we intuitively know that, while love is the reason for grief, it’s also the salve that soothes grief, so when we’re grieving, we feel our need for connection and love even more deeply than ever.

When we’re feeling that deep need for connection, anything that could possibly cause rejection is terrifying. The potential of losing further relationships is just awful when we’re already feeling the pain of the absence of a loved one. So we try to avoid rejection and seek approval in our grieving.

It’s really helped me to notice when I’m feeling ashamed and seeking approval, and to remind myself in that moment that when I feel I need approval, I don’t need to feel ashamed about it, because what I’m really seeking is connection and intimacy. When I’m confused and I think it’s approval I need, then I put my social masks on and lose authentic connection and intimacy with both myself and with others. It’s total self-sabotage, because connection with my true self and with others is the very thing I really want.

When I remember that it’s intimacy and connection that I really want, then I can decide whether this person or community is the sort of person or community I *really* want to connect with. If they are, then I can choose to put the social masks away and to bring my authentic self to the relationship, instead of adapting for approval.

It’s not easy – this is always a courageous choice. But with every courageous choice I make to put down my social masks and bring my whole self to the relationship, I experience more of the authentic connection that I’ve really been wanting. And ultimately, the authentic connection – the love – is the most powerful way to both dissolve shame and soothe my grief.

Big thank you to Rebekah and Dana for having the courage to open this conversation that triggered this post!

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8-Week Online Group For People Grieving The Death of a Loved One

You can find full details on the course content, dates, times and course fee over here.

If you’d prefer to work through the course material one-on-one instead, I have 5 spots available.

I’m also making 2 scholarships available to help you with the course fees if you’re not in the financial position to pay the full course fee. Click for full details.