This blog post is an excerpt from “The Princess Guide to Healing a Broken Heart” now available on Amazon.com and ThePrincessGuide.com/store. A portion of proceeds from book sales will be used to donate copies of this book to women’s shelters and homes for women.
One big part of winning the head game is learning how to grieve. I have often said that we grieve many times in our lives—not just when someone close to us dies, but also when someone chooses to leave our lives, when we change jobs or career paths, when we move locations, etc.
Up to this point, I have been talking about romantic relationships, but sometimes we need to heal from family relationships, as well. I feel like it is alright to share this story with you, since my birth father has been dead for nearly four years now.
My parents divorced when I was 6, and my maternal grandparents raised me. I was a Pa-Paw’s girl, and when he died in 2002, it was hard on me, but I knew exactly where I stood with him and how he felt about me. The situation with my father dying was a bit different.
Before sending my father an invitation to my wedding in 2013, the last time I talked to him was on the phone in 2006, he said, “I saw a photo of you from your sister’s wedding. I always knew you’d be the fat one!” At the time of her wedding I was a size 14 and have since realized I was using food to cope with the pain of a troubled marriage. When my father made this statement to me, I had lost all the weight and was a size 4, but it didn’t hurt any less. I realized it hurt me so much because he always seemed to favor my sister, and this statement made me feel all the more like the ugly, fat outcast.
He accepted our invitation to the wedding, made a reservation at the host hotel, and made plans to spend time with me before the ceremony. I was disappointed when I checked into the hotel only to find out he canceled his reservation. He got too sick to make the trip. I was unaware since we hadn’t spoken in several years, but he was fighting cancer. Both his parents died due to complications resulting from substance use, and that was also the case with him.
My husband took me to Houston during our honeymoon to see my father. During our day together, he told me about my family history, confirmed that the eye disease in which I had been diagnosed (Retinitis Pigmentosa) was genetic with both his great, great grandparents and his great grandmother being blind, and he hugged me and told me he loved me. I’m thankful we had that day together, but I still felt so much sadness, anger, and remorse when he passed away. Apparently, I wasn’t alone. A quick search engine query rendered several people on message boards describing the same situation and feeling the same way―deep sadness and remorse for the wasted years.
I’ve often thought if my non-relationship with my father had anything to do with the problems I’ve had with self-esteem and losing weight. (I couldn’t even lose weight before my wedding despite trying several diets and pills. The therapist I was seeing said I should consider making the dress fit me instead of trying to make myself fit the dress. I took his advice.)
So, what do you do to grieve an estranged parent or even an ended relationship? Grieving is grieving no matter the circumstances.
Let’s talk about the stages of grief first. I’ve heard several mental health professionals give different versions of the stages, but the five universal stages (according to Grief.com) are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.
In his book Mars and Venus Starting Over, Dr. John Gray explained that there are four emotions a person must experience and release to move through the grieving process: Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Sorrow. “When we lose a partner or a relationship ends, we expect to feel waves of sadness and sorrow, but this is only a part of the grieving process,” he wrote. “To release our attachment to a person or relationship, other feelings (anger and fear) need to be experienced and released.”
An important part of that process is denial. Denial isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is a natural emotion just like anger and sadness. Those things are not bad in and of themselves, but as I’ve mentioned before, we should feel them, release them, and do not sin—don’t do anything to hurt another person or ourselves (Ephesians 4:25).
“If we are still feeling hurt, then we may be attracted to someone who could hurt us again. Although he is the wrong person, he is the right person to link us back to our unresolved feelings. If we use this time to feel our feelings, we free ourselves from this pattern of getting hurt again and again. When we heal our hurt, we stop being attracted to the wrong partners,” wrote Dr. John Gray in his book Mars and Venus Starting Over.
It took me two years to go through the box of things my father left me. That was all he left me. I’m told what little money and the truck he had went to a friend of my father’s daughter. That was also hard to get over because I felt unloved, not valued, and once again not provided for by my father—a pattern he evidently repeated to his grave. I can now say, nearly four years later, I don’t feel hurt when I think about him. I actually feel sadness and compassion for him and the negative choices he made in life. I don’t want to follow his example. I can, however, be proud of his accomplishments working as a draftsman for NASA and owning his own plumbing business. We all have good qualities within us, and that’s what I choose to focus my attention on while acknowledging that his behaviors caused me great pain.
I do want to caution you not to ignore the bad things a person did while alive. I see it all the time, especially on social media where someone who was a drug addict, alcoholic, wife beater, cheater, thief, etc., will be praised for years after their deaths with those doing the praising never mentioning the truth about the person or how they destroyed lives and hurt those around them while on this earth. I’m not saying you should only focus on the bad, but you need to take a balanced view and live in truth …
I have heard ministers and church counselors tell people to just take off the yolk of heaviness and put on the garment of praise. People who are in the deep despair of pain and heart break can’t even focus on gratitude or the positive things while in this state—this is precisely why I introduced gratitude to you in the beginning of this book because it takes baby steps and daily practice to be able to fully experience gratitude and begin praising God for the things around you. It takes practice and refocusing your attention to change your state of mind. It takes going through the stages of grief to be able to overcome it. Denial is one of those stages that is necessary to experience in order to come out of grief, but when you choose to live there and not work through it, that’s where trouble sets in.
“I’ve been recovering many years. I’ve used denial many times,” wrote Melody Beattie in her book The Language of Letting Go. “It has been a defense, a survival device, a coping behavior, at times, almost my undoing. It has been both a friend and an enemy. When I was a child, I used denial to protect myself and my family. I protected myself from seeing things too painful to see and feelings too overwhelming to feel. Denial got me through my traumatic situations, when I had no other resources for survival … Denial protected me from pain, but it also rendered me blind to my feelings, my needs, and myself. It was like a thick blanket that covered and smothered me … When the winds of change blow through, upsetting a familiar structure and preparing me for the new, I pick up my blanket and hide, for a while … Then something happens, and I see that I am moving forward. The experience was necessary, connected, not at all a mistake, but an important part of healing.”
When I was training for a mental health professional position working with children and families, our trainer talked about the difference between grief and depression. He explained that depression is thought to be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it can be treated with medication. Grief, on the other hand, always involves a loss—it is the pain of not getting something you desperately wanted—and he said it may or may not have depression symptoms. (Since depression is a stage of the process, it is impossible, in my opinion, to not have symptoms. How severe and how they are treated is up to each individual. I do not believe in treating with pharmaceutical medications, except in the most severe of cases. I hold that opinion on all health-related issues, including mental health.) My trainer said if depression is present, then medication can be prescribed. However, the treatment for grief is always talk therapy.
In my personal experience and observation, a person can go back and forth between these stages until they finally arrive at Acceptance. During my darkest time, I think I went through Denial, Depression, Denial, Bargaining, Denial, Depression, Anger, Depression, Anger, Anger, Anger (I was never allowed to feel it before, so it took its toll in this process), and finally Acceptance.
Our trainer asked our group what is the timeframe for a person to stop grieving? When will they be finished? There were as many answers as there were people in the room, but he echoed my statement—THEY’RE FINISHED WHENEVER THEY’RE FINISHED.
As I have explained earlier in this book, you may think you worked through a step and have gone on to another one only to realize that you still have issues in that area. It’s perfectly fine (and normal) to go back and deal with it. The same holds true for grieving. My trainer said you know when a client is improving because the intense pain lessens and they cycle through the stages of grief less frequently.
Dr. John Gray warns in his book Mars and Venus Starting Over that moving on too quickly before going through the entire grieving process and not giving ourselves permission to feel all our feelings are two common mistakes people make. “Grieving the loss of love means fully feeling and then releasing all the painful emotions that come up when we reflect on our loss,” he wrote. (This is why talk therapy is so important.) Dr. John Gray says the only way to release our attachment is to feel and then release our emotions.
It’s important during this process to not allow others to tell you what you can or should feel. Feel all the feelings that come. Identify them and write them down, if needed, so you can release them. You have experienced a loss, and IT IS ALRIGHT TO GRIEVE.
If you are in the middle of sorrow, just know that you will get through it. “The Sovereign Lord has filled me with His Spirit. He has chosen me and sent me to bring good news to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to announce release to captives and freedom to those in prison. He has sent me to proclaim that the time has come when the Lord will save His people and defeat their enemies. He has sent me to comfort all who mourn, to give to those who mourn in Zion joy and gladness instead of grief, a song of praise instead of sorrow. They will be like trees that the Lord Himself has planted. They will all do what is right, and God will be praised for what He has done,” (Isaiah 61:1-3).
At some point in the process, we have to just give it all to God. Honestly, I think that’s what the grieving process is all about—Letting go and giving it up to the Father to take care of it. I heard a radio personality one day in 2017 say that she just lets things go and moves on when someone wrongs her because karma works faster that way, and the person ends up getting paid back for the wrong they have done much more severely than if she had tried to get even with them.
When we give it all to God, He will never reject or abandon us. We are promised that He will always work even the bad things out for our good (Romans 8:28). “Cast your burden on the Lord [releasing the weight of it] and He will sustain you; He will never allow the [consistently] righteous to be moved (made to slip, fall, or fail),” (Psalms 55:22, Amplified Bible). This is what it means to get to the Acceptance phase of the grieving process.
“Grief is a cleansing process. It’s an acceptance process,” Melody Beattie wrote in The Language of Letting Go. “It moves us from our past, into today, and into a better future—a future free of sabotaging behaviors, a future that holds more options than our past.”
Are you ready to jump start your healing process? Get your free chapter from “The Princess Guide to Healing a Broken Heart.” Senée is a Qualified Mental Health Professional, Certified Christian Counselor, ordained minister, singer, writer and public speaker. For more information on the Princess Guide series of books and training programs, counseling/coaching or to host a book signing or speaking event, log on to ThePrincessGuide.com