Readjusting
Today’s Healing Reflection invites you to safely come NEAR your grief and move toward healing.
Not every death or loss carries the same pain, yet the pain must be acknowledged and processed. Ignoring or repressing the pain can lead to delayed grief reactions. This might look like bursts of unexpected anger, tears, or strong emotions when least expected. This also can turn into a type of physical or somatic manifestation of the grief. Remember, using tasks or stages to discuss grief and loss are merely a guide to help you understand how one might work through loss. Grief should not be task-oriented. These grieving steps or tasks do not occur in a specific order. You may move through these grief stages or processes randomly and experience them multiple times.
I continue to explore the tasks of grieving introduced by the clinical psychologist, Therese Rando. Her focus is on bereavement, anticipatory grief, and traumatic loss. The Six “R” Model includes Recognizing, Reacting, Remembering, Relinquishing, Readjusting, and Reinvesting.
We have looked at Recognizing, Reacting, Remembering, and Relinquishing. Recognizing involves acknowledging the death and beginning to make meaning of the event. Reacting refers to how you react to the separation or loss and experience the pain and find ways to express your feelings. This includes ways to mourn secondary losses. Remembering is re-feeling your experiences and memories of the person, not just remembering. Relinquishing attachments and assumptions involves reworking attachments to the deceased and the old assumptive world. Today we will talk about Readjusting – Readjusting to a new world without forgetting the old one includes developing a new identity and revising the assumptive world.
Set an intention today to slow down and notice one new detail.
NOTICE
What does “Readjusting” look like for you? Are you ready to consider this? Or are you still in another part of your grief process?
EMOTIONS
How are you feeling today? If your emotion were an animal, what animal would it be? Would it be smaller than a mouse or larger than an elephant? Take a moment and be with this emotion. What do you need to support yourself?
ACTION
Take a deep breath and look around your surroundings. What do you see? Is there a plant, picture, or decoration you haven’t noticed recently? What stands out most to you?
REFLECT
What does readjusting mean to you? This idea that you readjust to this new world without forgetting. What does your identity look like to you? Who are you today? Who do you want to be tomorrow?
Note: The audio's background music ("Rings of Saturn") is provided by: https://www.purple-planet.com. Images provided by Canva.