Recognize & React
Today’s Healing Reflection is a safe place to come NEAR your grief and move toward healing.
This week, I am returning to the concepts taught by clinical psychologist Therese Rando. Her focus is on bereavement, anticipatory grief, and traumatic loss. She uses alliteration to help clinicians and mourners recognize “tasks” that occur during the mourning process. These are referred to as the Six “R” Model: Recognizing, Reacting, Remembering, Relinquishing, Readjusting, and Reinvesting.
While educators have made an effort to create some structure for the grieving process, grief should not be task oriented. When thinking about these various “stages,” processes,” or “tasks” of grief, these are not meant to happen in an orderly fashion. They are not linear and do not occur in a step-by-step fashion. These “tasks” of grief are intended to offer a way to notice where you might be in your grieving process. Don’t be surprised if you repeat the steps or processes.
Grief can increase feelings of isolation, loneliness, depression, anger, anxiety, and more. It can be helpful to understand that your grief experience, while uniquely yours, may also be shared and understood by others. Sometimes this connection can help you feel less alone on your grief journey.
People grieving may move through these grief stages or processes randomly and there is no expectation to fit a “norm” when grieving. Individuals need to be allowed to grieve at their own pace, in their own way, and move through the process in the way that meets their needs.
Today set an intention to recognize where you are in your loss.
NOTICE
Notice where you are in your grief experience. Recognizing the loss involves acknowledging the death and beginning to make meaning of the event. This is one of Rando’s tasks of grief. Another is Reacting. Reacting to the separation or loss involves experiencing the pain and finding ways to express your feelings. This includes finding ways to mourn secondary losses. Secondary losses might show up like unexpected losses such as if a loved one organized family dinners, these family dinners may stop happening and that community of dining with others is also a loss- a secondary loss.
Be curious if you can identify being in the “Recognizing” or “Reacting” steps. What were these like for you? Or what are they like for you? What are some of the secondary losses you might be experiencing?
EMOTIONS
How are you feeling right now? Name your emotion without judging it. Allow yourself to pause and consider where you are feeling the emotions in your body. If you are comfortable, close your eyes. Take a moment and just be with that emotion.
ACTION
The activity today is to imagine your emotion(s) as an animal. What animal would your emotion be? Be detailed as you visualize this “emotion” animal. Imagine the size, color, smell, and pay attention to what this “emotion” animal brings up for you. If your first instinct is to resist, notice that resistance. What would happen if you gave attention to this “emotion-animal?” Take a deep breath in and slowly exhale. Now sit with this image. Sometimes our painful emotions desire to be noticed and even sitting with them gently without judgment can cause them to feel less heavy. Be with this emotion for a moment and notice how the emotion changes as you sit with it. Are you able to imagine that this emotion has a message for you? How might you be able to take care of this need or listen to this message?
REFLECT
As you think about recognizing and reacting to your loss, whether it is a life-change loss or the death of a loved one – what matters to you right now? Are you able to nurture that need today or in the near future? One thing about loss, it reminds us not to waste time or take others for granted. We might not have had control over the loss we experienced, but we can do one thing today that brings needed comfort and meaning
Thank you for allowing me to share this journey with you and for listening. Tomorrow I will be exploring Rando’s “task” of “Remembering.”
Note: The audio's background music ("Dewdrops") is provided by: https://www.purple-planet.com. Images provided by Canva.