Remember
Today’s Healing Reflection is a safe place to come NEAR your grief and move toward healing.
I continue to discuss tasks of grieving introduced by the clinical psychologist, Therese Rando. Her focus is on bereavement, anticipatory grief, and traumatic loss. She utilized alliteration to help clinicians and mourners identify the tasks of the grieving process.
The Six “R” Model includes: Recognizing, Reacting, Remembering, Relinquishing, Readjusting, and Reinvesting.
It can help to have a common language and structure for the grieving process; however, grief should not be task oriented. When discussing “stages,” processes,” or “tasks” of grief, these are not meant to happen in an orderly fashion. Stages are not linear and do not occur predictably. When grieving, you may move through these grief stages or processes randomly and experience them multiple times.
Today set an intention to remember.
NOTICE
Notice how being familiar with the Six “R” Model “tasks” of grieving supports you in offering some insight into working through your own grief and loss. Before I talked about Recognizing and Reacting. Recognizing involves acknowledging the death and beginning to make meaning of the event. Reacting refers to how you respond to the separation or loss, experience the pain, and find ways to express feelings. This includes finding ways to mourn secondary losses.
Today I am introducing the task of Remembering. Remembering is re-feeling your experiences and memories of the person, not just remembering.
EMOTIONS
As you take time to remember, is there a memory that stands out for you? What emotions are you feeling as you allow yourself to experience this memory? We will spend more time with this in the “action” section. Remember to name how you feel without judging.
ACTION
Today’s activity is to recall a positive memory of your person. Imagine this memory or experience and allow yourself to feel the emotions that arise with it. As you participate in this activity, place your hand on your heart. Allow yourself to feel the warmth of your hand on your chest. For the next 60 seconds, you will hear music only. Take these 60 seconds to sit with your memory, feeling the warmth of your hand on your heart and notice the feelings while you remember. (music activity)
REFLECT
How was this activity for you? Was it difficult to recall a memory, or were there too many to choose from? I encourage you to write your memories in a journal. Writing them down allows you to safely keep them because you might forget details you assume you will always remember.
Thank you for allowing me to share this journey with you. Next I will be introducing Rando’s task of “Relinquishing.”