Grief Recovery Resolve Conflicting Emotions

Grief recovery is the answer you did not know you needed but always wanted. Grief occurs with big losses or change an can drag on for years or decades. This is because you do not know how to grieve. Without a grieving process you are stuck in uncomfortable emotions.

A Grief Definition

Hate Fully

Losing a Loved One

Grief and Trauma Work

Grief and Divorce

You Create Love

Help Someone You Know

Resources

In abusive homes discussing emotions is already missing easier emotions like anger and makes sense that for more complex emotional situations skills like grieving were not present or practiced at all.

Unfortunately, this is likely true for a non-abusive home. When people lack the skills to carry out activities, they typically avoid them. A family that does not have grieving skills will avoid grieving or even avoid uncomfortable emotions.

So, what is grief and how do you resolve it?

A Grief Definition

A loss cauese grief. A loss of someone or something and maybe even future things like dreams. Loss can also happen by choice or external circumstances.

The grief is conflicting emotions. Positive and negative emotions occurring at the same time causes grief. How do you laugh at the loving memories and cry about someone passing at the same time? When do you say I need a minute when with friends who remind you of the loved one you lost?

How do you love the job and smile about the memories with work besties as you get laid off? How do you grieve all the time invested into training and overtime that no longer has the same potential payout?

Where do you allow this pain to be expressed even though you want so badly for life be fun and bubbly?

Hate Fully

In trauma work you will have to “hate fully.”

In this case, my grief was with an abusive parent. How do I smile at loving little moments (though rare) and accept the terrible acts?

What is hating fully?

It’s a term I use to remind myself that bad people can have good moments.

You can start healing with a new approach driven by acceptance and a goal to hate fully. To hate fully means that you start operating out of acceptance. Start admitting that actions had an effect on you. Promise yourself you’re not going to suppress the anger and hurt or ignore it. You will redirect the energy from avoiding these negative situations toward healing.

Admitting that the negative things affect you opens the door to honoring that the positive actions did, too. I was very young and learned core beliefs from my mother that have made me successful. Even the negative events gave me such a drive and desire to succeed and be independent. You start hating fully—the good and the bad and acceptance starts to come. We can not heal what we do not see.

Hating fully allows you to see an abusive parent and a parent who provided beneficial life skills, all in the same relationship.

Another way to say this is to “give credit where credit is due.” You’ll honor the truth of your life experiences and say there were good and bad moments. Any of those moments created personal qualities, and those qualities helped make you successful or not.

You have the complexity to handle this level of duality. You have the strength to change and update the qualities that you want to.

A Formal Method For Hating Fully

I did not know of a process for navigating grief then, and one did not exist. I didn’t even know what I was experiencing was grief. But I was recently came across the Grief Recovery Handbook. This book outlines a simple and objective approach to “hate fully.” The grief recovery process provides the organization and objectivity, what I had called the hate fully method.

This method will help you break loose of decades-old emotions and you can use it over and over to grieve bad relationships, careers, and death.

Grief Recovery and Losing a Loved One

One of the cruelest things that can happen in life is the loss of a child. The level of investment and grieving I cannot imagine. The loss of an unborn child sparked the creation of the Grief Recovery Method Handbook. As such it provides examples of the emotional losses and how to grieve them.

Additional Child Loss Resource

Another book that addresses the grief of losing a child is “Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy,” by Mo Gwadat. In this book, Mo speaks about conversations with his son and how they inspired him to heal. Mo breaks down the process of grieving into formulas. Mo has a software engineering background, which he uses to explain how to find happiness. He looks at creating perspective and expectations to generate joy when the unexpected happens.

Grief in all Types of Loss

Loss and grief occur in many types of situations and are not isolated to the loss of a person or pet. Grief is also caused by intangible losses, like getting married or having a child. This transition from independent time to caring for someone full-time is a type of death of your former self. These are types of identities and are intangible losses that can cause grief.

Grief from Trauma Work

Grief also arises in trauma work as you start to uncover and understand the totality of injustices in our earlier years of life. As you start to accept abusive situations, you will realize how much opportunities were unfairly taken. When realizing this later in adulthood, it is undeniable that the childhood opportunities are gone, and there is no getting them back.

Grief from Divorce

You could see and feel the type of marriage and the vision for your family that is no longer possible because divorce means it is no longer possible. The days take on a different structure and you take on a different role. The easy of simple family events like dinner are no longer a reality. When grieving divorce your relationship to trust is also a must. Marriage requires a legal and spiritual promise. A promise that you make in front of your family, friend, and the court. How do you grieve you relationship with an emotion? By being complete and the grief recovery method is the right process.

Grief occurs with health diagnoses or with big life events.

During the pandemic, many people missed out on graduations, dances, the life mile stones that people dream about.

Grief can even occur with faith and God.

Grief happens in so many ways, yet there is so little skill and space available to handle grieving every day.

When you hate fully, allow relationships to be as good or bad as they feel. The grief recovery process is a good structure for navigating these conflicting emotions. No matter where the grief originates, this process will provide a grieving process.

It will allow room for grieving and reasoning by providing step by step processes to get the resolve you are capable of and want.

Core Loss and The Severity of Grief

Not knowing how to process grief can be a deadly situation for those who are still alive. One of the largest struggles in my life was with the death of a boyfriend, and this was a point in life where I lost all my faith.

As a friend would say, I was in “rock-bottoms basement.” I would wake up every morning already crying and angry.

I lived in a beautiful area surrounded by the ocean. All I could think was, “What a beautiful place to be miserable.” This phrase captures the duality of grief perfectly. I was surrounded by fun moments and places, I wanted to smile about the beautiful scenery and weather, but all I could manage was to cry. I cried about all the possibilities that would never happen.

A Loss of Faith

What I know is that a loss of faith is one of the most dangerous places that a person can be.

The truth is that I had placed a lot of hope in that relationship and started to invest in it emotionally. My life experiences stacked on top of each other and this death felt so unfair. I started to believe I was cursed. The idea that I could have anything enjoyable in life was gone and in one day.

Hating Fully to Grieving Fully

The process laid out in the Grief Recovery Handbook for tracing through the entirety of a relationship was key in venting anger. The anger at the risk he had accepted and the result that had come from it. This was a piece of the primary conflict, being angry at someone for dying and hurting me as a result. Laying out a situation where I promised I would “hate fully” allowed me to express that emotion.

I had already been practicing to “hate fully” when it came to abuse. I did not have a process for grieving something that I loved. Eleven years later, as I applied grief recovery to this loss, I learned a lot that I was still holding onto because I didn’t feel safe to move on. So I didn’t. My heart was stuck in a “dead” relationship over a decade ago.

Combining the grief recovery steps and a lesson from Mo helped me navigate grief fully.