HARTS Angels, Grief at Home, RRT STUDIOS Blocks Angel

The Angel stacks the blocks, knowing it does not matter which number appears, the steps to renewal are six sided, or many faceted, just like the people trying their best to put in order their thoughts.

Grief and Loss are part of the human condition.
What is grief?
It is said that there are 5 stages to grief, those stages come to everyone sooner or later, but are defined as :

Shock - Denial - Guilt - Anger - Acceptance

Shock: The numb time, when you can do everything or nothing. a dreamlike state, infused with suffering. Acting on instinct, automatic pilot, and ultimately not really believing that the loss is real.

Denial: This is the time when you most often say, this is not real, it’s all a bad dream. Many will come to the conclusion it’s all some conspiracy, that the person did not really die, they may even think they have seen them.

Guilt: all the “shoulda, woulda, couldas” come to mind. If I would have done this, I should have said this, I could have changed things. Most of these feelings come from the unanswered Why, the why me?
Why am I alone?

Anger: many times the anger will surface towards others, when the true fact is you feel you have been cheated, and your real anger is at the “supreme being” who planned all this death. Anger for some lasts longer if the death was caused violently, or a legal proceeding continues. There seems to be crying, depression and self punishment. Agony over unanswered questions and loneliness.

Acceptance: Realization that you are alive, redefining, refocusing, setting new goals. This all occurs at a snails pace. Slowly but surely strength is found to deal with the hurts. Recovery is built a little at a time, and with the help of empathic people to encourage you when you grow discouraged or weary.

H - 1 - HURT - The Shock, numbness, denial and intense feelings when you find life has been forever changed. You can live in a fog of confusion with moments of acute awareness.
A - 2 - AWARE - Frustration, fear, anger and loneliness seem to overwhelm your life. You become aware that life has changed and the future will not be as you had planned.
R - 3 - RESOLVE - A time when guilt, envy of others that have not experienced your change seems to be heightened. You resolve some of the loss, and try to remove the obstacles to dealing with your emotions. The guilt of not feeling the initial intense feelings can move you back and trap you.
T - 4 - TIME - Time becomes the friend and the enemy. It is a time of reliving past hurts and giving way to judgments. You perceive each moment of not living through the changes as a reprieve.
S - 5 - SHARE - Renewal of the Spirit begins at this time when you begin to share and support others. You let go of the control over the choices that are not yours.

Few concepts have insinuated themselves into the popular culture as thoroughly as the so called "5 stages of grief": Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. We've heard it from professionals in all areas of the healthcare system (who should know better) as well as from lay persons of all ages (who shouldn't). There is even a lengthy comedy routine about it by Dustin Hoffman playing Lenny Bruce in the movie Lenny. The time has now come to ditch it as the concept has done more harm than good.

Three Common Myths about the 5 stages
1. The 5 stages of grief were defined by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross In Her book "On Death and Dying", Macmillan publishing Company, 1969, She presents 5 stages terminally ill persons may go through upon learning of their terminal illness. She presents them as "an attempt to summarize what we have learned from our dying patients in terms of coping mechanisms at the time of a terminal illness". These stages were not originally the 5 stages of grief but better: The 5 stages of receiving catastrophic news. Over the next 28 years, healthcare professionals, clergy, nurses, doctors, caregivers, students, and other readers of the book somehow mutated the stages into the 5 stages of grief.

2. The 5 stages define the process a bereaved person must go through in order to resolve their grief. Grief is a complicated, multidimensional, individual process that can never be generalized in 5 steps. In fact, as will be shown, a person will generally have to go through the 5 stages before true grieving can even begin.

3. A person who isn't progressing through the 5 stages in sequence and in a timely manner needs professional help. This common belief has caused a lot of problems and misunderstandings. One researcher has shown that some caregivers have actually gotten angry at the bereaved person for not following the stages in order! The person shouldn't be angry yet because they haven't been through Denial.

All of the above points to a basic misunderstanding about what grief is to begin with so it's not surprising that myths continue to propagate. This is most likely because the pervasiveness and impact of grief wasn't really recognized by the psychological community until around the 1980s and even then it was slow in coming.

For example, in 1974 "The handbook of psychiatry" defined grief as "...The normal response to the loss of a loved one by death." Response to other kinds of losses were labeled "pathological Depressive Reactions". In 1984, Dr. Terese Rando---a noted grief specialist, researcher and Author---defined grief as "...Process of psychological, social and somatic reactions to the perception of loss". In 1991, the grief Resource Foundation of Dallas, Texas found that, for them, a good working and practical definition of grief as "the total response of the organism to the process of change".

Today, in December 1996, we at TLC group have come to accept the grief response as the Unified Field Theory of all Mental Illness (a subject of another Tip of The Month!) Curiously, most non-grief specialists commonly accept the definition of grief given in 1974. So what is grief and what produces it? A helpful equation, which proves itself daily in all instances is:

So, are the 5 stages without value? Not if they are used as originally intended, as The 5 stages of Receiving Catastrophic News. One can even extrapolate to The 5 stages of Coping With Trauma. Death need not be involved.

Things to remember are:
1. Any change of circumstance can cause us to go through this process.
2. We don't have to go through the stages in sequence. We can skip a stage or go through two or three simultaneously.
3. We can go through them in different time phases. The dead battery could take maybe 5 to 10 minutes, the loss of a parking space 5 to 10 seconds. A traumatic event which involves the Criminal Justice system can take years.
4. The intensity and duration of the reaction depends on how significant the change-produced loss is perceived.

It was mentioned above that grieving only begins where the 5 stages of "grief" leave off. Grief professionals often use the concept of "grief Work" to help the bereaved through grief resolution. One common definition of grief work, based on J. William Worden's "Four Tasks of Mourning" as outlined in his book grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, can be summarized by the acronym

This is grief work. It begins when the honeymoon period is over, the friends have stopped calling, everyone thinks you should be over it, the court case is resolved, "closure" has been effected, and everything is supposed to be back to normal. It's at this point that real grieving begins. Notice that the first step of grief work is acceptance, the last stage of the 5 stages of grief. Let's throw out the 5 stages of grief and replace it with a greater understanding of grief recognition and resolution. We hesitate to name stages for grief. It is our experience that given ideas on how to respond, grievers will cater their feelings to the ideas presented to them. After all, a griever is often in a very suggestible condition; dazed, numb, walking in quicksand. It is often suggested to grievers that they are in denial. In all of our years of experience, working with tens of thousands of grievers, we have rarely met anyone in denial that a loss has occurred. They say "since my mom died, I have had a hard time." There is no denial in that comment. There is a very clear acknowledgment that there has been a death. If we start with an incorrect premise, we are probably going to wind up very far away from the truth.

What about anger? Often when a death has occurred there is no anger at all. For example, my aged grandmother with whom I had a wonderful relationship got ill and died. Blessedly, it happened pretty quickly, so she did not suffer very much. I am pleased about that. Fortunately, I had just spent some time with her and we had reminisced and had told each other how much we cared about each other. I am very happy about that. There was a funeral ceremony that created a truly accurate memory picture of her, and many people came and talked about her. I loved that. At the funeral a helpful friend reminded me to say any last things to her and then say good-bye, and I did, and I'm glad. I notice from time to time that I am sad when I think of her or when I am reminded of her. And I notice, particularly around the holidays, that I miss her. And I am aware that I have this wonderful memory of my relationship with this incredible woman who was my grandma, and I miss her. And, I am not angry. Although that is a true story about grandma, it could be a different story and create different feelings. If I had not been able to get to see her and talk to her before she died, I might have been angry at the circumstances that prevented that. If she and I had not gotten along so well, I might have been angry that she died before we had a chance to repair any damage. If those things were true, I would definitely need to include the sense of anger that would attend the communication of any unfinished emotional business, so I could say good-bye. Unresolved grief is almost always about undelivered communications of an emotional nature. There are a whole host of feelings that may be attached to those unsaid things. Happiness, sadness, love, fear, anger, relief, compassion, are just some of the feelings that a griever might experience. We do not need to categorize, analyze, or explain those feelings. We do need to learn how to communicate them and then say good-bye to the relationship that has ended. It is most important to understand that there are no absolutes. There are no definitive stages or time zones for grieving. It is usually helpful to attach feeling value to the undelivered communications that keep you incomplete. Attaching feelings does not have to be histrionic or dramatic, it does not even require tears. It merely needs to be heartfelt, sincere and honest. Grief is the normal and natural reaction to loss. Grief is emotional, not intellectual. Rather than defining stages of grief which could easily confuse a griever, we prefer to help each griever find their own truthful expression of the thoughts and feelings that may be keeping them from participating in their own lives. We all bring different and varying beliefs to the losses that occur in our lives, therefore we will each perceive and feel differently about each loss.