Killer
Clichés about Loss
We have all been educated
on how to acquire things. We have been taught how to get an education,
get a job, buy a house, etc. There are colleges, universities,
trade schools, and technical
schools. You can take courses in virtually anything that might
interest you.
What education do we
receive about dealing with loss? What school do you go to learn
to deal with the conflicting feelings caused by significant emotional
loss? Loss is so much more predictable
and inevitable than gain, and yet we are woefully ill-prepared
to deal with loss.
One of the most damaging
killer clichés about loss is "time heals all wounds."
When we present open lectures on the subject of grief recovery,
we often ask if anyone is still feeling pain, isolation, or loneliness
as the result of the death of a loved one 20 or more years ago.
There are always several hands raised in response to that question.
Then we gently ask, "if time is going to heal, then 20 years
still isn't enough?"
While recovery from loss
does take some time, it need not take as much time as you have
been led to believe. Recovery is totally individual, there is
no absolute time frame. Sometimes in an attempt to conform to
other people's time frames, we do ourselves great harm. This idea
leads us to another of the killer clichés, "you should
be over it by now."
It is bad enough that
well-meaning, well intentioned friends attack us with killer clichés,
but then we start picking on ourselves. We start believing that
we are defective or somehow deficient because we haven't recovered
yet.
If we take just the two
killer clichés we've mentioned so far, we can see that they
have something in common. They both imply that a non-action will
have some therapeutic or
recovery value. That by waiting,
and letting some time pass, we will heal. Let's add a third cliché
to the batch, "you have to keep busy." Many grievers
follow this incorrect advice and work two or three jobs. They
fill their time with endless tasks and chores. At the end of any
given day, asked how they feel, invariably they report that their
heart still feels broken; that all they accomplished by staying
busy was to get exhausted.
Now, with only three
basic killer clichés we can severely limit and restrict our
ability to participate in effective recovery. It is not only that
people around us tell us these clichés, in an attempt
to help, but we ourselves learned and practiced these false beliefs
for most of our lives. It is time for us to learn some new and
helpful beliefs to assist us in grieving and completing relationships
that have ended or changed.
Question: I have heard that
it takes 2 years to "get over" the death of a loved
one; 5 years to "get over" the death of a parent; and
you never "get over" the death of a child. Is this true?
Answer: Part of the problem
is the phrase "get over." It is more accurate to say
that you would never forget a child who had died, anymore than
you would ever forget a parent or a loved
one. Another part of the problem is one of those killer clichés
we talked about, that time, of itself, is a recovery action. Although
recovery from loss does take some time, it is the actions within
time that lead to successful recovery.
