PROLONGED GRIEF:

I have a friend, an intelligent and gracious woman who is 85 years old, and has just lost her husband of 66 years.  I find it hard to imagine, together with her late husband since the age of 14, married since 19.  If anyone has a reason to grieve a loss, it is she.

My friend has tears when she speaks of her loneliness, her loss of her lifetime companion.  Grieving is a natural process, as inevitable as the tongue seeking out the missing tooth.  There is a gap there, an emptiness.  It is hard to adjust to it, and sometimes (as with teeth) a new one will never grow in to replace it.  In time we adjust to the gap, or we get an implant or a denture (a new relationship, new activities) to fill it in.  It is never quite the same, the memory is still there, but the intense pain eventually ends.

Sometimes, however, the grief becomes “stuck”, it goes on and on beyond normal limits, and it greatly affects our lives.  The most common cause of prolonged grief is probably our resistance to grieving.  A tragedy happens, we get caught up in taking care of the situations and not of ourselves.  We have to “be strong”, “keep a stiff upper lip” and continue to take care of our family and friends (and their grief).  Our grief gets “stuffed” down, it never gets a chance to be released.  And so this corrosive load of emotion gradually “leaks” out and works havoc in our lives.  EFT can gently release grief and, at the same time, “neutralize” it so that it is no longer harmful.  “Jane” is a case in point.

Jane came to me for advice on a career change.  She was intensely interested in nursing and had completed all the classroom work for her R.N. (Registered Nursing) degree.  But she “stopped dead” at the clinical (hands-on) portion.  She now wanted to go into computer repair, a complete mis-match for her, as I saw it.  I suspected an emotional block.  As I probed, I found that Jane had “nursed” her mother for three years as she was dying of cancer.  Jane rated her current grief as 7 on a 10 point scale... ten years after her mother’s death!  We applied EFT to the grief and, a few minutes later, Jane was unable to “find” her grief.  What she “found” instead opened my eyes to what is perhaps the greatest gift of the energy balancing process.

What Jane “found” was that she was now remembering all of the good times that she had with her mother!  Her energy had been blocked by the grief so that she was unable to think about the “good times”.  Now energy had been released, actually expanding the limits of her thinking.  As a result, the grief dropped away, “happier” thoughts were now available and Jane’s clarity, focus and creativity were enhanced.  (Not bad for ten minutes of “work”!)

If you are ready to “dump” that old grief, click here.