Are you facing a major life change?

We live in times of profound, accelerating and sometimes traumatic change. Those changes involve opportunity and tragedy, deliverance and danger, pain and joy, freedom and its loss. The world of the twenty first century bears rapidly fading resemblance to the world our parents and grandparents knew. Staying the same is not an option: as Norman Mailer starkly reflects in the Deer Park; “There is a rule so cruel and so just which demands that one must grow or else pay more for staying the same.”

The most important resource for personal growth in the face of these changes lies within us. Every change has a loss embedded in it: every change also has a gain. The internal resource to discern both is our capacity to grieve.

Yet there are times when we need the grasp of a hand to find the courage to grow. There are times when either the gain or the loss is so prominent we can’t see the other. There are times when the change comes with suddenness and violence, a radical altering of life as it was—it traumatizes. There are also times when the mortal coil of our body, mind or spirit is unbalanced in ways that limit or eliminate our capacity to grieve. This book is intended to help you understand when you need to seek help with change; when you need to turn inward to find the courage to live as fully as you can; and how to successfully integrate help from others with your internal strength. This book is a helping hand.

Where does grieving life changes lead us? It is the well spring of creativity; the source of courage to endure; the restoration of the capacities for joy and love after trauma, disillusionment and betrayal; the vehicle by which we can transform tragedy into opportunity; failure into growth; dying into living fully.

It is easy for me to say that grieving can do all these things: it is something else for it to occur. There are forces that interfere with this transformative process, both within us and from the outside. Again, the intent of this book is to aid you in being aware of those forces—especially those involved in depression and traumatization—and helps you find ways to alter their influence.

Are you having trouble with the positives?

If you are questioning just what it is that has changed in your life, start, with filling out the Life Change Inventory. This self-assessment tool will not only point out the many life changes you are experiencing or have dealt with in the past, but how you view them now: as primarily a loss, a gain or both. Then you will find reading the following section more valuable. (Link to Life Change Inventory at www.integraonline.org)

Recognizing and Validating Loss

Why is it so difficult to recognize, much less validate, the losses involved in change? “It's not the American way,” one friend replied. “It's a sign of weakness, lack of optimism, incompetence,” was a client's response. “It has to do with the male macho stuff” smirked another client. “Guys can't admit to anything that makes them look bad!”

Such attitudes, common in the United States, reflect the belief that loss can be avoided or overcome by competence, punishment, desire, and entitlement. There is fear behind this avoidance. One source of that fear is that fate is arbitrary—whatever happened to you could happen to them—and that’s something they’d rather not think about. Second, there is a fear that acknowledging a loss will create depression —something you might never recover from. You point at Uncle Tim—he never was the same after coming back from ‘Nam. Or you look at Aunt Joan, who refuses to be in the same room with her ex twenty years after the divorce. Then there’s Jackie, who seems to relish every mishap that happens, even when it’s not hers. That’s what could happen to you, you fear, so you avoid any loss, as long as you can.

These attitudes are characteristic of a masculine, youth-oriented society that has not faced death and limits, that seals off evidence of those not living the middle class dream into ghetto neighborhoods, sealed in prisons and certainly not in the popular media except for the sensational reports of crimes and misdemeanors. We live in a society that lives, on the average, thirty more years than its great-grandparents did. It’s become a part of today’s culture to suggest that loss is a sign of character failure, a source of shame, evidence of incompetence, or unacceptable passivity. Poverty, hunger, and death occur someplace else—not in my suburb, not on my playing field, not on my shift, not in my stock market.
Not witnessing a loss means it didn't happen. That’s the nature of denial. Many of us no longer see the poor, malnourished, and homeless in the inner city or out in the country, made invisible from the interstate highway system or commuter train. Unlike South Africa, for example, we haven’t dealt with our own apartheid and the need to reconcile the murders of blacks and slavery by white society. Prior to 1930, over eighty percent of people in the United States died somewhere other than a hospital. Now, eighty percent die in hospital settings. What that means is if you avoid hospitals, you can usually avoid death or its reminders. A hundred years ago, the idea that most people in the United States could reach the age of forty without ever seeing a dead or dying person would have astounded almost everyone!

In my travels and work in Europe in the 1980s, I realized why many Europeans consider Americans to be less emotionally mature. Many of these contacts and friends lived through World War II in their own homes, lost many family members, witnessed the devastation or occupation of their country, or were children who grew up with their parents’ stories about such times. More likely to have a world perspective, they are sensitive to existential issues: the traumas resulting from political torture in the Middle East; the traumatization in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, the necessity of finding another way than by war and intimidation to resolve international conflicts. Their view of America reflects what they see as our “phobia” about acknowledging the reality of death and dying and loss and grief, our preoccupation with distractions through sports and entertainment, for with the exception of soldiers in combat, few Americans experienced directly and personally the impact of the most devastating of all wars. “We have good times, too,” remarked Ole Almstrup, a psychologist friend who was a child during the war. “But we appreciate what we have even more because we know it could be taken from us at any time. And we certainly know what hard times are like!”

Yet some are getting there. Just recently, my friend Rich was riding high on the stock market. Every day as the market surged he was making more and more money. For days at a time, he wouldn’t come out of his basement office. This went on for years. Then came one of those days when there was a sharp downturn. Rich was riding too close to the edge and the stocks he was invested in took big hits. He lost everything and went into bankruptcy.

“Best thing that ever happened to me,” he admitted sheepishly six months later after he’d returned to the health care job he’d left in order to speculate. “I’d lost sight of what was important in life. I felt invulnerable, that nothing and no one could touch me. I was in a kind of trance where money was all that existed. Now I have my family back. I appreciate sunny days and walks in the park—and the joys of a good meal and good company. I can empathize with people’s pain and grief, for I now know something about loss.”

Rich couldn’t have been persuaded differently while his stocks were rising. It took a loss—a huge loss—for him to awaken to the true priorities in his life. Six months of grief were not only humbling but a powerful learning experience for him.

It can be easier to deal with loss and change if you recognize from the start that they can affect everything in your environment, from the loyalty of your friends to how you view yourself. For example, many losses challenge your friends and loved ones to know how to respond to your grief. Some did not bargain on having to deal with someone who wasn't always the life of the party. Some may be so profoundly affected by their own experiences of loss that they cannot see yours.

Change and loss can also affect the way you look at and experience yourselves. While you are grieving, it's hard at times to find your best self. You wonder if the passionate, loving parts of yourself have been lost as well. You're all too aware of your shortcomings, of things to be ashamed of, and have a tough time balancing that with your strengths, which now look like weaknesses. In addition, you may find it hard to love again after losing someone. Your behavior may change to decrease the chances of having the same thing happen again

Loss can also affect you on several time levels, past, present, and future. If you do not recognize this, you can feel overwhelmed and confused by its multiple layers. You can be disappointed to find that, after having thought you had gotten over a loss, you're dealing with yet another aspect of it.

I am not an advocate for anyone to deliberately go out and experience a loss, just so they can be more sensitive and empathetic and grow. Sure, it’s character building to play sports and lose, to not always succeed, and to have to deal with the loss of a boy friend or a girl friend. Sometimes even such losses can be life changing to be sure. But more often it takes a change event that was unplanned, not chosen and even the worst nightmare of the individual before the resulting grief has transformative potential. The difficulty is that you may not have recognized such a loss has already happened to you. You may not have recognized it as such, and not connected the ensuing “depression” as in reality grief over an important loss.

If you have difficulty recognizing the losses you’ve experienced, take a look at the Life Change Inventory. It organizes the changes you encounter in life into three groups:

Life Changes
• Changes in your relationships
• Changes in yourself
• Changes in your circumstances

Some of the changes will apply to you; many will not. Let’s look at each set separately here. Check ones that apply and decide: at the present time, is this change primary a loss, a gain or both?

As you enumerate your life changes, and see which ones you consider primarily losses, consider how you responded to them at the time they occurred. Was there validation for you that these were indeed losses? Were the resulting reactions you had validated as grief, discouragement? Was the trauma of these events processed and understood?

Death is the most obvious way to lose those you love, but choosing to end a relationship, even when doing so is clearly the right choice, also contains loss. Even more difficult to recognize and validate are those losses embedded in the growth of relationships. Because no growing relationship stays the same, loss and its recognition become an important part of its vitality. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's reflections on the changing nature of relationships in Gift from the Sea exemplify this point:

One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to an old form of relationship and more deeply still, that there is no holding of a relationship in a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth. All living relationships are in the process of change, of expansion, and must be perpetually building themselves new forms.

But there is no single fixed form to express such a changing relationship.

Because there is no single, fixed form for a relationship, the old is constantly being altered. When old, no longer functional ways of relating are honored, there is room and energy for the new. But sometimes the failure to recognize such changes leads to alienation, misunderstandings, and in some instances, divorce. “You don't treat me the way you used to when we were first together” can be an invitation to explore just how the relationship has changed, what is missing now, and, if possible, what can take place to revitalize it. Unfortunately, such statements are often only complaints or else the invitation to discuss is misunderstood.

Self Change

The most difficult changes to validate, I believe, are the changes that happen internally, that only you know. There may be no outward sign that something has shifted, but you feel it. Perhaps it comes because you have been successful and are taking on new roles. Perhaps it is a hidden shame that no one else knows about—or at least not anybody near you. If you share this change with just about anybody, they would dismiss it—or the opposite, tell you that you deserve to feel that way. Examine the kind of changes that appear in the next section, and see which ones apply to you—and how they apply—as a loss, a gain or both.

All of these losses, of course, require you to grieve, for losses have a way of changing who you are and what you are about. Grief itself is an unsettling process that causes you to wonder if you're going crazy, if you've lost a part of yourself that can never be restored. It's a rare loss that doesn't cause you to stop and question some basic premises about life—its fairness, your immortality, your ability to love, your desire to not have to always be so aware. When it gets really bad, losses can call into question your very identity or your reason or desire for existing.

For example, there is little permission to view as a loss something, which may on the surface seem positive, yet without validation, grieving is difficult. He had not anticipated the losses involved in his promotion, yet similar many who are promoted above their peers experience reactions. Friendships change and are sometimes lost. The basis of trust, forged over time, does not always transfer, especially when the new role is more powerful. Mike had no one who could support him in exploring the losses involved in his promotion, and he was affected spiritually. His very essence was demoralized.

In a way, such “losses of innocence” challenge some of our basic assumptions about life, assumptions like bad things don't happen to good people, that doing the right thing guarantees health and happiness, that positive thinking can overcome any obstacle, that only sinners suffer, that the one with the most toys wins.

Doubts about your self-worth, who you are, and how competent you are can result from change. You can lose a sense of worth as a result of a promotion or firing. You can lose your goals and dreams as a result of success or failure. Your habitual ways of doing things don't always work when you move, stop smoking, or start living with someone. Your attractiveness, health, prowess, self-concept, identity, body image, or sexual drive can be altered if you gain or lose weight, fall in love, or become disabled or ill. In every instance, your identity changes. So does your routine. You may even find yourself saying things like, “This isn't me” or “This is the new me” or “I've never really thought of myself as attractive before.” Such statements reflect your struggles with defining and sometimes losing who you are.

Retirement typically causes such identity problems. Deprived of an important role to play as well as your work, retirement (or worse yet, unplanned retirement or being fired) can take from you a way to define just who you are and your chief purpose for living as well as a comfortable, familiar, predictable way to relate.

Such losses of identity are often not observable to an outside source. They can come about at times of apparent positive growth and change

Losses of self often cause us to stop and reflect on what's happened to us. With such times of reflection, we often realize how much we've changed—and what we've lost in the process. We’re wiser, but that wisdom has come at the price of our innocence, our habits, and at the cost of giving up myths and assumptions that no longer fit.

Circumstantial/external environment

The third kind of change that affects involves changes in our circumstances. Those kinds of changes can relate to careers, our finances community, nation environment and nature itself.

It is often easiest to focus on losses that are external to us and our primary relationships as sources of stress, but not necessarily ones of loss. Yet they are; each time something happens that changes our sense of security or identity, we, too are changed.

Losing objects you treasure can be devastating, too. You may think you really don't need many things until the time comes when you have to do without them. Then you have the opportunity to examine just how important—or perhaps unimportantsomething is. For example, most of us have treasures that are of little monetary value or significance to anyone else, items such as photographs, trophies, trinkets, or other cherished pieces that represent ties with our past or our friends and ancestors. Sources of comfort, prestige, pleasure, or simply ways of expressing ourselves, losing any of these, whether to theft, destruction, or even through a sale, can be a source of grief.

The most significant of these material losses are those that meet basic needs, but you often miss most those things you rely on for self-expression and as ways to enhance your sense of self-worth. A guitar or harp, a boat, your native country, or the language and customs you learned while growing up are often such agents of self-expression.

Natural disasters have another impact, too, as do auto or plane crashes, fires, and other types of accidents that involve someone you know: They cause you to lose your faith or trust in your environment. You usually expect your environment to be predictable, or at least benign. Why else would you build houses on flood plains, too close to the ocean, or precisely on earthquake fault lines? You just don't expect the tornado, earthquake, hurricane, or volcanic eruption to actually come. When it does, you are devastated because you can't take your environment for granted.

When Loss Is Shared

Oddly enough, positive life experiences that are shared may also create a sense of loss. At a wedding, the couple focuses on the joy of the commitment they make to each other, perhaps not realizing that this commitment comes at the price of their individuality and their freedom to be with friends, family, or other sexual partners. Sometimes those are welcome losses or even escapes. Sometimes they are not. Parents and siblings may be genuinely happy for a couple's joy while personally feeling a sense of loss of the special relationship they used to share with one of them.

In many instances of shared loss, you don't recognize the loss aspect until later. It may be many years before you look back and see how graduation was the last time you saw each other, how the birth of a child meant an ending to your times with each other or with couples who didn't have children. You may have been so relieved to have the war over that you didn't acknowledge just how much of a loss it would be not to have the life-essential companionship of a buddy who'd seen you through. It's often at reunions, holidays, or chance meetings years later that the communality of what you lost can finally be validated.

Loss can be shared across generations, too. The Nazi Holocaust, for example, continues to cast its shadow more than fifty years later, and not just on the remaining survivors but also on succeeding generations. This is also true for the Native Americans whose hearts were buried at Wounded Knee, the Irish whose ancestors left their country during famine and persecution, and African Americans who are descended from slavery's clutches. That's why powerful books and movies like Roots, Schindler's List, Beloved, Saving Private Ryan, How The West Was Lost, Whale Rider, and The Irish In America can reach out and grab our heartstrings.

Loss can be shared in support groups, too, but support groups aren't for everybody. Sometimes rather than dealing with loss and grief, they become a social gathering and a way to stabilize an identity as a victim:

Even so, the journey through grief is much easier if there are companions along the way who validate your journey, especially at the start. That's why programs like the Victim Intervention Project in St. Paul, Minnesota, are so significant. Begun by grief counselor Margaret MacAbee whose husband was murdered, this project coordinates local ministers and volunteers to visit family members within a day or two of the murder of a loved one. “What we are doing is sharing the beginning of an incredible, unimaginable journey,” says Margaret. “It's as if we say to them, ‘Welcome to hell. I'll walk with you.’ Even hell is a lot easier to take if someone can be there while you go through it.”

Whether loss is shared or not, it's through discovering the interweaving of your life experiences with loss that you find the universal threads that give your life hope—the threads which tell you that by fully facing what you experience, you can know what you have lost, what you have left, and can discover just how intricate, extensive, and empowering the connections in your life can be.