If you are in need of immediate support and care, please call your local emergency support hotline or get admitted to the local hospital.
Resourceful response to loss
The idea is to move forward in love and be congruently happy when thinking about the loss of your child. Steve and Connirea Andreas found through interviews with bereaved people that those who had the most resourceful response to loss showed a strong sense of the person they lost being fully present with them in the moment.
This goes hand in hand with the theory of continued bond. In this model you find ways to adjust and redefine your relationship with your child, allowing for a continued bond that will endure, in different ways and to varying degrees throughout your life. Rather than assuming detachment as a normal grief response, continuing bonds considers human attachment natural even after death.
If you died tomorrow, would you want your loved ones to grieve and be unhappy, or to remember you joyfully with full feelings of love and appreciation for your special qualities as they move on with their lives? Which way do you think the person you have lost would prefer? – Steve and Connirae Andreas
What would your child prefer you to do and be?
Resilience
According to Dr. L. Michael Hall there are five stages of resilience:
- The getting knocked down stage
- The emotional roller-coaster stage, where your emotions are all over the place
- The coping stage, where you develop the skills to cope with the challenges and solve the problems that they create
- The mastery stage, where you get some things figured out and are able to master certain challenges
- The ‘I’m back’ stage.
What holds these stages and strategies together are frames, meanings and intentions that create a self-organizing attractor in your system, like “I know I will get through this, it’s just a matter of time and learning.”
Even though you might question your resilience, given that you’re reading this is a testament to your willingness to move forward, which shows you are resilient.
Continue reading in Chapter 10 of Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple.
