2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Today we'll talk about healthy ways to deal with loss and grief and how Acceptance and Commitment Behavioral Therapy can help you do this. To begin with, there is no right way, but there are healthy or unhealthy ones. And TPO (ACT) has its own perspective on the healthy living of grief
This topic is very important because whatever condition we take: depression, anxiety, PTSD, drug and alcohol abuse, one of the key topics as we explore feelings is loss and grief. And in each such case, these are years of carrying grief in oneself without adequately experiencing it. Behavior aimed at “drowning a beach ball in water”: “I don’t want to think about my parents' divorce,” “I don’t want to think about my brother’s death,” “I don’t want to think about the injuries I received in a car accident,” “I don’t want thinking that I lost the ability to do my favorite job "," I don't want to think about the fact that we moved from city to city and every time I lost friends ", etc.
Meanwhile, the worries about loss do not go away and patients have to deal with grief. And, of course, no one wants to plunge into sadness, confusion, powerlessness and depression.
But at ACT, we invite people to deal with all of these experiences. After all, it is the attempts not to FEEL that represent depression, obsessive rituals, the use of alcohol and drugs, gambling addiction, etc.
The goal of ANT is to develop the psychological flexibility to live meaningful lives in which we engage in relationships with others. However, it is precisely this involvement that is the reason that people dear to us leave us with grief of loss when they leave. And if we do not cope, then part of our BEHAVIOR, aimed at avoiding unpleasant feelings, becomes disconnecting ourselves from intimate relationships. It is closeness that means that the loss will be painful. And it's scary!
Sometimes we can hear “I don’t want to live like this!”, “I don’t want to suffer anymore!”, “I feel so bad that I don’t know how to live!”. A person is so absorbed in these thoughts and experiences that it seems as if nothing can help. These are normal experiences. Problems begin with how a person tries to cope with them: drinking, suicidal attempts, refusing to eat, etc.
And if we say “yes” to all experiences, we start to establish relationships with people again, then our process of experiencing grief also changes. One does not happen without the other. Therefore, an important target is the development or restoration of social skills for deep interpersonal interaction.
How do we help the client from the position of AST:
1. We collect accurately and in detail information about significant changes in life: moving, loss of people, animals, work, physical and psychological injuries, etc.
2. Helping through mindfulness practice to get in touch with avoided feelings, thoughts and actions that sustain suffering.
3. Explore cognitive confusion (attention stuck in …) with thoughts of oneself as “unable to live like this any longer”, “traumatized and inferior”. We do not set a goal to change them. We do not work with thoughts, but with the process of thinking (not what we think, but how). We help to develop the "Observing Self".
4. We work with values and goals. Asking questions: What is important to me? What kind of person do I want to be? And how do I want to live my life ?. For example, “I want to be honest and share my pain with my wife,” “I want to take care of my daughter and therefore stop drinking and start working,” “I want to recover so that …”, etc. We work on what we can DO, not what we have lost.
5. Working on skills and behaviors that support interpersonal interactions. This includes the skills to communicate your feelings to selected people in a contextual and appropriate way.
6. We remember about different religious beliefs and philosophical convictions, keep our own, support those with which we deal or at least do not interfere with them.
7. We are patiently waiting. Nobody knows how long it will take to grieve in any given case.
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