photo credit: la fattina

I was glad to see that Ellie continued her thoughts about Seligman and his A-B-C-D-E methodology for moving towards optimism and away from despair.  You may have read that I told her that it was a painful piece to read… and I still believe that the grief that she expressed was both searing and, by the time she finished the piece, hopeful.

As I was reading about her loss of her husband, it reminded me of a friend I have who has been divorced for many years.  She made the choice to stay in her pain.  For her, the pain of the divorce and the circumstances leading up to it are still fresh even after eight years.  I have another friend who refused to vote for Bill Clinton because her own husband had been unfaithful and so had Bill.

Another friend of mine lost his wife eleven years ago.  Although she had a terminal illness, she was not yet very ill.  She had been in the hospital with a medical crisis, which had passed, and the malfunctioning of some equipment resulted in her dying unexpectedly early.  In reality, for her it was a blessing.  For those left behind, it was a rude ending.  Like Ellie, my friend made a decision to go through the grieving process because if he didn’t go through it, he would be stuck there for the rest of his life, however long that turned out to be.

Moving Forward

When grief hits, it drains you.  It robs your days of color, interest and energy and in the process fades the color, interest and energy from you.  Here in the good ol’ US of A, we don’t grieve for long.  At least, we don’t acknowledge that we do.  We don’t like to think about things we can’t control so we paper it over so that others can get on with their lives without our being too much of a disruption.

In our book club we have lost two women to cancer.  The first one was diagnosed with lung cancer at the end of January, 2004 and died June 15 of that year.  She was a dear friend of mine.  I had hosted her celebration of being at our mutual employer for 25 years. (Companies used to celebrate that kind of stuff.)  After we both left working there, we’d go to lunch once a week and then go decorating shopping.  She was constantly sneaking furniture into the house. (You might ask how she could do that… well, by the time her husband noticed and asked if it was new, it wasn’t anymore.)  On the day she died, I was scheduled to teach a class.  I wanted to stay home, but if I didn’t show up…  Don’t want to disrupt the plans.

The problem, or the solution, depending on your point of view, is that, despite our losses, life does go on.  The class must be taught.  The kids must be fed.  The bills must be paid.

The real question is how will you live in this new environment.  Will you choose to live consciously, grieving when it hits, and enjoying your life and making plans for the future when you can?

The center point of Seligman’s Adversity, Beliefs, Consequences, Distract/Dispute, Energize approach is the consequences.  Think about the losses you’ve experienced in your life and quietly recite your ABC’s and then, like Ellie, ask yourself: Can you accept the consequences of your current life view?  Are you giving up for the rest of your life?  OR are you choosing to use the entire A-B-C-D-E process to move forward?

It is right and necessary that we grieve our losses – parents, partners, jobs, friendships, youth, fitness, health – the list can go on forever.  But grief is not a life sentence.  You will always miss those people or things.  It is right and necessary that we also find a way forward.  They want that for us.  Now, we must want it for ourselves.