Grief is a natural process that occurs when somebody dies. We all grieve and that's appropriate, to a certain extent. In the early stages, it's important that you get through grief. However, over the years, again and again, I've had clients who were still grieving three, four, five, even twenty-five, thirty-five, and forty years later.
There comes a point at which grief isn't healthy anymore. Certainly, when you're married to someone for a long time and they pass away, your thoughts of them are going to be there forever. When people lose a child, they are, of course, going to hurt, and they're going to hurt for a long time. Their thoughts of their child will always be there, but they don't have to hurt forever.
In fact, one of the cases I had was a woman who came to me who had had four children. Her sixteen-year-old boy had died of cancer, which was a long, drawn-out and painful process. She went to pieces.
Her husband brought her to me and said that the family was falling apart. All she did was cry and grieve. When I asked how long he had been dead, he replied, "Three years." I made a decision at that point in time that I had to do something to shock her a little bit, to wake her up out of her grief and get her to pay attention to the other children she had.
The question I asked her is one that's worth considering for almost anybody who loses somebody and grieves over them. The question is simple. I turned to her and asked her if she would rather I put her in a hypnotic trance and give her amnesia, so it would be like she had never known her son. Would she give up all the memories of his sixteen years of life in exchange for not feeling the pain she had now? She looked at me quite angrily and said no, and I said, "Good. The reason you don't want to give up those memories is because if you gave yourself amnesia from ever having known somebody you loved, you'd miss out on all the good times. In fact, that's what's happening now."
When you took inventory, one of the things that happened was that some of the images you made in your mind were images where you saw what happened at the time as if you were there. These images are associated. In some of those images, you saw yourself in those memories, and those are entirely different because they are disassociated.
The trouble with long, drawn-out deaths-in fact, all deaths-is when people remember the person who has died, they make life-size images and they see those images as if they're happening now. It's very difficult to get through the pain of death. When people look at good memories, they'll see themselves in the good memories, but they'll remember the funeral. They'll remember the death as if it's happening now. In other words, they'll be associated with it, and this is simply backward. The process of flipping pictures is how people come out of grief when they stop remembering the tragedy of death and start remembering the good times vividly and associating with good memories.
I put the grieving mother into a light, closed-eye process. I had her go through and take ten really good memories and see what she saw at the time and hear what she heard, and then look at the unpleasant memories and see herself worrying next to the hospital bed of her son. By going back and forth between these things, it tells us unconsciously how to sort our memories so that we disassociate from the unpleasantness of someone's death and associate with the good memories. And then there's only one more step, which is to put it in the past.
As we described in the inventory, we all have ways of sorting out where the future is and where the past is. If you think of something that happened six months ago and something that happened a year ago and something that happened five years ago, and literally draw a line in your mind between those memories, you'll discover that there's a distance. We all measure time with distance in one form or another. The trick is to take the bad memories and to push them off into the distance, so they go into the past where they belong. If we hold on to memories as if they're happening to us now, then it's very hard for us to get over grief and into the natural process of healing. We need to do what's important, which is, once again, to come back to our senses and look at the people who are still around. Everybody's got some friends, everybody's got some relatives, and even older people who have lost the people they have loved (like a husband of fifty years) need to realize there's still life out there. There are still other people.
The best thing about the future is that it's in front of you. The best thing about the past is that it lies behind.
Getting Over Grieving Exercise
- Think of all the memories you have of the person who has passed away.
- Remember all the good memories about being with them by being associated in the memories. Feel them as if they are happening now.
- Remember all the bad times by looking at yourself in the image. See yourself going through the experiences in small images, which is like watching yourself on a small, black and white television screen
- Take your time line and imagine a line stretching way behind you that represents certain times from your past you have forgotten and never think about. Imagine taking all of the bad times with this person and placing them all on this line way off behind you.
- Imagine a wonderful future in front of you where you honor their memory by living as fully and as happily as possible.
-- Richard Bandler, "Get the life you want". #RichardBandler #Grief