Many moons ago, I landed in a breakout session at a workshop that presented the idea that every change represents a loss, and therefore must be grieved. The context was organizational development – the speaker was giving us a tool to help manage change. I had never paid much attention to grieving, so the classic steps of grieving were new to me, as was the idea that every change represents a loss.
I used this new way of seeing change to help lessen the pain I was initiating as a change agent for businesses.
Back at the breakout session, the other thing I learned is that the end of the grieving process is a story about what happened – one that allows us to regain a sense of peace. As I came to see more and more of the world around me, and the speaking about it, as a bunch of stories, I grew better at recognizing my own stories and increasingly flexible in managing them.
I also remember reading, in “The Game of Life and How To Play It,” by Florence Scoville Shinn, about times she had treated for grief, only to have her clients first heal and then return to grieving because it wasn’t respectable to be happy in the face of loss. That seemed strange and kinda sick.
A buddy of mine who does a lot of grief work, tried for a long time to help me understand his view that when someone close to us moves out of our life, we have to grieve the loss of love that might have been. It didn’t quite make sense to me that we have to undergo a process to eliminate a story we made up about something that we didn’t get.
When I was undergoing divorce, another buddy told me I had to go through the grieving process and that it would take about a year. I wasn’t willing to sit out a year. I wanted to get back in the game quickly.
It hit me one day that, if the end of the grieving process is a story, maybe we could skip the process and go directly to the empowering story. I conducted an experiment.
As my father was dying, I invented the story that would bring me peace. I told that story about my dad’s death to myself until it did bring peace. When my dad passed, I checked in on my feelings to see how it worked. In my assessment, it worked pretty darn well. I did have a few moments of sting, but they passed quickly as I returned to my story.
I’ve used this method repeatedly. I don’t know if it totally eliminates the official grieving process, but I’m sure it provides a much quicker, more peaceful way of coping with the appearance of loss.
I’m driven to write this today because someone I know is wrestling with a lot of losses in his life – a lot of change. I’d like to give him some hope and something to hang his hat on in these difficult days. My friend is a writer – if there’s anyone who can invent just the right story to bring himself peace, he can. I think you can too.
