Necessary Losses: Getting Good at Getting Through Grief

Necessary losses are a part of our lives. Loss softens us, and causes us to reexamine our lives. Many changes come with the loss of someone you loved. It can take many months, or longer to adjust to life without that beloved person. One has to recreate your sense of self.

There is no one correct way to grieve. Recently, I've had patients reflect that in a grief group at a local hospital they were told to sit in a chair and do an hour of grieving each day, but that's not what I would generally recommend. I have found that grief is as individual as your thumb print or a snowflake. Many people report that grief comes in waves of 20-30 minutes, and can be triggered by many different things. You need to grieve your way, and have support for doing so.

Many feelings are normal as we grieve: sadness, anger, fear, relief, abandonment, shock, confusion, and emptiness.

What factors impact grief?

• Your relationship with the person you lost

• The suddenness or the expected nature of the loss

• Your temperament

• Your coping skills

• Your support system

• Your faith

• Your loss history and having resolved past grief

The more deeply you were attached to the individual, the greater the loss. When I am working with someone who has lost a baby or a child, that is a huge life-changing kind of loss. A couple can be married for 50 plus years, and depending on the quality of the relationship it could be a much more or less difficult transition. Losing your last or only parent can propel you into being the oldest generation in your family. The end of a friendship or the loss of a cherished pet can be very painful, and unearth other feelings of unresolved loss from earlier in your life. Loss is cumulative.

Grieving is hard work. It can make you feel physically and emotionally drained. When you are grieving, it's important to do extreme self-care and nourish yourself as much as you can. There are tasks of mourning to be done, including feeling the pain of the loss and adapting to your life without that person in it to call or spend time with.

Each individual has a loss history. I usually try to take information about previous loss in the first few sessions in counseling individuals. Your history of loss includes all the moves, break-ups, family divorces, job loss, loss of friends as well as loss by death that you have experienced in your lifetime. Looking at how you have coped with past losses and what was helpful can be a good place to start approaching the current loss you may be experiencing.

What helps people who are grieving?

• Support from friends and family

• Rest

• Eating healthfully

• Getting back into life as you can

• A place or person where you can process your grief

• A growth-oriented mindset

Loss is a part of our lives and while very painful, also allows us to grow and to reflect on our own lives and mortality. Getting good at letting yourself fully grieve allows you to go forward being more open, more loving and with a deeper sense of reverence for the delicate nature of our time here. Understanding how your own loss history informs your life can help you become more fully human and more empathic to others.

Never Enough: Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers

I recently reread Dr. Karyl McBride's excellent book, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? (Free Press, 2008). Its a useful resource for adult women who are trying to heal old wounds from a narcissistic mother. McBride estimates that there are over 1.5 million American women that are narcissists, and if one of them is your mother, you have probably been damaged by her insecurity, overbearingness, insensitivity and domineering personality.

Daughters of narcissistic mothers grow up understanding that mom is only happy with them if they do what she wants. The maternal love is entirely conditional. Mom is unreasonable and unrealistic about what she expects. She withholds love if she's not pleased.

Daughters of narcissistic mothers can feel empty, sad, disappointed, and like they are somehow not enough. I liked this poignant quote from Jan Waldron in McBride's book: "An adult woman can hunt for and find her own value. She can graduate herself into importance. But during the shaky span from childhood to womanhood, a girl needs help in determining her worth---and no one can anoint her like her mother."

Girls are vulnerable to whatever is happening with their mothers. Daughters can feel that they are valued for what they do rather than who they are. They may feel unlovable. It might be difficult to trust their own feelings. They may fear becoming like mother emotionally.

Here are some questions to help you determine if you are being affected by your mother's narcissism:

1. Do you find yourself constantly trying to get her approval, love, and attention but without success?

2. Did your mother emphasize how it looks to her rather than how it feels to you?

3. Is your mother jealous of you?

4. Does your mother not support your healthy expressions of self, especially when they conflict with her needs?

5. In your family, is it always about Mom?

6. Is it difficult for mom to empathize with others?

7. Does Mom have difficulty dealing with her own her own feelings? Is she limited to expressing anger,coldness and neutral? Does she have trouble letting others have or express their own(different) feelings?

8. Is Mom critical and judgmental of you?

9. Does your mother treat you like a friend, rather than as her daughter? Is she needy and trying to always get your attention and support?

10. Is it hard to have any privacy or boundaries from your mother?

Daughters of narcissistic mothers need to examine the negative messages they have absorbed from their mothers, and begin their own healing process. You can learn to replace the unhealthy maternal voice inside you for a healthier one that allows you to set your own boundaries, feel your own feelings and take good care of yourself. With counseling and self-reflection, you can begin to become a different kind of woman and mother than the one you grew up with. Good mothers don't engulf their daughters and tell them what to think, feel, do and wear.

Becoming your authentic self means overcoming the neediness and expectations of a narcissistic mother, and learning to love differently with your own partner and children. Breaking the patterns of narcissism in your family will help the next generation be mothered differently. McBride's book is a valuable read to get you started thinking about how you might have been impacted by a narcissistic mother, and begin the healing.

What's Your Attachment Style?

Attachment is the way you connect with other people. We learn it from our parents and attachment figures while we are growing up. We carry our attachment style into our adult relationships, and it helps to shape who we become as a parent and partner.There are four types: preoccupied, fearful, dismissing and secure. None of the styles is bad, just part of who you are and the life experiences you've had. We may each be able to shift our style of attaching over time and through healing experiences.

If you are securely attached, you can trust others and let them close to support you. In this style, you allow yourself a full range of emotions, knowing that all feelings are okay. Securely attached people feel basically happy and capable, and they tend to view their partner as well-intentioned and trustworthy. If you have an anxious attachment style and choose a securely attached partner you are likely to find that the reliable bond with them helps you to grow more secure over time. You don't overreact to a partner's small mistakes or slights.

What if you have the preoccupied style of attachment? You may feel fearful of rejection. You might overreact to problems, and easy jump to the feeling that you can't cope. This type can drain a partner with a sense of being perpetually overwhelmed, vulnerable and needy. Your sensitivity may cause you to overreact to perceived slights by a romantic partner. It may mean that you pick fights or instigate conflict which may exhaust your partner. The attachment need feels so strong and the fear of not getting needs met is so intense that little things can have huge meaning for you. A slow response to a call or text message may create high levels of anxiety and upset, and cause you to jump to (negative) conclusions. No partner is ever going to intuit your every need perfectly. Preoccupied style of attachers "activate" their strategy to sort of scan for any possible problems in relationships in a hyper-vigilant way, which can cause stress and anxiety.

If you have the dismissing style of attachment, you move away from attachment and fight strongly for your autonomy and independence. You also predict that important people in your life will not be there for you when you need them, so you avoid your own feelings and the feelings of others. You may withhold from expressing affection to a partner and make an insecure partner feel more insecure. You probably feel conflicted about both wanting love, comfort and connection and also wanting to protect yourself from the risk of it. You want to believe you don't need love, but you do.

People with the fearful attachment style feel that they aren't loveable. Attachment figures growing up may have been unavailable, perhaps having their own problems. They deeply desire connection and closeness, but can avoid or send mixed messages to their partner. These individuals can be vulnerable to depression, anxiety and passivity, and need to express their needs directly. Individuals who have the fearful style of attachment often view their partner negatively and can't empathize much with them.

Understanding how your style of attaching creates challenges for you in building a satisfying, secure and joyful relationship gives you a good start. Close relationships give us emotional availability, safe haven and a secure base. Insight for how your early attachments with parents influenced your ability to attach will help you develop self-compassion for why you struggle with certain things. It may also help you build more compassion for your intimate partner as you discuss how your childhoods and past relationships colored your ability to get close.

Leslie Becker-Phelps has an insightful new book on this topic called, "Insecure In Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It" (New Harbinger Publications, 2014). Becker-Phelps offers strategies for becoming a more securely attached person and partner.

We want to both become and look for a partner who can be securely attached, mature, non-defensive, effective at communication, appreciative, and affectionate. All intimate relationships will have some miscommunication at times. The best we can do is to choose wisely, have compassion for ourselves and the beloved, risk our own vulnerability, and try our best not to avoid, distance or act out of insecurity.

9 Strategies for Moving Past Your Partner's Affair

You love your partner, and never dreamed they would be unfaithful. Now you found out. Perhaps you had been noticing different behaviors in your partner, or you found a heap of text messages or phone calls to the other person. Maybe you found the restaurant or hotel receipts, or the credit card bills, or a mutual friend saw your partner out with the other person and reported it to you. It may be that your partner came out and told you directly. You are grief-stricken, and your whole life appears not to be what you thought it was. Now what?

If you are married, love your spouse, and  have children and a whole life together, it's a big decision to give up all your dreams because of their affair. Infidelity is wrong, and involves a third person in your relationship. Practically speaking, it is also very common. Can couples heal and move on together after an affair?

I have seen many couples deal with the aftermath of one partner's affair, and some couples really can heal and get past it. An affair can, but often does not have to, end your marriage. If you choose to stay and repair the marriage, you have a whole journey of healing ahead of you. It helps to know what to expect, what to talk with your partner about, and what to do on your own to take responsibility for your own healing.

Your partner's response when the details of the affair matters: Were they remorseful? Did they sincerely ask for your forgiveness? Were they more arrogant and defensive? Were they willing to work hard to repair the marriage with you? If they weren't truly repentant and deeply sorry, you may want out of the marriage, because this affair may be foreshadowing of more affairs to come.

What if they really regret the affair and want to repair things with you? How do you manage the myriad of feelings the spouse feels who has been cheated on? How do you work through the trust being broken with your partner? How do you move through the current hell you are living through,with an eye to rebuilding the future of your marriage?

1. You need to take time to grieve. Finding out that your beloved spouse was unfaithful to you---physically, emotionally, or both, is a huge loss. In some ways it's worse than a death, because it was a willful decision to turn to someone else without regard to hurting you.To grieve, you must  feel all the feelings that you experience: shock, anger, bargaining, sadness, hurt, and eventually, acceptance.Grief comes in waves. It can be very intense.You can feel it as physical symptoms, including an inability to sleep, not being able to eat, a hollow feeling in your chest, etc.You have lost the trust and the innocence you once had in the marriage. Something has happened that you won't be able to forget, but can work hard to forgive over time. You may want to journal or talk with a therapist on your own to process all your feelings, and decide what you most want to communicate to your partner. It is usually a better choice not to share everything with friends, family, or your children (especially if you want to work it out, as you may forgive your partner, but they might not).

2. Do extreme self-care. In the months following your finding out about your partner's infidelity, it is  important to rebuild your confidence and self-esteem. Few things in life feel more like a personal hit and rejection that a partner's affair. Take some time to reinvest in yourself. Exercising might save your life during the first few months. Change a few things up about yourself. Find ways to be your own best friend. This is a time to reinvest in yourself, because you have to get stronger to fight for and rebuild your marriage. Whether your repair attempts work, and you are able to rebuild your marriage or not, you are with you either way.

3. After you get the facts on the affair and have talked openly with your partner, try not to obsess about your partner's every move. Better to act with integrity and self-esteem, and put your partner on notice that you are "all in" the relationship with them, as long as they are "all in" as well. Let them know that if you find out they are continuing their unfaithfulness, you may need to end it. This is about reclaiming your own power. You are not willing to be repeatedly victimized. Go on record about this with your partner.

4. Restructure the relationship with your partner. You need to understand what the affair meant to them. Are their unmet needs that they have? How about needs that you have? Create a format where you can each check-in with each other about how you are doing with the other. Do you have a regular date night? Weekends and vacations away together? If not, set it up, take turns making the plans, and get going. Begin having fun together again if you weren't. Find a safe way to make behavior change requests with each other.

5. Require new transparency in the marriage. As a marriage therapist, I don't like couples to have secrets. Discuss and negotiate new boundaries on Facebook, cell phones, email, lunches with the opposite gender, etc. Modern technology makes infidelity an easier temptation, but inappropriate and hurtful behavior needs to be addressed. If your partner can't agree on some reasonable compromises with you, it's a huge red flag. It is reasonable for you to want new boundaries.

6. Coping with triggered grief, anger, and sadness is an inside job. Much like war veterans can get triggered PTSD symptoms, lots of little things can surprisingly trigger the downward emotional spiral of people who have been betrayed. You have to be able to sort it out yourself, or get help doing so. If you fall apart or get angry or paranoid over every little thing,your partner will begin to feel hopeless that you two can get back on track. You have to be able to choose which items are the big things, and how to ask your partner for comfort (as in holding you). You can't stay stuck in angry, attack mode or it will drive your spouse further away. Remind yourself that your partner CHOSE to return to you, rather than pursue a future with the other person. It may help you to keep a list of your negative thoughts and check the evidence, making sure you are not using distorted thinking like emotional reasoning. You need to sort this out and be aware of not coming across as hostile, defeated, and stuck with your partner. Pick your battles, don't beat your partner up every time you get triggered. You can also learn to do thought stopping, where you go run a few miles when triggered, or remind yourself your partner stayed with you.

You need to be able to develop your own internal dialogue to deal with the insecurities that have gotten stirred up inside you. It may be overwhelming to your partner for you to be consistently needy, angry, and hyper-vigilant. You need to stay grounded, and keep a mindful of creating a new, better relationship with each other. Keep in mind that your partner may have given up the other person, but is actually grieving that relationship concurrently to working out things with you.

7. When you feel safe to do so, begin to address the sexual relationship between the two of you. If it has been dormant in recent months or years, heat things up again. I find many marriages have become disconnected in this intimate part of the relationship after having children. Begin to talk about what you would like in this intimate area of your life again, and get your partner to talk about what they have always wanted in this area. If at all possible, do not ask for specifics about sexual activities between your partner and the other person. It will be harder to get rid of these images. Make your partner wonder why they ever got involved with anyone else! Again, get out of victim mode as soon as you can. You can't undo what has happened, but you can try to rebuild and move forward.

8. Develop your spiritual life together as a couple after the affair is uncovered. A shared faith could be a huge help as you try to heal.

9. After the initial grieving, try to introspect about whatever part you may have played in the distance that happened in your marriage. It's perfectly possible you played no role in it, and certainly your partner involving another person was wrong. It is also possible that you need to own things you did or didn't do that distanced your partner (Did you get busy and ignore him? Over-focus on the children? Not invite her for date nights or couples time? Not share responsibility for a great sexual relationship?)

Marriages change after infidelity, but with your strength, the right support, and a good effort from both you and your partner, you may be able to get back on track and not lose your love and your life together. Hopefully, years from now you can look back and be glad you rebuilt your life together. In a world where the divorce rate is this high, being a couple who dug deep and renewed your commitment to each other and rebuilt the trust over time is something to be proud of you both for. There are times in life when digging deep and growing through difficult times can make you grow as an individual and as a partner.

The Words We Choose

I started college as an English major, so I am always very interested in word choice, either in the written word or in conversation. As a therapist these last 25 years, I'm curious about what people's word choice means about their relationships and their world view.

What does it imply when one partner describes their home as "my house," their financial resources as "my money," or their shared child as "my child?" There are underlying power dynamics in most human relationships. I often stop couples when they do this, and ask them to reframe their statement.

Words can heal and also have the power to hurt. Children think that as parents, we know everything. (Then as teens, they often find out we don't.) The words a parent says get imprinted on a child's developing core self. I often ask people in individual therapy how their parents viewed them in the family. Were you told you were the smart one or the pretty one? Could you never measure up in your parents eyes to a sibling? Were you told you weren't an athlete, weren't a good student, or couldn't be something you wanted to be?

Clearing up some of those old messages that were imprinted on you by your parents is liberating. Maybe your parents were human, and not clairvoyant or all-knowing. Perhaps it is time to update your own view of yourself, and watch what you say to yourself. Self-talk is powerful. Why can't you feel, think, and be who you'd like to be already?

In your relationships, watch what words you use. Create joining and union with your partner. Focus on we, not I. Share the power, share the ownership, and lean into your closest relationship. You won't believe the difference.

The Decision to Forgive

Forgiveness is ultimately a decision one makes.You might make it because you are exhausted from carrying around so much pain and hurt. You might be concerned about the physical health ramifications of holding a grudge or resentment over a period of months and years.

It doesn't take a perfect apology in order to choose to forgive. Forgiveness is more an internal decision one makes,realizing that all people are flawed,and that you accept whatever hurt was caused and move on in your life.You free up trapped energy that was stuck in justified anger and hurt,forgive the person involved, either literally,through a conversation or in writing,or symbolically, through a forgiveness ritual you can create. Sometimes I have encouraged my patients to have a burning bowl ceremony,where you safely and ceremoniously burn scraps of paper with names or actions you forgive and release.

When is it hard to forgive?

When your partner has betrayed you by becoming emotionally or physically intimate with someone else.

When someone close to you has lied to you.

When your parents were physically or emotionally abusive.

When a sibling rejects you and builds allies in the family against you.

When a co-worker or business partner doesn't keep their commitment,and you are negatively impacted by it.

When a parent falls apart,and can't be there to play their role in your life that you really need.

Amazingly,I have witnessed people in all of these painful circumstances,and others, who choose to forgive.Giving forgiveness,after fully working through your hurt and anger, means choosing peace inside yourself. Choosing to forgive doen't neccesarily mean you can feel safe with that individual again right away,or maybe ever.You don't forget. Forgiveness means you accept the natural weaknesses and imperfections in people you have cared about.You stop feeding the fire of anger,going over the other person's wrongdoings like a movie repeating.You choose your own peace and lightness,because life is fragile,and you reject wasting anymore emotional energy in that negative,hopeless way.

Forgiveness allows you space to add other emotionally satisfying people and experiences to your life.Resentment is about the past. Forgiveness is about freeing yourself from victimhood,and creating emotionally healing experiences with either those you've forgiven, or others you allow into your inner circle. Taking inventory about what grudges or pain you are carrying,and working it through to forgiveness can allow you to take back your life.