Terrible things happen to good people. We are socialized to view ourselves as victims of events, and sometimes of our thoughts and feelings. While we have looked at how we react, and what activity we run to when in grief, we need now to take responsibility for our reaction. Part of that is pushing forward with our choice to recover from the loss. A big step in that choice is absolute honesty--with oneself. We can't filter through rationalizations, or overworking our analysis of our own feelings.

One of the first things we have to do is realize that we are a sum of our teachings and experiences, and a sum of our losses. Some of those losses have not infringed on our day to day life, but others do. One way to find out which are most restricting is to do a loss timeline. Draw a horizontal line across a paper, labeling the left hand side with the year of your birth, mark the general midpoint and the current year goes on teh right end. You will continue down the line chronologically, labeling years or ages above the line and the associated loss with the times below the line. Think deep, do not limit yourself. Pets die, first boyfriends girlfriends break up with us, best friends move away, jobs end, graduations occur, divorces happen and, of course, significant people in our lives die.

Do this alone and in a quiet area, you may find yourself moved to tears by some remembered loss. Once the line if complete, look at it carefully, see if you have forgotten anything. The hard part now is to identify what you could call the most painful or limiting loss you have EVER experienced. This may be the most recent one, or one so many years ago that you never thought that it still bothered you in such a deep way. You may even see connections between your short term energy relievers and certain losses (like starting to smoke, the beginning of weight gain or drinking).

Look at those short term stress relievers and events on the line, also those myths that we developed earlier. See where there may be connections that have kept you in stagnation recovery-wise. Next time we will look for what is yet incomplete in terms of events on our line, things that are not yet resolved. Peace.