We have looked at the need for action to overcome your grief. You now understand that you must make a conscious decision to get better, and we have found one way to identify the area that may be limiting your life. Now we have to look at why this is limiting your life.

Many times, when we experience a loss, we actually say the words, "If only I had time to do..." or "I/we were going to..." This give the feeling of something undone or left incomplete in the relationship, whether it be a death, divorce, breakup, job loss or whatever. We often feel that we might have done something else if we had had more time somehow. Of course, most loss occurs when we are not really ready for it, and would we have done EVERYTHING we wanted to prior to it if we knew? Probably not. this can even include minute things, such as undelivered message, or anything else, large or small, that carries emotional meaning to you. I believe I have relayed that I cried over the words "potato salad" for a couple of years after the passing of my mother following a car accident. The potato salad didn't mean much, however it symbolized my mother, and the fact that she was "always" going to teach one of us her method of making it, and died without doing so. It was the pinacle of incompleteness in my relationship with my mother.

Just because something was incomplete, does not mean the relationship lacked something or that you are bad. There are many reasons that things are not complete: some people won't let you say meaningful things to them (it is too emotionally charged for them to handle), sometimes we are afraid to say them, sometimes the right time never comes, we get sidetracked, we forget, sometimes we just run out of time. However we are robbed of the opportunity to complete, it just is.

We have created our loss timeline. Now we need to examine which relationships are incomplete there. There are clues we can use: if you avoid thinking or talking about a loss, if memories turn painful (beyond sad), if you only want to talk about the positive things involved, if you only want to talk about the negative things involved, or if you have some fear about taling about the loss. All of these are signs that this may be a point of incompleteness. We need to look at the loss timeline, and look at this ideas of intensity, as you look along the timeline. Circle the ones you think may be incomplete. Look back at that list of chosen ones...does one jump out? Does one bring several of those clues we just listed to mind? Choose one of your circled losses that brings with it some of those clue feelings. We are going to take some action on it next time. Peace.