How are you going to get through your first, or yet another Father’s Day without feeling raw, abandoned, or left behind? After my father died while I was a child, it took years before I could pass through a Father’s Day and not feel sad and confused as I was left with all of the questions I never had a chance to ask as I grew up. As we grieve the loss of a father, sometimes it is easier to go through the process if we know what to expect as our heart heals. Understanding the grief process helps us to feel in control over something we have very little control over.
When we first lose our father, we often find ourselves making decisions and choices that sound reasonable but are quite counterproductive to our overall healing. Even though it may temporarily give us relief, in the long run it does not nurture us or complete our healing. For some people after their father dies they thrive again by themselves, but most of us are not that lucky or successful at dealing with the loss of love from a father. Sometimes we spiral down to the depths of despair (which is somewhere we all go to some extent or another), but then have trouble climbing back out. And to various degrees, you may re-experience the loss over and over again or continue to suffer your loss until you learn new ways to cope.
Some people who appear to have let go of their loss really haven’t, because what they’ve done is closed the door to their hearts. To avoid feeling any more pain they move on too quickly, and in doing so they’ve numbed their ability to fully feel. Without realizing they are doing this they carry on in their lives unable to feel the love in their hearts, and consequently their ability to grow in love and happiness is stunted.
The good news is that building resiliency is an on-going process. How long it takes to move through your father’s loss depends wholly upon you. While we’ll talk about the three stages of grief here, the length of time it takes for you to go through each of the stages depends on you and your resiliency or ability to bounce back. I like explaining the grief process using Dr. John Gray’s three stages found in his book, Mars and Venus Starting Over.
The first stage of healing is going to someone who can help. If family dynamics do not permit you to grieve openly or talk amongst yourselves, then you may need outside help. The advice of friends while well-intentioned may leave you feeling worse off if you’re not able to complete the second stage in a way that is best for you.
The second stage of healing is grieving the loss. We do this by grieving our father’s loss, and then finding forgiveness. Our survival tendency is to avoid our pain. A man can get in touch with his feeling when he is in the presence of others who are also in pain. Numbing ourselves does not heal pain. The tragedy of doing this is you close shop and decide to never love again. Whether you are a child still growing up, a young adult that has not found their significant other, or an adult in a current relationship-if you numb yourself, then you stop growing in the area of love and relationships. Human beings are not meant to live their lives alone by themselves.
The third stage of healing is becoming whole. In this stage we work on becoming whole, because this will protect us from getting hurt again. If you are in a romantic relationship while you are processing your father’s death you have to be aware that you may transfer feelings to this partner, but you are really dealing with moving through your feelings you had for your father. If you find yourself doing this-this is where outside help can help you look objectively at how you are thinking, feeling, and behaving to the loved ones still in your life. By focusing on feeling the four healing emotions of:
· Anger
· Sadness
· Fear
· Sorrow
Then you will know that you really love somebody and have moved on when you do not hold them accountable or responsible for your pain anymore. A victim’s belief is, “I can’t feel better unless you change.” If you did not have a chance to work through any issues you had with your father while he was still alive, you can still process the feelings and obtain the love you need so you can move on.
Sometimes just getting in touch with our feelings doesn’t complete the healing process-so while we feel our pain, we aren’t able to find relief. If this is the case, then an important part of the process may have been overlooked, and it is either limiting or blocking our natural ability to heal. A solution-focused way to work through this last stage of grief is to write Feeling Letter’s each time these emotions come up. My next article will go over how to write a feeling letter to your father. And in doing so you can move yourself quickly through these feelings of loss so you become at peace with your loss and can remember your father with love.
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