Search Results for: reading

No longer relegated to live a life defined by tragedy, survivors and scientists alike are finding the positive side of grieving. Becky Aikman took her place on a metal chair. In her 40s, and much younger than most of the others in the group, she already felt out of place. During the session, the older women addressed her with barely disguised resentment. She was haunted by the “bad juju” of the group. Later, she explained to the facilitator that she felt the group should be following its description: “Moving Forward After Loss.” He responded by asking her not to come back. Partly because of her experience with that support group, she says, “I realized that getting out in the world and having positive experiences helps me. I realized that having friends and doing things with friends helps me. I realized that looking at the humor in life was very helpful.” Becky decided to form her own group, one that would emphasize new experiences and comradery. What she was looking for was a positive experience, despite her loss. Eventually, she would emerge as a happy, wiser person. Channeling her time as a journalist, Becky sought out research on grief. She discovered that the “five stages of grief”—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—had been discarded as outmoded by most grief researchers and counselors. She also found someone who had made researching how people grieve his life’s work: George Bonanno, Ph.D., a professor at Columbia University Teacher’s College. The New Science of Grief George came to grief research unexpectedly after what he calls a “curious” job offer early in his career, to direct a grief study at the University California in San Francisco. It was the beginning of a lifetime of studying bereavement, one in which he found, “almost nothing from the traditional ideas seemed to hold up,” he says. Although some seemed to get stuck in the intense grieving phase after a death, George found most people were able to move on. “The more common outcome is of being sad by the loss, being unhappy about it, but continuing to do OK in your life,” he says. “It suggests that it’s what we’re wired to do. “And to some extent, it is. We have a biological response to stress that’s extremely effective.” George found there were factors that helped people naturally evolve through grief. People with a better network of supportive friends and family, potential for financial resources, education and physical health, as well as fewer other stressors, tended to bounce back more easily, although virtually no one got off without significant pain. An additional factor is resiliency, which George believes may be influenced, at least partially, by genetics. He has written cautiously that he believes as well that people can nurture resilience. “That may be a little naïve and a little dangerous, because we don’t really know a lot about that yet,” he says. Until we learn more, there are some things people can do to feed resiliency, George says. For one thing, we can work to lessen stress. We can keep social relationships active. And, “laughter is a very good thing, because laughter and amusement are kind of incompatible with being upset.” It may be artificial to watch funny movies—but doing so reminds you to have joyful experiences with other people. Being optimistic and flexible are useful, too, he says. Not Recovery, but Renewal Becky assembled five women who had lost their husbands at a relatively early age. “We were all still going through a lot of changes, and we were going through them together,” Becky says. “We understand each other in a deep and profound way. It’s a friendship that’s really deep and lasting because of that.” By the time Becky began the group, she had remarried—but it’s a mistake to think she didn’t need support at that time. “A lot of people think that if you’ve lost a spouse, when you remarry, that’s it. Problem solved. And it’s not true. That experience will always be a big part of me,” she says. Specialists in grief counseling agree that people never “recover” from grief. Recovery means returning to life as it was before, and we can never get back a loved one who has died. Instead, we learn how to build a new life, says Bill Hoy, Ph.D., a faculty member in medical humanities at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “I call it renewal. We learn how to build a new life in this radically changed world in which I live now as a bereaved person.” What’s more, the grief process ought to be a lifelong process of becoming a new person, he says. “I think we are constantly being renewed by the deaths of the people we say goodbye to,” Bill says. Twenty-one years ago, Bill’s father died, and he continues to think about his dad as each significant event in Bill’s life arrives. “That doesn’t mean I haven’t moved on or moved past his death, and it certainly doesn’t mean that my life is organized around his death,” he says. What does renewal after a death look like, and when does it occur? There is no one-size-fits-all timetable, counselors say. But, eventually, there comes a time when most people say they are OK, that they are getting through the grief. Bill says they might tell him, “ ‘Probably Christmas is going to be hell on wheels again, even the third year—or maybe even the fifth year, but I’m able to get through it.’ And it’s not just slogging through it and it’s not ‘I’m a damaged person forever.’ Instead, ‘I’m actually a better person in one way or another.’ ” Forming a ‘New Dave’ Similarly, Dave Kurns talks about the “new Dave” who is forming. His wife, Sharon, died on Dec. 23, 2012—“a difficult Christmas for the kids and me, and probably always will be.” “Hopefully, many of the good things that I was and many of the good things that I’ve become will emerge in a new Dave,” he says. A therapist he has spoken with called it re-forming—“You shatter, and you re-form into a new person.” “I don’t think I’ll ever recover,” Dave says. “I don’t know that I’ll ever become whole. But I do think that I will re-form into something new that I hope is different—and maybe even better than before—as a person.” Sharon was a director of a regional education agency in Des Moines that serves central Iowa schools. She was also an avid reader, and her book club presented Dave with a memorial fund to use to advance the love of reading. The idea to set up a virtual book club, “A Year of Reading Sharon,” originated with teacher Sarah Brown Wessling and her book club. After interviewing Dave and his children, then examining the books Sharon had recommended for her book club, Sarah suggested a year’s worth of reading: 13 books that spoke to Sharon, ending with the last book she was reading, Isaac’s Storm. The book club includes a Facebook page liked by more than 450 people, a Twitter feed and a discussion group on GoodReads.com. People are encouraged to read the book that month and then give it away, to promote the love of reading. Participants post photos showing the book being left for others all over the world.  It’s a way to celebrate Sharon’s love of reading and her sharing spirit, but it’s more than that. “Even though we’re sad, we can still feel some of the joy that she brought to us,” Dave says. No Right Way to Reconcile With Grief “A Year of Reading Sharon” has helped Dave mourn, which is an absolutely necessary step, says Alan Wolfelt, Ph.D., who directs the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colo.  “There’s no one and only way to mourn,” Alan says. In talks throughout the world, he champions “companioning,” or traveling with someone through the darkness of the journey toward reconciliation, or a realization of the reality of death. Alan cautions against shaming a person for not getting grief right—when there is no right way to grieve. Where, years ago, we experienced death often and shared our grief more, now we are uncomfortable and unfamiliar with it—people can get into their 40s before death touches them closely, and then they tend to be impatient with the grieving process. The next logical, but incorrect, step is to attempt to manage grief instead of surrender to it. “In the last 40 to 50 years, we’ve shifted from surrendering to the mystery of grief to now wanting to manage the science of grief,” Alan says. “Knowledge can be an obstacle to the path to wisdom.” Spiritual or philosophical beliefs can be obstacles, too, and sometimes religious communities buy into the same assumptions that society as a whole makes. And religious organizations that believe that if you have enough faith, “this won’t hurt very much,” or that God punishes people who do bad things, also undermine a grieving person, Bill says. If a faith community offers the necessary social support, it can help tremendously. But often, death causes people to question their faith. “It’s very hard to square a good God with a dead child,” says Bill, who spent the first 10 years of his career as a congregational pastor. So people had better have a theology that is big enough to encompass that, he says—“And I do, but that’s a 53-year-old theology now, and so I can make sense of that for myself that bad things happen in the world in which we live, even though there is a good God.” Alan’s center is nondenominational; he sees people who are helped by their faith and people who feel there is no God. But when faith teaches that if you are strong enough, you can bypass the need to mourn, people can feel ashamed. And that shame can cause you to become stuck in your grief, Alan points out. On the other hand, Becky’s group found happiness by choosing a way to grieve together. As members shared new experiences, they bonded. And in 2013, Becky published Saturday Night Widows, sharing the group’s experiences and how, together, they came back from tragedy. “When we get together, we have a blast,” Becky says. “We do things that are fun. We laugh ourselves silly all the time.” That’s not to say that the group members don’t endure pangs of grief, waves of overriding feelings of loss that Alan calls “grief bursts.” Becky says, “I absolutely agree with people who say you need time to recover….Everyone is different, everybody needs a different amount of time, but I agree that there's a low period that people go through—and nobody gets to skip that part. “I'm just saying that everybody does have the ability to work their way through this over time, and to find joy again.” The women are, Becky says, moving on—and focusing on the future. Their movement happened not in spite of the grief they felt, but because of it, Alan says. “There are times in life we need to be sad,” he says. “The more we befriend it, the more we ultimately can be happy.”

Gayle Kirschenbaum pulled up to her Cedarhurst, New York, home after dark. She and some friends had been hanging out together, and they returned a little later than Gayle’s mother, Mildred, had expected. Mildred was waiting on the lawn for her, with the family dog by her side and a glass of water in her hand. Gayle stepped nervously out of the car—she knew her mom would be mad—and with the headlights shining on both of them, Mildred threw the water in her daughter’s face. She handed her the dog’s leash and told her to walk him. “I don’t care if you get raped, if you weren’t already,” she hissed. When Gayle returned with the dog, Mildred marched her up to her bedroom, where she ripped everything out of Gayle’s closet and commanded her to put it all back, flipping it all to the floor again as soon as Gayle had finished. Being late was just one of the many things that could set Mildred off. In one of Gayle’s earliest memories, from age 3 or 4, she recalls getting ready to go outside and having difficulty putting on her sneakers. Her mother, frustrated and angry, screamed, “Tie your own shoes! Don’t come out until you can tie them yourself!” Hours later, Gayle finally emerged from her room with tear-stained cheeks, having taught herself to tie her laces. A constant irritation for Mildred was Gayle’s appearance. Mildred was obsessed with Gayle’s nose: It was too big, too crooked. She laughingly compared Gayle’s profile to that of the Native American man on the Buffalo nickel and begged her to get a nose job. Her figure was under constant scrutiny, too. Mildred forced Gayle to wear a bikini, knowing that her daughter was self-conscious about her body, and made her stuff the top to hide her flat chest. “I was always afraid of being found out,” says Gayle, now in her 50s. And she was, when during a swimming lesson, the foam-rubber falsies popped out and floated to the middle of the pool. Gayle lived in fear of her mother, and the fear took a physical toll. “I was always sick. I had headaches and dizziness and threw up all the time. I remember once in the seventh grade telling a friend that I had a headache, and she asked, ‘What is that?’ I couldn’t believe that some kids grew up without that kind of physical dread.” Why Do It? We live in a time when individuals often are encouraged to protect themselves. To examine their childhoods and relationships and then distance themselves from toxic people and experiences. Many would congratulate Gayle if she severed ties with the mother who, in her words, “looked at me with rage all the time.” She’s better off without a parent like that, right? Maybe not, says mounting evidence from the field of positive psychology. Multiple studies have found that forgiveness might be able to bestow more personal peace and healing than walking away. Forgiveness therapy has been shown to “improve depression, anxiety, destructive anger, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, well-being and self-esteem,” while also helping people find meaning and purpose, says Gayle L. Reed, Ph.D., a longtime forgiveness researcher who helped develop the Forgiveness Research Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the auspices of Robert D. Enright, Ph.D., co-founder of the school’s International Forgiveness Institute. “Few people fully realize the huge impact that the ability to forgive can have on their happiness,” writes Christine Carter, Ph.D., a senior fellow at University of California Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, in her book, The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work. “Forgiving people tend to be happier, healthier, and more empathetic.” And Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., author of The How of Happiness, writes that forgiveness “may be the one factor that can disrupt the cycle of avoidance and vengeance in which we find ourselves. …Forgiving allows a person to move on.” Frederic Luskin, Ph.D., a decades-long researcher on the topic and director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project at Stanford University, calls forgiveness “a creation of peace in the present.” His team’s research has shown the ability of forgiveness to lower blood pressure, increase optimism and repair fractured, traumatized communities in civil-war-ravaged Sierra Leone. One of their most dramatic studies showed that forgiveness could even help heal the deep hurt of a centuries-old conflict in Northern Ireland. Protestant and Catholic mothers who had lost sons to sectarian violence there were asked to rate their level of grief before and after a week of forgiveness training. Before the forgiveness therapy, the average “hurt” rating was 8.6 on a scale of 1 to 10. After just one week, the mothers’ average rating dropped to 3.6 and then stabilized at an even lower 3.4 six months later. On a standard evaluation for depression given to them before the training, the women checked an average of 17 out of 30 symptoms (such as difficulty sleeping and an unhappy mood). After the forgiveness training, though, they checked only 7 out of 30 of those depression indicators. Of course, walking away is often the wisest, safest option if you’re in an abusive relationship. And forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. You can forgive someone in your heart, but still choose to keep your distance. That point was made to the 20 women who suffered spousal emotional abuse in a 2006 study by Gayle R. and Robert. “Forgiveness is distinct from condoning, excusing, pardoning, forgetting and reconciling. Forgiveness is a decision to give up resentment and to respond with goodwill toward the wrongdoer,” wrote the two researchers. While half of the study participants received standard psychotherapy treatment, the other 10 women underwent forgiveness therapy. After several months, the women who learned to forgive experienced significantly greater improvements in depression, anger and self-esteem than those who had the typical treatment. And having a forgiving frame of mind can help smooth all your relationships. Forgiveness acts as a kind of social lubricant, helping us feel more connected to others, according to one study from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In one of their experiments, the researchers found that study participants who were asked to recall a largely forgiven offense from their past were much more likely to volunteer for and donate money to a charity compared with participants who were instructed to think about an offense that they had not forgiven. What other type of therapy can boast such powerful outcomes? An Act of Love Gayle K., a TV producer and filmmaker, did not know about these outcomes or even that forgiveness could be considered a “therapy” when she first turned her camera on herself and her own family. Though she’d been in counseling for much of her adult life for post-traumatic stress disorder, she still found it difficult to form relationships (she’s never been married) and see herself as lovable. By chance, Gayle met another woman a few years ago who had also suffered a traumatic childhood. The woman walked Gayle through an emotional exercise that had helped her: Stand up, close your eyes, and imagine your mother as a little girl. “I saw this child with pain, and I felt it. I know she wasn’t abused, but she still had a different kind of pain,” Gayle says. “And then I imagined myself as a little girl, too, next to her. We were just two little kids who were wounded. She was no longer my mother. It really reframed how I saw her.” Soon after, she asked her mother to go to therapy with her and to allow her to film it for a documentary that would eventually be called Look At Us Now, Mother! The film follows the pair as they chat with therapists, go on vacation together and try to make sense of their turbulent relationship and past. (“My mother’s a narcissist, so she didn’t mind the spotlight one bit,” jokes Gayle). “Our journey was about forgiveness,” she says, but it was not easy. While making her film, Gayle had to relive the past, reading her childhood diaries and watching hours of home movies shot by her dad, which reminded her of forgotten incidents, like the time Mildred instructed Gayle’s brothers to put her on top of the refrigerator, from where she couldn’t jump down and bother them. Gayle also had to deal with her mom’s skepticism and denial. In one scene, as they are heading to the psychologist’s office, Mildred quips, “We’re going to find out what’s wrong with Gayle’s relationship with me. Are we looking for trouble where trouble is not? I would venture to say ‘yes.’” In another, Mildred confesses to the therapist, “One of the reasons that I might not have been nice to her as a child was that she was a bitchy little girl growing up.” Yet the two persisted. Gayle learned that her mother grew up in poverty and that Mildred’s father, in deep debt, committed suicide—a tragedy that was never discussed in their family. She learned how her mother’s Jewish upbringing in a time and place where Jews were not always welcomed caused her to have deeply held beliefs about appearance. If her daughter didn’t “look Jewish,” with a stereotypically big nose, Mildred’s thinking went, Gayle would be able to make it further in life. For Mildred’s part, she was finally able to see how much pain she had caused her daughter. She also saw how desperately Gayle still longed to have a relationship with her. The feeling was mutual. Their gradual acceptance of each other was so hard won and so fueled by love that even their therapist cried during one breakthrough session. The Phases of Forgiveness Without doing so consciously, Gayle created and underwent her own form of forgiveness therapy and, through her documentary, encourages others to do the same. “Forgiveness is the best gift I’ve ever given myself,” she says. But what exactly is forgiveness therapy? “Forgiveness means overcoming the impact of unjust behaviors by choosing to be a virtuous, loving person,” Gayle R. says. For the research that she and Robert have conducted, they used the four-phase process outlined in Robert’s book, Forgiveness Is a Choice. The first step is called “uncovering” because you uncover your anger and evaluate the damage that the injustice has wreaked on your life. If your spouse has ridiculed your weight, for example, be honest about how that has made you feel (unlovable? weak? mad? vengeful?) and how it has negatively affected your life (have you gained more weight as a result? Did the unkind comments breed an insecurity that has impacted your work performance?). The second phase, “decision,” is simply that: You choose to commit to the hard work of forgiving your transgressor. You also admit that what you’ve been doing in the past to help heal the wound hasn’t worked. If, say, your sister insinuated that your kids misbehaved last Christmas, and you’ve been pointing out her own kids’ naughtiness ever since, this is your time to change tactics. Robert says the decision to forgive is the toughest part of the process. “Change is unsettling, and the decision to try to reduce anger and to love more in the face of betrayal or cruelty can be scary,” he says. The third step is called “work” because that’s what it is—work toward understanding and empathizing with the person who hurt you. Robert suggests asking yourself several questions about the person you want to forgive: What was life like for this person while growing up? What psychological wounds do you think she or he might be nursing? What extra pressures or stresses was the person experiencing at the time she or he offended you? Try to find any sparks of compassion you might have for him or her and fan them. This third phase also includes accepting the pain of what happened to you, instead of trying to fling that ache and anguish back to the person who hurt you or toward others in your life. Finally, in the “discovery” phase, look for the meaning in the experience. What have you learned through your suffering? Has—or can—your ordeal in some way give purpose to your life? If your parents had a hard time accepting your spouse because of a racial difference, say, then perhaps you could join or spearhead a diversity or civil rights cause. Or maybe you simply commit to viewing all of humanity with a more open mind and heart, the way you wish your parents would do. In his book, Forgive for Good, Frederic details nine steps to forgiveness, which include taking the grievance less personally, using stress-management techniques (deep breathing, meditation, focusing on something good) to ease anger, and focusing on your luck rather than your misfortune. But whether you follow four steps or nine, the gist is the same: “Forgiveness is not just wishful thinking, it’s a trainable skill,” Frederic says. (For all nine of Frederic’s steps, see “9 Steps to Forgive for Good” at livehappy.com). In one fascinating study out of Erasmus University in the Netherlands which was published last year in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science, researchers demonstrated the actual—not just metaphorical—unburdening effect of forgiveness. One-third of the 160 college students recruited for the study were asked to write about a time when they were seriously offended by another person and ultimately forgave them. Another third wrote about a similar incident in which they had not yet forgiven the person. The final (control) group composed a short essay about a recent, neutral interaction they had had with a friend or co-worker. All of the participants were then asked to jump five times, as part of an ostensible fitness test. What happened? The students in the forgiveness and control groups jumped significantly higher than those in the so-called “unforgiveness” set. The researchers proved empirically what philosophers have been saying for centuries: “Unforgiveness produces a burden akin to carrying a load,” the study authors write. That lightening effect is undeniable when you see Gayle K. and mom Mildred these days. On the road together, promoting their film and message, they are all ease and laughter. You can see they truly enjoy each other’s company and feel all the more lucky for it having been through what they have. “How many wonderful relationships are wasted because people can’t forgive?” Gayle asks. “It’s my life’s mission now.”