A Book by Donald E. Watson, M.D.

CLOSE THIS WINDOW

This article is reprinted from Challenges.

A BOOK BY DONALD E. WATSON, M.D.
BY ROBERT WALDRON

Focusing on a wide range of personal crises--losses of a loved one, jobs or careers, money, health, youth, social status, relationships, opportunities, hopes and dreams-- Dr. Watson (a board certified psychiatrist from Santa Ana, CA) takes issue with conventional “stages of grieving” theories, contending that such an approach may actually impede healing by promoting excess intellectualization.

From the Introduction
Crises are tumultuous times in our lives. Most of these critical times are triggered by major losses: death of a loved one, loss of a job, onset of an illness, natural catastrophe, collapse of a relationship, etc. Regardless of the nature of the triggering event once they have started, crises take on their own character. Crises dictate changes in our lives,. Crises also change us. If we have coped, we change for the better; if not, for the worse.

Crises are like great earthquakes. They shake our stable foundations, undermining our sense of security; they obliterate our accustomed guideposts, invalidating our familiar perceptions; and they create new vistas, inviting us to seek the treasures of our new world. These upheavals twist the smooth landscape of our life-courses into rugged peaks and valleys, ushering chaos--and sometimes despair--into our formerly routine lives. And they confront us with new challenges, rendering useless our customary habits.

We welcome some crises. A new romance, a new child, or a new home are agreeable crises, and we greet them with smiles on our faces, enthusiasm in our voices, and hopeful optimism in our hearts. Such crises offer an obvious abundance of opportunities to enrich our lives.

Often, however, crises are unwanted, unplanned, and unforeseen: a broken romance, a child’s illness, a home destroyed by fire. Like agreeable crises, these also offer new opportunities, though they are rarely obvious at first. In the immediate aftermath of unwanted crises, it is difficult to imagine their potential benefits. Yet, in destroying our familiar landscapes, these upheavals expose new territories--new opportunities to enrich and renew our lives. These new treasures often lie in distant peaks, and to secure them, we must first traverse the lowlands. Then, we can reach the summits beyond the valleys.

In short, by coping well with a crisis, we are positioned to exploit these opportunities. But if we meet disagreeable crises with frowns, passivity, and hopeless pessimism, we immobilize ourselves, creating a disability that wastes our prospects for enhancing our lives.

Whether we thrive or stagnate depends largely on our attitudes toward calamities, and these attitudes are shaped by two types of lessons: those from our personal experiences and those from our society. Our personal experiences include our own past crises, and our social lessons include histories, myths, folklore, and superstitions concerning misfortune. Some of the attitudes created by these lessons strengthen us, but others undermine our ability to adapt to change.

This book shows how to develop healthy attitudes toward crises. It teaches how to master the skills of life-navigation in unpredictable and treacherous conditions, focusing primarily on the most frequent and most consequential turbulence we encounter: major losses.

Major losses are injuries to our souls. They disrupt our moods, our health, our habits, our relationships, and our dreams for the future. The damage caused by our losses can be so extensive that we often feel we can’t survive. In fact, not only can we survive them, but we can thrive after our losses--provided we use the opportunities to establish new destinations and to change our courses to reach them. To help us thrive, nature provides us with a gift for healing, a process termed grieving.

Unfortunately, grieving carries a false reputation in our society. Rather than being seen as a gift of nature, it is deemed a curse. Rather than being recognized as a healing force, it is shunned as a sickness.

In fact, the skills of healing allow us, not merely to accept our losses, but to adapt to all challenging events and to proceed in our lives much stronger than we were before. Despite this, our society sabotages our ability to heal by teaching us to waste healing opportunities. If we follow these lessons, we risk compounding our original losses by losing even more of our greatest treasures: our hope, our health, and our dreams for the future.

Our social lessons burden us with five false beliefs concerning grieving: that grieving means constant suffering; that sadness is the main emotion of grieving; that grieving is reserved for the deaths of loved ones; that we grieve only for harmful losses; and that grieving proceeds in stages or phases. Learning how to heal after a loss begins with correcting these misconceptions.

First, grieving is not constant suffering. Quite the contrary: Not grieving is what causes constant suffering--depression, anxiety, physical illness, passive fear of success, withdrawal from healthy relationships, and self-destructive habits such as abusing alcohol and others drugs. Though it is true that healing is associated with pain, this pain is temporary. To prevent endless pain, we just accept the temporary pain, and allow the healing process to proceed.

Second, anger, not sadness, is the primary emotion of grieving. It is also an indispensable resource for healing. Yet, our society teaches us to waste this rich resource by hiding or denying it. The problem is, trying to bury our anger often produces guilt, another serious impediment to healing.That’s why learning to use our anger well is essential to our healing.

Third, grieving is not reserved for mourning the death of a loved one. Indeed, grieving allows us to heal after any loss, and we suffer losses every day. Each day, at a minimum, we lose a day of life, with its energy, optimism, and opportunities. Also, on any given day, we can lose a job, a marriage, a relationship, a treasured object, or a dream for the future. Or we might lose our health, faith, money, freedom, social status, or self-esteem. By healing from each of these losses, we regain our bearings, renew our commitment to life, and restore our wholeness.

Fourth, we must grieve, not only after unwanted losses, but after beneficial losses as well: unrewarding jobs, harmful habits, or oppressive relationships . If we know that we can heal after our losses, we can gladly give up such harmful things, and reach for our new treasures. On the other hand, if we are afraid to grieve after such losses, we will cling to things that harm us, and forego realizing our new opportunities.

Fifth, we don’t experience “stages” of grieving. Instead, we experience symptoms: anger, guilt, sadness, preoccupation with the loss. Stages are abstract theoretical ideas, and focusing on them can delay or prevent healing Moreover, the symptoms associated with healing don’t occur in a regular order. Instead, they can be triggered by memories, additional losses, or other events. It would be wonderful if we could automatically march step-by-step through well-defined stages of grieving to reach our new destinations. But we can’t.

Rather than trusting mythical stages of grieving, or hoping that time will magically heal all wounds, we must perform work to heal. This work requires using accurate knowledge and well-honed mental skills that are sharp and designed to fit the job at hand. Unfortunately, we often resort to using tools that are rendered dull, warped, or obsolete by denial, depression, alcohol abuse or harmful mental habits.

Even with otherwise sharp tools, we often try to apply inappropriate mental habits, and these, too, interfere with our healing. That’s because we usually develop our mental skills to meet the challenges of living routinely, not to manage life crises. As a result, the mental skills that serve us well in our everyday lives are likely to fail us miserably during critical times. After all, roller-skating skills are useless for rock-climbing.

Each crisis in our lives challenges us to perform four tasks: to face reality, to reorganize our view of the world, to plan our next strategy, and to undertake the actions necessary to realize these plans. Successful people possess the skills to accomplish these tasks automatically. To succeed in life, others must deliberately make habits of these healing skills.

Healing skills are mental skills. That’s why learning how to heal means practicing new ways of thinking about problems. This is often made difficult, however, for new ways of thinking often collide with old ways of thinking. That is, our existing mental skills include habits and beliefs that interfere with grieving. For this reasons, we must unlearn old ideas, which often include cherished--but harmful--habits, beliefs, and superstitions.

For many people, letting go of obsolete ways of thinking is the most difficult aspect of crises. Yet knowing how to let go of excess mental baggage is one of the necessary skills for successful living. That’s one reasons that learning the skills of healing is itself a healing process.

This book teaches you how to release your grip on your harmful attitudes about healing...