What Abi Taught Us (12 page)

In stark contrast to Kübler-Ross's model, Stroebe and Schut do not believe in phases of bereavement. ‘We do not propose a sequence of stages, but rather a waxing and waning, an ongoing flexibility, over time. Early in bereavement, loss orientation dominates, later on attention turns more and more to other sources of upheaval and distress. At times the bereaved will be confronted by their loss, at other times they will avoid memories, be distracted, or seek relief by concentration on other things.'
²
This dual process seems to resonate with the bereaved I've interviewed. Claire Rushton, who lost her 16-year-old daughter Courtenay to meningitis in 2014, describes this process as ‘dipping my toe into the water', the water representing life outside of her grief. ‘By slicing up each experience, a social
engagement, or simply a trip to the shops or supermarket which were and still can be completely overwhelming, the hurdles are smaller and my emotions aren't swamped. It's like testing the waters to see what I can handle. Some days I can get my whole foot in, other days it's just too much,' she explains, describing the process of approach and withdrawal at different times of her grief.
³
Stroebe and Schut stress that oscillation is necessary for optimal mental and physical health adjustment. ‘The person may choose to take “time off ”, be distracted, or need to attend to new things, or at times it may be too painful to confront some aspect, leading to voluntary suppression.'
⁴

Camille Wortman, another academic focused on grief and bereavement, explains that finding engaging activities to distract us from thoughts is an effective strategy used for combatting depression. ‘It is certainly clear from the research evidence, as well as from my personal experience, that distraction can be an important element in the mourning process. Yet almost nobody talks about it,' she wrote to me.
⁵

‘Being involved in an engaging activity can break the grip of negative thoughts, at least temporarily. Examples of engaging activities include going shopping, attending a sporting event with a friend, taking your dog for a walk, or going to the library. Involvement in an engaging activity will increase positive affect (that is positive emotion) more than involvement in an activity that is less engaging. However, experts concur that involvement
in just about any activity is better than not being involved. Because bereavement is often accompanied by a profound loss of interest in life, it may be difficult for mourners to become engaged in particular tasks. A strategy for breaking through mourners' resistance is to encourage them to spend five minutes on a potentially engaging task, and telling them that they can stop after that. In most cases, mourners continue with the task once they are drawn into it.'
⁶

Claire Rushton has found this is a strategy that works for her. ‘There are days that I just can't move and I don't want to, I just want to sit and be sad and for the world to stop.' But she's found her own way of drawing herself back. ‘It may sound odd but I tell myself . . . okay, you've cried now, now you need to get up and do something. I call it the “cleaning out the teaspoon drawer moment”. I have come to realise that by giving myself permission to be sad and grieve, but also giving myself a reason to take me out of that grief, even if that's all I'm doing—cleaning the crumbs from the teaspoon drawer—I've moved, and the movement switches my emotions from despondency to a purpose again.' Rushton's teaspoon drawer is a good metaphor for the small activities we use as a bridge to help us return to the world of the living.

I sometimes use a similar strategy to approach work. When I'm feeling tired and overwhelmed I find a really easy, mundane task to get started on, knowing that the rest will follow once I've overcome the initial inertia. Work in itself has provided me with the perfect distraction. Before I learned about oscillation from Stroebe and Schut, I had worried that perhaps I was using work as a form of denial. But now I recognise its value as respite: I wasn't hiding from grief, just recovering. Believe me, there was
plenty of grieving going on before, after and sometimes even during work hours.

In direct contrast to old-school bereavement theories, these researchers are adamant that this form of denial is in fact a beneficial strategy for the bereaved to adopt—as long as denial is not extreme and/or persistent. ‘Confrontation with the reality of loss is the essence of adaptive grieving. It needs to be done, the cognitive business needs to be undertaken, but not relentlessly, and not at the expense of attending to other tasks that are concomitant with loss. It needs “dosage”.'
⁷
Dosage refers to the different levels of grief individual people can bear before requiring a rest from their grieving—using Claire Rushton's terminology, how far we can dip our toe into the water before we need to withdraw. We can't grieve all the time, but we also can't avoid it entirely—there are aspects of the death we are forced to face eventually. Neither confrontation nor avoidance is sustainable, and both the processes of actively grieving and respite from grieving are vital for recovery.

Across the months I've been aware of oscillating not only between positive emotions and negative emotions, and approach and withdrawal, but also backwards and forwards in terms of functioning progress. One week I feel I am coping really well, feeling bright and cheerful and full of purpose, and then, without much warning, I'm weeping and desolate. Yesterday, for example, I cried about eight times, though the week before I'd been feeling really good. Having grieved over my mother, I'm at least aware that this is very common in bereavement. The gaps between bad patches seem to get longer and longer—at first there's only a good day, then I'll have a good few days, a week, or even a few weeks—and then, suddenly, I start to feel blue,
a bit lacklustre, and the world turns flat again. Forward and back, forward and back the gradual progress goes.

Conjuring a mental picture of how we oscillate (approaching and withdrawing, approaching and withdrawing, up and down, back and forth) has helped me through the days and weeks. Sometimes there's just no avoiding all those emotions, and I find the strength to lean into them, experience the lot and, in doing so, seem to get out the other side. At others I know I need to withdraw and avoid confronting my grief, even if momentarily.

Distracting activities give us the opportunity to recover, to build up our strengths, so we can do it all again. Similarly there are times when we need to retreat: to lick our wounds, put our heads on the table, and lie down exhausted. Approach, retreat, approach, retreat. And so it goes.

Here's a list of the things I use to snap me out of my grief when it's too debilitating and I know I need a break:

• Music—Spotify is my saviour, offering something for every mood. Don't underestimate the power of music either to shift your mood when you get down or, at other times, just to reflect your feelings.

• Listen to podcasts—‘Desert Island Discs' is my favourite because it takes people of wildly different backgrounds through their life stories and reminds me that most people experience massively unpredictable twists and turns and yet still get somewhere in the end.
⁸

• Phone a friend—someone I know will make me laugh (usually my sister).

• Walk the dog—mad Jack, the Jack Russell terrier, always makes for a good diversion as he chases the shadows of seagulls or any passing motorbikes.

• Read—my Kindle is my number one source of distraction, particularly in the middle of the night when my mind is not a place I want to linger in.

• Netflix—spending time with my ‘
other
favourite men' (that's you, Ragnar Lothbrok, Tommy Shelby or even those idiots from
Top Gear
) works without fail.

• Going to the movies with Trevor (my real-life favourite man).

• Cooking/baking.

• Meeting friends for a drink.

Exercise in finding distractions

Distraction is important because grieving is an exhausting business. Do whatever occupies your thoughts and consumes your attention. Don't be hard on yourself: if that means watching entire TV series, or getting lost in movies, or listening to talking books, then do it.

On the next page, list five things you can do to help take your mind off your loss. Remember, they don't all have to be worthy. Claire Rushton's tidying the teaspoon drawer is a great example of a simple activity she finds achievable and sufficiently distracting to draw her out of her grief and back into the world.

Five ways to distract your thoughts

1. _____________

2. _____________

3. _____________

4. _____________

5. _____________

When you are lying on the couch, or stuck in bed, which one of these is simple and accessible enough to get you up?

Chapter 9

Three habits of resilient thinking

PSYCHOLOGISTS HAVE BEEN INVESTIGATING
the impact of our thinking processes on our resilience for more than three decades. Back in the classrooms at UPenn, Karen Reivich went to great lengths to explain that the way we think has a substantial impact on the way we feel and function. ‘Research conducted around the world shows conclusively that how we analyse the events that befall us has a profound effect on our resilience. How you respond to situations reflects something called thinking style. Thinking style is like a lens through which we view the world. Everyone has such a lens, and it colours the way we interpret the events of our life. Your thinking style determines your level of resilience—your ability to overcome, steer through, and bounce back when adversity strikes,' Reivich and Andrew Shatté explain in their book,
The Resilience Factor
.
¹

Realistic optimism

Recent psychological studies have demonstrated that optimism is a key protective mechanism against depressive symptoms in the face of trauma, regardless of individuals' culture of origin.
²

Back in March, nine months after the girls died, I wrote a piece on my blog (
www.1wildandpreciouslife.com
) about trusting the process.
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Looking at it now, I can detect the optimism I felt. Not a full-blown clarion cry of optimism—I was still far too bruised for that—but a certain faith that somehow we'd get through. ‘As I try to wrap my head around what has happened to our family, and step uncertainly towards our own unknown future, I find myself resurrecting the mantra of one of my university professors, who, when navigating new terrain, constantly reminded us to “Trust the Process”,' I wrote, going on to explain that ‘trusting the process doesn't imply inertia, rather embarking on small steps forward in the belief that they'll get you there in the end'.

At the time, I wouldn't have recognised this as optimistic thinking. But, reviewing old lecture notes in which Reivich taught that ‘being conscious that the present might be bad but to keep looking forward to the future' is the very essence of optimism practised by resilient people, I can see how my attitude fits this mould. She also told us that optimists focus on solutions when change is possible, and use acceptance and humour when it's not. They're also more accurate in their assessment of how much control they have, and less likely to deny and avoid problems.

I would not have described myself as optimistic through the first year after losing Abi but, in psychological terms, I can
now see that I was. I turned away from being identified as a ‘victim', baulking at the helpless connotations of that phrase; I knew what I could change and what I couldn't. I knew there was no bringing Abi back, but I hoped we could find a way to get through the loss and survive it with our marriage, family and sanity intact.

Reivich and Shatté explain how this kind of flexible thinking style relates to resilience. ‘The most resilient people are those who have cognitive flexibility and can identify all the significant causes of the adversities they face . . . They are realists in that they don't ignore the factors that are permanent or pervasive. Nor do they waste their valuable reserves of resilience ruminating about events or circumstances outside of their control. They channel their problem-solving resources into the factors they can control, and, through incremental change, they begin to overcome, steer through, bounce back and reach out.'
⁴

The key words for me here are flexible and realist. In the lecture theatre, Reivich drummed it into us, time and again, that ‘realistic optimism' is the key. On the basis that studies have demonstrated the pitfalls associated with runaway optimism (or as she would call it ‘Pollyanna optimism', whereby people always assume everything will turn out for the best), realistic optimism requires maintaining a positive outlook without denying reality, appreciating the positive aspects of any given
situation without overlooking the negatives. Resilience requires an accurate appraisal of the situation—extreme pessimism and extreme optimism only end in (more) tears.

To sum up, people who can think realistically and optimistically seem to work better with what they've got, differentiating more effectively between things they can change and things that are set, and working out a viable plan to deal with the elements that
are
in their control.

Redefining hope: What are you hoping for now?

The Chronicles of Narnia were my favourite books when I was a child. I remember how much I cried, at 13, when Aslan died. Decades later I went to see
Shadowlands
, the movie, with Trevor and my mum. In it, Anthony Hopkins, playing C.S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia books, describes his grief at his wife's diagnosis with cancer and her death. The three of us sat in the cinema and sobbed. Years later, I still remember the words: ‘the pain now is part of the happiness then'.