The Sun Still Rises: Surviving and Thriving After Grief and Loss: Using The Power of Your Mind to Help You Heal During Grief

In my opinion this is the most important tool you have to take care of yourself and your grief. Yes, your old noggin. Many people that I talk to as a professional speaker believe that they do not have control over their thinking. The reality is you do have control over your thoughts and your thought processes, and this can really be extremely helpful for you during grief. Don't surrender control and don't think that you don't have control over your thoughts. You are strong and you do have the ability to control what you are thinking. You can’t control what has happened, (the loss) but you can control how you think about all of it. So here are a few tips for helping to control your thinking as you go through the grief process:

Controlling your thoughts- Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that you can't have certain thoughts about the loss of your loved one. I think that is healthy. However, if you constantly sit around thinking about how terrible your loss is, I don't think that is healthy. I know I may face massive criticism by some mental health professionals for saying that, but there you have it—that is my strong opinion. After I lost my wife I had a huge loss and obviously was in a great deal of pain due to her death. I would sit around the house thinking to myself, “how can another human being just disappear so suddenly from the planet? Just be gone?” It was if she had “transported” like they used to do on Star Trek. It was obviously a devastating loss. At a certain point though, I realized that sitting around thinking about my devastating loss was not going to change anything. But what I could change was my thinking. That was a big light bulb for me.

So my suggestion regarding your thinking is that you decide what you want to think about. So instead of focusing on my loss, I would focus on the fact that I had Cindy for 32 years. I can be grateful for the fun times that we had together. I could be grateful for having a long and happy marriage for 32 years. I could be grateful for the daughter that was result of our marriage and still brings me great joy today.

When you have a negative thought I want you to try to replace it with a positive counterbalancing thought. Let's say you’re grieving the loss of a child. You could say “I'm so devastated that I lost my child” (which is true), but you can also say how blessed you were to have had the child to begin with and how much sheer joy they brought you when they were alive. I want you to focus on having positive thoughts to counterbalance the negative. I find that it is very helpful in reducing your level of stress.

Avoid negative content- When I was in the early days of the grieving process I made a deliberate attempt to purposefully avoid any negative content. Let's face it—if your real life has enough negative content, (and boy does it right now) why would you want to expose yourself to more? I avoided all of the news channels, (I didn't need to see any stories about death and dying, bombings and blood) all reality shows, (the majority of them are intensely negative) any negative books, sad music, and any movies that were negative or had scenes about death and dying. I have always believed in and taught the idea of garbage in equals garbage out, and I think it is even truer when you are in a grieving phase of your life. My daughter was very helpful regarding movies—I would call her and ask if she had seen a certain movie or read about it. And often she would say “hey Dad, don't go see that movie—in that movie the main character loses his wife.” She was my movie content consultant. So make a conscious effort to avoid all negative content. I think this a good idea all the time in life, (if you want to get and stay motivated) but critically important for your self-care in the early days of grieving.

Consume positive content- This is the opposite of the paragraph above. Find content that inspires and motivates or makes you laugh. The idea behind this is to find content that may help strengthen you or make you feel better or make you happy, at least during the time you're being exposed it. Yes, I know you may say to yourself “I really don't feel like watching something funny, or watching a movie or reading a book that is inspirational.” I'm going to ask you to try it—I'm not saying it’s a cure, but I am saying that it may help you at least for the short amount of time you're watching, listening, or reading. So find inspirational music, books, and movies that will help you feel better.

Control your associations with people- I have often said that “the quality of your life is in direct relation to the quality of the people you associate with”. You are in pain and you have had a loss. The last thing you want to do is to associate with people who have negative attitudes, who are mean, or will not support or strengthen you. I want you to carefully evaluate everyone who is in your life personally and professionally. Decide whether each person in your life is a positive influence and which ones are negative influences. I strongly recommend that you not associate with any of the negative people. Get rid of them. You are already grieving and they will drag you down with them into the abyss on the dark side because that's what they do. You don’t need them!

So please be exceedingly careful in who you associate with during this time. This is a form of protection. You want to be with people who make you feel better not worse, will lift you up not drag you down, and will encourage you not discourage you. There are people who often object to this concept because they feel they have to associate with negative people who are friends or family. Wrong! You don’t have to do anything! Right now you're going through a very tough time in your life; you are grieving a loss. You have the right to take care of yourself by eliminating negative people in your life. You are the architect of your own life, and you decide who you want to be in your life and out of your life. Don't let other people decide for you (who your friends will be and which family members you spend time with.) That decision is entirely up to you. This is the one time in your life when it is perfectly OK to be completely, totally selfish and do things for your own reasons and not for someone else's. I promise it will help you heal.

Continue learning and studying- I have always been an avid reader of books—particularly books relating to self-improvement and motivation. I also enjoy fiction, books about history, invention, and creativity. I could spend a small fortune just in a few hours at a book store. I also love learning online and love watching documentaries about a whole range of topics. I would encourage you during this time also to continue learning and studying about any topic that you're interested in. With the library, the Internet, bookstores, book readers, and Amazon there is no limit to how much information is available to you quickly and often at no or little cost. So put together a plan of study and determine what it is you want to learn and what it is you want to study.

You may want to try attending a noncredit class on a topic you have a passion for at a local university. I found learning and studying to be tremendously stimulating and helpful to me healing during my most difficult period of grieving. I often try to figure out why it was so helpful. If I had to venture a guess I would say because it felt like I was moving forward and I was learning something new. Obviously, it also helped take my mind off of my day-to-day grief and allowed me to focus on something else.

Make up your mind- Did you ever notice how when you make up a bed in the morning that it just looks so much more appealing when you go to bed at the end of the night? I think you could also do the same thing with your mind. You can decide in your mind that you're going to grow and to move forward and not to wallow in your grief. Now I will admit that many people say to me “how is it that you can just decide on how you're going to think?” I believe it's all just a question of attitude. You can literally make up your mind to do anything you want.

You can either make up your mind to be down, depressed, and sad, or you can make up your mind to be working towards being happy. You'll notice I didn't say that you will be happy right away; I said you're working towards being happy. It is a future goal. During my most intense period of grieving I always thought and knew that eventually I would one day again be happy. You see, grief is something that happens to us as a result of loss. We obviously can't control that the loss happens, but we can control how we respond to the loss every day. So I want you to make up your mind to work at being happy not at being sad. You really can decide what you want your attitude to be.

Comparison- Please be careful about comparing yourself to others while you are grieving. In my early days of grief I used to watch couples at the airport and I would say to myself “why does he get to have a wife when my wife died? That is so unfair.” It was true—it was unfair. If we look carefully at the facts no one on the earth can tell me why his wife is alive and mine died. No one has that answer. It is a great mystery of life. So if it is a great mystery that has no answer—why compare? Why beat your head against the wall? Why ask “why does one family lose two children and another family has five healthy kids?” I don’t know and neither do you. So my point is that comparison is a very destructive and jealous, negative thought process. It will just tear you apart. So I simply stopped comparing myself to others. It has no value to you and just makes you feel worse not better.