Letting Go of Disappointments and Painful Losses by Pam Vredevelt

Author:Pam Vredevelt [Vredevelt, Pam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-76947-3
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

RELEASE

THE

FEELINGS

PAINFUL EMOTIONS ARE BUILT INTO THE LETTING-GO process. No matter what we have to let go of, whether it’s sending our youngest off to kindergarten or saying a final good-bye to our spouse of more than fifty years, we will feel grief. We will feel some degree of sadness, ambivalence, emptiness, anger, or confusion. These feelings aren’t bad. They’re normal, and it’s necessary for us to feel them.

Time and again, psychiatric research has shown that an important part of letting go is feeling. Feeling leads to release. Denying, stuffing, or numbing our feelings with some sort of addictive behavior only prolongs and intensifies our grief. It blocks us from moving on in life.

I remember the ache in my empty arms after our first baby died halfway to term. With my postpartum hormones raging, the grief was more than I wanted to endure. At the counselingcenter one morning I said to a colleague, “I wish therewere a pill I could take that would make these feelings go away.”

He was very kind and, like a good friend, spoke the truth in love: “I can sure understand that, but then you would just have to work through your grief later.”

He was making a point that I understand more fully now. Letting go demands that we feel and ride out our painful emotions. When we are feeling our pain, we are progressing. We tend to get mixed up about this process. We think that if we feel pain deeply, we are losing it, cracking up, or getting ready for the funny farm. Nothing is further from the truth. When we are feeling, we are moving ahead through the grief process.

I have a few statements I like to teach my clients:

Fish swim, birds fly, people feel.

Feeling is healing.

We get stuck in our pain not because we don’t care, but because we don’t give ourselves permission to feel.

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