Manchester Psychotherapy

Counselling in Manchester

The 5 Stages Of Grief

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5 Stages of grief and grieving manchester psychotherapyGrief is a common issue facing clients but it’s not reserved just for those that have had someone close to them die. Why is grief such a common issue? This article aims to answer this question and explain the stages of grief. My next article will give some suggestions for dealing with grief.

We can lose someone close to us in all sorts of different ways. People don’t need to die on us for us to feel their absence. Often during the therapeutic process it’s important to grieve the loss of an ideal that we have held close and thought essential. It hurts when we finally realise that the relationship we had with our parents was not perfect, or that they did not look after us the way they should have done, the way any small child deserves to be looked after. It hurts when we realise that our partner letting us down has destroyed our idea of what an intimate relationship should be like. Giving ourselves permission to grieve these losses is an important step in realising our full potential in the here and now.

The stages of grief are well documented in relation to death. Kubler-Ross proposed that there are five stages of grief that people go through. In this post I will briefly discuss these stages. It’s important to appreciate that the stages outlined below are not fixed in stone and it may be that you experience them in a different order or not even experience certain stages at all. There is no normal with so much of the human psyche, we do what we do and that’s ok.

Stage 1 – Denial, shock and disbelief

When you first realise your loss you may completely deny that you have lost anything at all. You may be so amazed with the realisation that it’s hard for you to get your head round it. When you discuss your childhood with a therapist it’s not uncommon to discover that events that have taken place in your past were more important than you initially perceived them to be. This may be the way you were treated as a child, the absence of a significant caregiver as you grew up, the significance of abuse that you suffered as a child. Blocking these things out is a very clever strategy when you are little. You can’t do anything about them because as a kid you are powerless. But it may be useful to allow yourself to feel the feelings associated with these events or relationships when you are an adult. As an adult you are able to look after yourself and have all the faculties to guarantee your own survival.

Stage 2 – Anger

Once you have accepted that the event in question did happen, or the relationship really was a poor one you may experience anger. This may vary from mild consistent annoyance to outright rage. It’s OK to feel angry. Chances are you feel that you should not have been put in that situation or the other party should have treated you better or looked after you in a much more loving way. It can be really useful to express this anger to a sympathetic friend or your therapist. I also advise you to avoid confronting the individual concerned about the issue at this stage of the grieving process. Sometimes it’s best to strike whilst the Iron is cold and you have had time to work it through and process your feelings. If it’s a loved one you have lost you may feel angry that they have left you (or died) or you may feel angry at yourself for not preventing it.

Stage 3 – Bargaining

Bargaining is when we attempt to rationalise the situation and work out how it can be avoided. You may start to think that you have somehow misinterpreted the situation or you are overplaying it. When faced with death, Kubler-Ross mentions individuals thinking how they can delay or cheat the final event.

Stage 4 – Sadness

At this point sadness may hit. As I said before, these stages won’t be clear cut and it’s very likely that you will have already experienced a great deal of sadness. It’s important to allow yourself to feel sad. What’s happening here is that you are processing the loss. Go with it, don’t try to push it away or distract yourself. It’s healthy and you will not feel sad forever.

Stage 5 – Acceptance

This is the point at which you will accept the loss you have experienced. You can now move on and form new relationships, get a new job or think of your deceased loved one without falling to pieces.

There is no set time period for these stages. You should not try to speed the process up or slow it down. Just accept it and you will come out the other side. From there you can move on.

If you think you would benefit from help and support from a counsellor, please call me on 07966 390857 or use my contact form to get in touch.

If you want to read my post on 5 ways of coping with grief, click here.

Why All Our Emotions Are Important

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our four emotionsAs a therapist I spend a great deal of my time talking to clients about their emotions. For some clients this is no problem, they live in an emotional world. For others I can ask what they are feeling and I see a look of confusion descend. Some of us are good with emotions; some of us are good at hiding them. We all have them.

I can remember the first time I came across the concept that there are only four emotions. It was explained to me that humans are happy, sad, angry or scared. Eric Berne, the father of Transactional Analysis even dismissed anger as a racket feeling, which would leave us with three. The explanation continued with the statement that all other emotions are a combination of the four. Jealousy, for example, is a combination of anger and scare. Boredom is just another way of saying we feel angry.

Whilst I agree that this is a blatant oversimplification of the vast emotional spectrum we experience, I like the simplicity of it. It’s a great way of getting to the bottom of our feelings and reduces the chance that we will use language to deny our real feelings. It’s like saying you are annoyed when really you mean you feel angry. Anger feels much more genuine and is more likely to lead to constructive change. It moves away from the passivity of “annoyed”.

All emotions are OK and all have a valuable part to play in keeping us on an even keel. Here’s a quick rundown of what they do for us:

Happiness

This one, I don’t have to explain! When we feel happy the world is great, everything is fine and we want for nothing. Unfortunately though, there is a common misconception that this is how we should feel all the time. Imagine if we did. Happiness would become normality. How would we then distinguish the great times from the rest of our lives? Being happy all the time is an unrealistic expectation that, ironically, decreases the chance that you will feel happy because you become angry at your lack of happiness! I’m going to stop there with that one because I’m tying myself in emotional knots!

Sadness

This is the bad boy of the gang. No one likes to be sad. Sadness has got a bad press (I feel sad for sad). Sadness gives us permission to slow down, do less, withdraw from the world and do what we need to do in order to successfully get on with our lives again once we ready. We may have heard bad news, been let down or even lost someone close to us. Sadness is there to give us time to sort this out in our head. It’s OK to be sad. It’s useful and just as important as happiness over the course of our lives. Give yourself permission to go with it and it will pass, and you will have grown.

Anger

Anger can give us the energy to change situations that are pissing us off! The rush of adrenaline, the focused mind, these could save us from harm or pull us out of bad situations. Anger is readily embraced by some, hence the need for “anger management“, but for all of us anger can result in change for the better if used appropriately.

Fear

Fear keeps us safe and protects us from dangerous situations. Fear can also hold you back from doing all things in life you’d like to. In therapeutic terms it’s important to distinguish between fear, which is rational and from the Adult ego state, and scare, which is from the Child ego state. It’s that scare, which kept us safe when we were kids, but can be a block now we are adults. During the process of therapy, many people learn to let go of those scary feelings about issues we have echoing from our childhood and move on with our lives.

I make no apologies for repeating this next statement; all emotions are OK. They are all equal. When they get out of balance we may need help to adjust. Too much of any of them might not be useful for us and could lead to depression, anxiety or anger issues. But pushing our emotions away just moves those feelings inside and they manifest in other ways, often through physical illnesses or stress. So don’t deny them, be with your emotions and they will serve you well.

Anxiety: How To Reduce Your Anxiety Levels

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How to reduce anxiety levels

Negative self talk can be a big problem for many people.  How many times have you done something stupid and then beaten yourself up verbally?  When we start listening to our thoughts we often find that we are our own harshest critic.  The technique I am going to talk about here can be used to distance you from your thoughts.  It’s a basic ACT method known as defusion that I teach to my clients .  When we are having thoughts it is common for us to start listening to them and treating them as fact.  The reality is that we are not our thoughts. Thoughts are just words flowing through our heads, they have no power.  So how can we separate ourselves from our thoughts?  Try this:

A fictional person we will name “Jim” suffers with social  anxiety.  He may often have the thought  “Nobody finds me interesting” when in company.  This is a thought, it’s not a truth. When we fuse with our thoughts we accept them for truths – never great if we want to believe in ourselves.

Let’s take that thought and acknowledge that it is just a thought.  Jim would say to himself,

“I’m having the thought that nobody finds me interesting“.

This has moved the thought one step away from an accepted truth.  Next, Jim can move the thought two steps away with,

“I am noticing that I’m having the thought that nobody finds me interesting“.

This thought is  now much further away from accepted reality and can be examined from afar.  Jim is now separate from his thought, he has de-fused with it.

Finally, Jim can acknowledge where the thought came from – his mind,

“I’m noticing that I’m having the thought that nobody finds me interesting – thanks for that mind“.

Jim can now go into company much more detached from the anxiety he would normally feel when surrounded by others.

I’m not suggesting that Jim would not feel any anxiety when surrounded by others.  He is, however, in a better place than he was before and he can choose to accept the feelings that come up for him if he knows that being in groups fits in with his values (more of that in a later blog).

Your homework?  Try it then come back to this post and leave a comment about how you found it.  It doesn’t matter what the thought is, if it’s not useful to you you can defuse from it.  And remember, you are not your thoughts.

If you want to read more on defusion and other ACT techniques, check out “The Happiness Trap: Stop Struggling, Start Living“, by Russ Harris.