Small victories matter in healing

This weekly column seeks to help educate our community about emotional healing through grief. People may write questions to Golden Willow Retreat and they will be answered privately to you and possibly as a future article for others. Please list a first name that grants permission for printing.

Dear Dr. Ted:

I have many losses and I feel like I understand the grief process – and yet when I have loss, I find that it is still so difficult to move through my healing process. Why does it take so long to move through losses and get my life back again?

Thanks, Edward

Dear Edward,

It would be so nice if we could just hurry up the grief process due to having knowledge and wisdom from past losses.

The difficult piece is each loss has its own individualized healing process, as the relationship with the latest loss is its own personal experience with you. Grief helps you rebuild your world around you after it has been severed in one way or another.

Grief is an incremental process of building on the smallest of victories in order to be able to step back into the world again feeling partially whole.

It is the small victories that start to move you from the past, allowing you to build a more present platform in the present. If you think of a puzzle and you empty the boxes of jagged confused pieces onto the table, it may feel like you have nothing but chaos, confusion and an overwhelming task that seem so impossible. It may be so overwhelming that for a while, you just leave the pieces sitting there and try to avoid them.

The only problem is there they sit, slowly catching your attention more and more and getting in your everyday life. Even recognizing that something has to happen with that pile is a victory.

As time goes on you start have more and more small victories of actually starting to try to put pieces together. You find a corner and then you find a straight edge. Slowly you start to find a frame that holds all the inner pieces, and through trial and error, you start to rebuild the new picture and from all those little pieces – you develop a bigger picture that makes more and more sense.

Over time, as you put together more and more puzzles, you learn little tricks, nuances and skills that help you manifest the new picture from chaos. But it doesn’t mean you get to skip the work of actually building the puzzle pieces into a picture. With each puzzle you also gain confidence that the impossible is possible and that the chaos is not forever, and things will change as more pieces connect, and soon the present picture presents itself.

This is similar to grief, as the beginning can be so overwhelming and you wish that the pieces of your life were not sprawled out on the table of life. As life seeps back in and you do your grief work, you have the opportunity to build the new definition of yourself while learning new skills, realizations and insights to help you navigate your present world, as well as learning more tools to help with your next puzzle of life.

Remembering that each little victory is what builds the outcome can help you recognize that healing is happening and you can have the confidence to make it through your latest lost, one breath/piece at a time.

Thank you for the question. I wish you well. Until next week, take care.