Guidelines for Working on Specific Losses

Many people tell the painful story of their loss over and over. They don’t realize that reciting a general litany of unhappiness is one of the main reasons they stay stuck. There are two important keys to success in becoming emotionally complete with the parent who died or left. The first is to focus on the specific events and non-events you recall, and the emotions you had and may still have about them. This will help you move away from “storytelling,” which keeps you trapped. The other is to avoid an intellectual analysis of what happened to you as the result of the death or absence.

Starting Your Graph

Your Relationship Graph about the missing parent begins with the first memory you have of that parent, assuming you have such a memory. There is a possibility that you have no memories about that parent. As sad as that may be, you have to be truthful about it. You may have heard stories or seen pictures, but if you have no actual memories, you will use your dawn-of-concious-memory as the start place for your Relationship Graph.

It’s also possible that after a while, you learned to push those kinds of feelings away, and it almost seemed like you were not bothered by the fact that your other parent was not there. What’s more than likely true, is that no matter how good you got at pushing feelings away, you were still being affected. One of the primary purposes for taking the actions of Grief Recovery is to become complete with what was unfinished so you won’t have to push feelings away anymore.

Create your Relationship Graph about the missing parent by looking back at specific events and your emotional responses to them. There’s an almost unlimited range of things that did and did not happen in relationship to the missing parent that may have affected your life. Here’s a short sample list:

• birthdays and other holidays
• first lost tooth
• first day of school
• music recitals, sports events
• first boyfriend or girlfriend
• arguments with custodial parent

Of course as you got older, the kinds of things that happened may have been different, but the feelings of not having that missing parent there to share them with you can still be very strong.

From Relationship Graph to Recovery Categories and Then to Completion Letter

After you finish your graph from as far back as you remember right up to the present, it is time to convert what you’ve put on the graph into the recovery categories—apologies, forgiveness, and significant emotional statements. Please go back and reread the instructions for converting your Relationship Graph entries into the recovery categories.

After you convert your graph entries into recovery categories, it is time to write your Completion Letter. Use the instructions. Stick with the format. It will work perfectly well on this relationship, as it has on the others. When you have finished the work, get together with a listening partner (preferably the same person you’ve been working with) so you can read your graph and letter. Use the reader-listener instructions.

Some people who conceived a child who was never born or didn’t live were never guided to name the baby. The Relationship Graph and Completion Letter give you an opportunity to name the baby that you had developed a relationship with. The same is true for those dealing with infertility. There’s no reason you can’t name the baby you’ve dreamed of having. While you may not have conceived, you certainly had a relationship with the baby that that you hoped to have. Giving that baby a name may help you with your graph and letter.

Of course the best time for action is as soon as you become aware that someone important to you is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s or dementia. But you can do the Relationship Graph and Completion Letter at any time, using the instructions. While the graphing process doesn’t change, the key is to separate your graph into two distinct parts. The first part is your relationship with the person from as far back as you can recall, right up until the onset of the condition that keeps them from being how they were. Write a Completion Letter on that relationship. When you get to the “good-bye” part of your letter, remember that you are saying good-bye to the relationship you had right up until that moment, so you can start a new one based on the changes that are happening with the other person.

In the second section, you will graph your relationship with the changed person. There may be a lot of frustrating events and attached emotions. You might need to make some apologies if you have been less than tolerant and understanding of what’s going on with the other person. You also may need to issue a lot of forgiveness for the way that person has talked or acted toward you. And there will probably be some painful emotional statements regarding how difficult it is for you to watch this person slip away from you.

As you start converting each Relationship Graph into the recovery categories, keep the idea of those intangible losses in mind. You will need to use the Significant Emotional Statement and Forgiveness categories to communicate most of them. An example would be: “Dad, I could never bring any of my friends home because of your drinking. I never felt safe and I couldn’t trust that you wouldn’t embarrass me. I never felt like I was part of a normal home. As I look back, having to always be on alert, it’s like I never had a childhood. I forgive you so I can be free.” Those few sentences address all of the intangible losses we’ve mentioned.

We’ve indicated that people sometimes only focus on the alcoholic and lose sight of the influence of the other parent, who may have impacted them in different ways. In a setting where it was unsafe to bring friends home because Dad was always drunk, it might also have been Mom’s responses that were an equal or bigger problem. A communication to Mom might be: “Mom, your reactions to Dad and his drinking were so frantic that I lived as if a nuclear bomb were about to go off any moment. I could never relax, and even as an adult, I have found it difficult not to be on constant high-alert even when nothing in my situation is unsafe. I forgive you for instilling in me a constant sense of dread and doom. I forgive you so I can be free.”

We’re about to start showing you how to deal with some of the losses we’ve just mentioned. But—and make that a capital letter BUT—before you attempt to complete your relationship to any of these other losses, you must take all the actions laid out earlier in this book. This is especially important in relationship to the people who most directly affected your life. Absent that foundational work, attempts at completion of these other kinds of losses tend to be intellectual and analytical. However, if you follow our guidance, you can achieve the greatest degree of emotional completion with any losses that affect your life.

This section addresses three major life areas: faith, health, and career. The first one, on loss of faith, is very thorough. Even though you may not have a loss of faith issue, please read the loss of faith section. It will give you a template for either of the other areas, health and career, that follow.

Loss of Faith

Whatever caused your loss of faith, we will show you how to complete what was left emotionally unfinished for you. With those tools you can become emotionally complete with God, and with any of the people, events, or institutions that caused or contributed to your loss of faith. You will start by making a Relationship Graph about your faith. The graph will help you identify which elements relate directly to God, and which relate to the people you associate with your breach or loss of faith. The faith graph is a collection of mini-Relationship Graphs with the people who affected that part of your life, as well as with God.

Review Graphing Instructions—Before you start your graph, go back and review chapter 11, from, on how to make a Relationship Graph. As you recall events and people, put positive or happy experiences above the graph line, and negative or painful ones below the line. In some of the events you recall, your reactions will be about what did or didn’t happen and how it affected your relationship with God, both positively and negatively. Add the names of any people involved, and the approximate year the events happened. Don’t be preoccupied if you don’t remember some names, dates, or exact details.

Start your graph by going back to your earliest memories that relate to religion. That will include:

• your parents
• priests, rabbis, or ministers (the clergy)
• Sunday school and Sunday school teachers
• church, temple, or mosque (from now on we’ll just use church)
• the tenets of your church

At some point you probably started learning the doctrines of your religion. You may have liked what you were learning, or maybe not. You may have gone through periods of time when you questioned them. If you had strong thoughts and feelings about those religious and spiritual principles, put them on your graph. There’s a high probability they are part of what has affected you. A complaint we’ve heard is that during childhood, some children observe church leaders not following the precepts they teach. If you had that experience, it might have been part of a loss of trust that contributed to your loss of faith, if not in God, then in the people who were teaching you about God. Also important is whether or not you told anyone about what you experienced, and whether that person said or did anything to help you. All of that is part of your relationship to your faith and should appear on your Relationship Graph.

When you finish the graph, you will convert what you have discovered into the three recovery categories—apologies, forgiveness, and significant emotional statements. To review how to do that, go back and re-read chapter 12. As you convert each of the things on your graph into one or more of the recovery categories, you will see which ones you need to direct at God, and which ones need to be directed at the people involved. Take your time and devote some energy into converting your discoveries into the appropriate categories. The more thoroughly you do that, the more effective your Completion Letter will be.

There may be some people with whom you had limited relationships, but to whom you feel grateful for their influence or guidance related to religious matters. There may be no need for apologies or forgiveness, just a desire to say “thank you,” which is a simple but powerful emotional statement.

Since you have things to say to many people, in addition to God, you will have a letter that is aimed in multiple directions. It will encompass all of the people and relationships that appeared on your graph, including God. It is like a tree with many branches, with each of the people and events involved as part of the whole picture. We recommend that you start the letter with a variation on the phrase we suggested for the beginning of your other Completion Letters. In this case you would say, “I have been reviewing my relationship to my faith and to God, and to the people who have been associated with my religious experiences along the way, and I’ve discovered some things I need to say.”

On the other hand, if your earliest memories are not positive, you might say: “Mom, I forgive you for forcing me to go to Sunday school. The teacher was really mean and scared me about what would happen if I didn’t believe what she said. And, Mom, I forgive you for not helping me when I told you about that.”

Those are simple examples at the positive and negative ends. Your memories may not be as concrete on one side or the other. They might be a mixture. And you might have had different feelings related to Dad than you had to Mom. You can make your comments individual to each of your parents in the letter format.

The next entry in your letter might be to a Sunday school teacher, about whom you had either positive, negative, or mixed feelings. Make your statements about those feelings in the appropriate categories. As we said, you may or may not remember names or dates, but don’t let that stop you. The point is to deliver the undelivered emotional communications, indirectly, to people who affected you in one way or another as they relate to your religious beliefs. You may have thanked your teacher or clergy member when something happened years ago, but you may now feel a need to express something a little stronger that might sound like this: “Pastor Joey, I want you to know how much your teachings helped me later in life, and how much they affected the way I talked about these matters to my own children. Thank you.” The same style would be used when you have something negative to say, but it would have to contain forgiveness. Example: “Mr. Glazer, I remember being very scared when you taught about the devil. That fear has stayed with me much of my life. I forgive you so I can be free to let that fear go.”

We should mention here that many people feel angry at God, especially when something bad has happened to them or to someone important to them. You may be angry at God, but you might be uncomfortable with that feeling. You may need to forgive God, but you might be fearful of the idea of “forgiving” God, as if that would be disrespectful. The problem is that if you are harboring a resentment against God for things that did or did not happen, then you must forgive or you will never be able to rebuild your trust in God. Even if a renewed faith in God is not your goal, there is no value in walking around with a resentment burning in your heart and soul.

On the other hand, you may have some very important positive things to communicate. In those instances where you believe that God has been with you through something difficult, you might say: “God, thank you for walking with me and my family as we struggled with the deaths of our cousins in the car accident.” That’s a generic way of saying it. Use your own beliefs and your own language to say what’s important for you.

We know that there are many different beliefs about communicating with God, and we are not suggesting that anyone do anything they feel uncomfortable with. With that warning in mind, we recommend that you say both positive and negative things to God as directly as possible, whether they are apologies, forgiveness, or significant emotional statements. The more directly you communicate those ideas and feelings, the more complete you will feel.

After you have written your Grief Recovery Completion Letter^©, the last piece of the puzzle is to read it, out loud, to a safe person. Use the Instructions for Listeners and Readers. It is essential that your listener make a commitment to absolute confidentiality regarding the letter you read to them.

Loss of Career—Career Changes

The format for dealing with career issues follows the same general outline we just demonstrated for dealing with faith issues. If you did not read the last section, please go back and do so. It will make the following instructions easier.

Fill in your graph chronologically, moving from childhood through to young adulthood and right up to the present. You will move from chores to jobs, like mowing lawns or babysitting, and starting to get paid for your work. After age 16 you may have had a job at a store in your community. As you graph your career, there will have been bosses, supervisors, and coworkers. You liked some and not others. Some treated you well, others didn’t. All of that goes on your graph.

When the graph is done, you will convert the events and people into one or more of the three recovery categories and figure out the statements you will make in your Completion Letter. Here’s an example of a comment you might need to make about a boss you had when you were a teenager: “For years I resented you for sending me home that day I was late. But I really learned from it. Ever since then I take my commitments seriously and always show up on time. I forgive you for sending me home; and I thank you for teaching me an invaluable life lesson.”

It is not uncommon in today’s corporate world to have been let go or downsized, even when you had been a good employee. Often, the communication about your termination was delivered without much apparent concern for you or your well-being or for your emotional reaction. With that in mind, forgiveness is often a huge element of completion.

As with other completions, we cannot stress enough how important it is to say “good-bye” at the end of this letter. One method is to issue a general comment that is aimed at everyone involved, which might look like this: “I have to go now, and I have to let go of any pain I have associated with my career, and with any of the people involved. Good-bye.”

Loss of Health—Health Changes

This section, like the last one, is based on the same ideas we showed in the loss of faith section at the beginning of this chapter. Please take the time to go back and read that section so you’ll have an idea of the format that will also work on your health issues.

Once more, we’re going to take you back to the beginning, your beginning. We want you to graph your relationship to your physical self. As a little boy or little girl, were you athletic? Were you a dancer? Did you do a lot of physical things? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, beginning your graph will be relatively easy. You will remember the things you liked doing. You will remember the people you did them with. Note: You may not remember all the names of people you played with as a child, and you may not remember exactly when you did certain things. That’s okay. We’re more concerned about the emotions of joy or pleasure—or pain—you had in using your body.

For those of you who were not physical—who did not play sports, dance, or do many outdoor activities—your relationship graph about your body and health will be slightly different. There are many people whose great joys in life are more cerebral than physical. But even so, certain health problems may have limited your ability to read or use a computer or pursue whatever you loved doing. This is not to suggest that you had no relationship to your body or health, nor that diminishing health doesn’t also affect you a great deal. In fact, it is sometimes the loss of certain physical abilities that makes some people aware that they had never made enough time for doing physical things.

In any case, as you graph your relationship to the physical things you did, there will usually be other people involved. In sports, there will have been teammates, coaches, and others who were part of that world. Again, you will have liked some of them, and not others. Each of them is part of a mini-relationship that you might need to address. “Thanks for being a supportive teammate. I remember your constant encouragement, it really helped me.” Or, “You never helped me be part of the team. I forgive you for being so selfish.”

When you write the Completion Letter, some of your emotionally important statements will be to the people who were part of the physical aspects of your life. But some of what you need to say will be more directed at your own body. Although it may seem silly, we think it a good idea to thank your body for all the pleasure you had using it to do the activities that pleased you. In the career section we mentioned that the Completion Letter was a good place to say “good-bye” to the hopes and dreams we once had that can no longer be, so we can develop new hopes for things we can achieve. The same is true with health issues. It’s important to use this graph and letter as an opportunity to say good-bye to what we once were able to do, so we can focus on what we can do now.

In addressing the issues of your health, you might realize that some of what has occurred bears a relationship to whether or not you took good care of your body. If so, the graph and letter are the ideal places for apologizing to yourself for that lack of care. We know it can seem a little silly, but do it anyway. Some people prefer to forgive themselves, rather than apologize. It’s your choice.

Often when there is a move, it can mean that there is more money and the move is to a larger house. Those are positive things. However, regardless of its size or condition, children are accustomed to the old place. They know the home, and it seems to know them. They know every nook and cranny, for it is their home. The exciting feelings about the new home are mixed up with sadness about leaving the old one. Even if the children did not love the old home, they were very familiar with it. That mixture of positive and negative feelings illustrates what we mean by the phrase “conflicting feelings.”

Sometimes fortunes are reversed, and the move is from a larger house to a smaller one. This move not only represents a change in the familiar but also adds the negative feelings associated with financial difficulties. Although young children may not recognize or relate to the money problems, they will be affected by their parents’ attitudes. Children often hear parents’ late night arguments about money. Or, they have an awareness of nonverbal communications between parents that indicate that something is not right.

Cole was excited about having a house with a yard and his own swimming pool. He was also excited about having a larger room. At the same time, Cole was sad to be moving away from the friends he had made at his old school and in his neighborhood. John knew that the move they were about to make was a golden opportunity to teach Cole how to deal with the confusing feelings he was experiencing.

This exercise wasn’t just for Cole’s benefit. John and Jess were able to remember and talk about many of their memories, both good and bad. The process was very helpful to all three of them. On moving day, with tears in his eyes, Cole waved good-bye to the only home he had ever known. Cole adapted very well to the new home. Having completed his relationship with the old apartment, he was able to develop a new relationship with his new house. John and Jess still have fond memories about the old apartment in which Cole spent his early years, and they have built many more wonderful memories in their new home.

Soon, Cole will go away to college. While his room at home will still be his on holidays and vacations, he will take the same actions he did thirteen years ago, recognizing that many of his day-to-day activities will change as the result of his move. John and Jess will be with Cole, and together they will remember the events of the past thirteen years. Most of his life will now be lived at his college dorm, where he will develop new familiar patterns of behavior. And you have probably already figured out what Cole will need to do four years from now.

We’ve seen countless examples of the negative affect on adults and children who do not properly complete their relationships to something as important as their homes. This simple exercise can help ensure a smooth transition to your next home.

One of the by-products of those actions is that you may discover some still unfinished emotions attached to other people and relationships from your past. You can use the actions you’ve learned in this book to go back and complete your new discoveries.

Even if this exercise seems silly to you, we cannot over-emphasize its importance. Do it anyway.

There is no hard and fast rule for how many entries should be on any graph. The objective is accuracy not volume. We’ve known people who put too many entries on a Loss History or Relationship Graph and didn’t get the benefits of the graphs. They became repetitive and listed each and every example of similar things. That is not to say you might not have experienced an inordinate amount of losses due to death. One key for you would be to list the deaths of people with whom you had involved relationships. Without being judgmental, we would suggest that the death of your second cousin, whom you’d only met twice in your life, might not need to be on your Loss History Graph.

As to number of entries: a general guideline for a Loss History Graph is to have somewhere between 6 and 20 entries. Of the thousands of them we’ve seen, the average is probably about 15. If you get too much beyond that number, you might need to see if you’re repeating similar events or including people with whom you had limited relationships.

The Relationship Graph might have between 5 and 15 entries above the line, and the same amount below the line. Depending on whether the relationship was essentially positive or negative, your graph may be focused primarily on one side or the other. But if you start having a large amount on either side, look to see if you’re repeating the same kind of events over and over. There is no need to repeat the same things. That creates the danger of keeping you stuck in the pain or in an unrealistically positive picture of that relationship.

The same guidelines hold true for the Completion Letter you create from your Relationship Graph.

Compassion vs. Negation

A cliché has slipped into modern language that can create real difficulties in achieving emotional completion. The phrase is: “He did the best he could with what he had to work with.” Typically it is said about someone with whom you did not have a good relationship. Even though it may be intellectually true, it is not emotionally helpful. We’ve known people who’ve added that comment near the end of their Completion Letters, and then call us some time later to tell us they don’t feel complete. In the letter they write, “You did the best you could with what you had to work with.” When they do that, they inadvertently override the forgiveness they had issued earlier in their letters. Without realizing it, they are excusing bad behavior. The intellectual fact is that whatever people do is their best, otherwise they’d do something else. A sadder part of that fact is some people’s “best” nearly destroyed us.

In fairness, either of your parents or others who raised you may have been victims of horrible childhoods of their own—and of people and events later in life. They may have been subjected to alcoholism, mental illness, or just plain cruelty. For that, you may have some compassion for them. But it’s likely that while they dragged the impact of those situations through their lives, they also inflicted you with the by-product of what was done to them. In spite of what they did to you, and if you have a sense of compassion for what happened to them, there is a more helpful way to say it. Rather than excusing it by saying it was the best they could do, and thereby negating the forgiveness you issued earlier in your Completion Letter, you can say: “Dad, I have compassion for you and the things that affected you.” This should be near the very end of your letter and should always come after you have issued all the necessary forgiveness.

No Questions—Only Statements

Another danger in Completion Letters is to ask questions. Obviously, a question asked in a letter to a person who has died cannot be answered. We’ve seen people ask things like: “Dad, why didn’t you take better care of your health?” Asking an unanswerable question like that, even a rhetorical one, leaves you incomplete. Since the objective of Grief Recovery is emotional completion, you don’t want to set yourself up to fail by asking questions that can’t be answered.

While it is clear that people who have died can’t answer your questions, it is never recommended that you ask questions in Completion Letters to living people. We remind you that your letters should never be communicated to the living people you are addressing. That’s because your letter will have forgiveness in it, which must never be done directly. Therefore, given the fact that the living person will not be hearing your letter, you can’t get answers to any questions. That is not to say that you can’t ask questions of living people when you see them or talk to them—that’s your choice. Just don’t ask questions in Completion Letters.

Use the PS Letter for Additional Completion

It’s possible that you’ve already done Relationship Graphs and Completion Letters about your parents and others who affected your life, but you may still feel incomplete. If so, go back and do some additional work focused on those aspects of the relationship that contributed to your losses of trust, safety, normalcy, and childhood. You can do a mini-graph and then a PS Letter about those elements of a relationship in which you recall events or situations that caused you to feel unsafe or untrusting.

After you write the mini-graph and PS Completion Letter, you must make sure to read your letter out loud to another living person, who qualifies as a “safe listener” for you. Use the Listening and Reading guidelines.