“No insight has been able to transform these painful feelings.”
Richard writes:
“A relationship with my girlfriend of 7 years has ended recently, and I’ve been suffering a great deal. I’ve also been Focusing quite a bit lately out of necessity, since these feelings of loss and hurt seem to be screaming for my attention.
“I’m finding that Focusing in this area has value (self-awareness, insights, etc…) but the transformational element of Focusing seems to be limited in this realm of grief and loss. No insight has yet been able to transform these painful feelings of loss that I’m experiencing.
“What can we reasonably expect of Focusing’s transformational ability when facing grief and loss? It seems almost absurd to say to a parent who has lost a child that Focusing could help them transform their feelings of grief and loss. And in my situation, it seems that time alone or falling in love again may be more transformational then 100 hours of Focusing in this area.
“The lyric may be true that, ‘When you got a heart ache, there ain’t nothing you can do.’ I can be Self-in-Presence with this heart ache, but there are no guarantees of shifts or transformations. I need help understanding what I can reasonably expect from this practice, or better yet, what is an unreasonable expectation.”
Dear Richard,
Great to hear from you. And so sorry that you are going through that hard time.
I would agree that grief and loss have an organic quality of “this needs to happen” and “this cannot be rushed.” The feelings of grief have their own timing.
But we can make the time take longer than it needs to in two ways:
- By trying not to feel so bad.. Or,
- By getting identified with the bad feeling.
There is something else that can happen when YOU — as Self-in-Presence — can BE WITH the feelings of grief and hurt. It’s not that they won’t hurt. It’s that they will have company. That’s a big thing — to be giving a comforting quality of presence to yourself, to be saying to the something(s) in you that are feeling hurt and grief, “Yes, I am with you.”
Yet even that is not the whole gift that Focusing can bring.
“What is it about me that this hurts in just this way…”
The rest of what Focusing can bring is a further process that has a quality something like “What is it about me that this hurts me in just this way…?”
There IS something that makes this hurt exactly THIS hurt and not another hurt.
Maybe it’s that…
…you were imagining your future with her in a certain way.
…she was exactly the person you always wanted.
…she was not the person you always wanted but you went to all the work of making that be okay anyway, and THEN the relationship ended.
And so on. It will be unique to you.
All those examples, as I write them, seem to me more logical and more cognitive than what the process is actually going to feel like, when you get in there and sense what it is about THIS and about YOU that this hurts in just THIS way. It will be fuzzy and unclear and at first really hard to articulate and all you will know is that there is something there. And then you spend time with it, and you get something, but it makes no difference in your body, and that’s how you know that however true that was, it isn’t all of it.
And finally you get the one that gives you a big deep breath — “Ah, that’s what it is!” — and then even though nothing has changed and she is still gone, you feel mysteriously lighter.
AND you will still feel sadness and loss, but not quite to the same degree. As the guy says, pain is inevitable but suffering is not.
And there can be more of a lightness almost every time you do Focusing. And I think you can reasonably expect that.