Let go of what you can’t control

Grief involves anger and loss of emotional control, often a state of confusion.

Anticipatory grief, for those who experience it, is sometimes even more severe and stressful. It does not lessen the burden of actual grief after the loss has been experienced, and is not a substitute for it..

Anticipatory grief is a chance of closure and personal growth which comes at the end of life. It is a chance to reconcile differences and heal the heart with forgiveness.

How we deal with our emotions affects how we love, how we live, how we parent and how we lead.

We should not view our emotions as good or bad, positive or negative. We need our emotions for real resilience.

When we go through tough situations, we cannot ignore our negative emotions with the hope that they don't matter.

Write down what you are truly feeling in a personal notebook. Move beyond the rigidity of denial.

• Make space for other people to vent aloud. They know that they are powerless, and they have to accept the situation. Venting gives them the illusion that they are in control.
• Have a little competition with your best complaints.
• Create a house chart of complaints where your kids can let out their own.
• Avoid complaining mistakes (such as: getting carried away by anger, firing too many complaints at a time or thinking that complaining alone will save us from our problems).

The five stages of grief are: 

• denial (inability to accept reality), 
• anger (physical tension, frustration, resentment), 
• bargaining (magical thinking, pleading to God), 
• depression (sadness, emptiness, guilt, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, hopelessness),
• acceptance. 

Nothing good can come from looking at your ex’s Instagram stories or Facebook timeline. When it comes to social media, just say no.

Lockdown poses unique problems for couples who are isolating together.
People who are used to seeing their partner at the end of the day now are now living with the new reality of not only being full-time with their significant other but also working alongside them. This situation, together with the uncertainty of the whole pandemic crisis can create tension.

There is a polarization going on around the way that people deal with fear, with anger, with the preparations in the face of disaster. You can find:

• People that become clear organizers because order for them means making sense of the chaos of the external world and the one that is rising inside of them.
• People wanting to talk all the time with other people and have a sense of what’s going on with everyone.
• People thinking that their partner is not cautious enough.

The stages of coming in terms with grief are:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

These widely accepted stages are considered rigid and obsolete as modern psychologists update the understanding of grief.

It focuses on the psychological connectedness of grief, looking at the quality of bondings that are made during the course of our lives.

Grief, and even the behaviour of babies in the absence of parents suggests it is not just a mental experience, but has physiological effects, like raising the level of the stress hormone cortisol in our bodies.

We are dealing with the feeling of uncertainty, and we don't know when our feeling of uncertainty will end.

We dream about when we can safely leave our homes, see our loved ones, and go back to normal. We wonder if our businesses will reopen or when we will stop feeling so paralyzed with fear.

We have lost so much, and many elements missing from our normal lives are intangible and can hardly be identified. Because it is ambiguous, we find it difficult to know what we are mourning.

It is a loss of the way we have lived, the boundaries between work, home, school. Our plans, weddings, birthday parties, loss of safety and trust in our leadership. The loss of connection, the fear of economic toll.

Thinking, "I'm getting angry again" is a strong trigger for overly intense anger.

When this happens, the negative feelings that we associate with this thought make our emotional reactions worse. Common feelings include shame, guilt, feelings of inadequacy. If we know we have not made peace with our past hurts, we are more likely to experience this emotional reaction.

This process requires us to pause and reflect on our internal experiences.

• A meaningful component is to identify the negative feelings behind it and the conclusions we make. We should realize that our reaction in the moment may not only be about the current event but also about previous hurts.
• Meeting this challenge requires attention beyond only controlling anger. It takes self-observation about the moments when anger arise. This way, we can immediately recognize that our reaction to a situation incorporates reactions coming from previous hurts.

While going through difficult times, we are all losing, more or less, the shared rituals we used to have with others. But that is not actually such a bad thing.

Instead of thinking about what was lost, we could think about what we still have and figure out ways to make the most of the time spent at home, like staying more with our family or getting in touch again with old friends by calling them.

It’s not that difficult to create rituals online. Focus on:

• Asking people to bring to their online gathering something symbolic to share, to create a sense of connectedness.
• Marking the moment as something special by having someone provide an opening statement.
• Creating emotional highs by using music or something else with high emotional resonance to augment the experience.
• Having a distinct ending that includes an emotional peak, because people tend to remember an event better that way.

Unconscious actions serve an evolutionary purpose. And they make our lives easier in many ways.

*When you're reading something for example, your mind is also filtering a huge amount of sensory information, scanning the environment for relevant stimuli (food starting to burn on the stove or someone screaming), and even processing internal stimuli like thoughts and emotions related to previous meetings and discussions. All of these processes occur simultaneously, some more automatically and with less conscious awareness than others. If we were to give all of them the same amount of focus and attention, they would overwhelm us.

William James described in the the late 19th century how mental processes that are abundantly practiced and rehearsed escape our awareness and begin operating autonomously and without conscious intentionality.

This post-conscious automaticity that James studies ensures that with practice, we can master new skills to a degree that we can eventually execute them with efficiency without having to overthink their every aspect.