Dwelling On Missed Opportunities

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1. Depression Versus Grief Depression and grief are both total responses to a given life situation. To use a poker analogy, we could say that whether you’re depressed or you’re grieving you’re all in. And the two syndromes have many symptoms that overlap, symptoms like despair, hopelessness, guilt, diminished interest in activities that used to seem pleasurable, inability to […]...
2. Secondary Losses Grieving is a confusing process for various reasons. The one we want to talk about here is that people are not always conscious of all the secondary losses they must confront along with their primary loss. The primary loss is the loved one who has died. Dealing with this is hard enough on its own. […]...
3. Preoccupied With Life Changes “When I accept myself as I am, then I can change.” – Carl Rogers The paradox about life changes is that when you are too preoccupied with them happening you actually get in your own way, stunting your growth and making the changes you desire less likely to happen. Of course if you don’t think […]...
4. Saying Goodbye Is Hard To Do An essential existential fact to grasp in the realm of anxiety and grief is that to the human psyche there’s not much of a difference between symbolic death and actual death. Most people don’t consciously realize it though. By symbolic death we mean the rupture of a human relationship where the person is still physically alive […]...
5. Lost Youth Conscious awareness around where grief originates doesn’t necessarily make the process of grieving any easier but it does make it possible to go through the process, to start to move towards healing. At the same time moving towards healing is a scary prospect because it means admitting at the deepest level that a loss really has […]...
6. Pleasant Emotions While Grieving We tend to put a lot of energy into trying to make our life experience conform to how we think things should be instead of how they actually are. In the context of emotions, we often repress the ones that don’t seem to fit the situation or we get down on ourselves for having them, […]...
7. Mired in Self-Pity “Why me? What did I do to deserve this?” A difficult life situation can feel intolerable when we feel it is unjust, that we did nothing to cause what has happened. We want to believe that the world is basically a fair place, that people get their just desserts, that if we play by the […]...
8. Grief Is Messy Kübler-Ross was trying to do the world a service with her five stages of grief, and it has helped, but her model has ended up causing a lot of harm too because people take it too literally. They think they should be passing through neat, clearly defined stages, and start to question whether something is wrong […]...
9. Leave The Past Behind “Sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.” -Irvin Yalom We have this unique human ability to keep the past alive in our minds and in our hearts, arguably a good thing when this past was filled with love and joy, definitely a bad thing when this past was […]...
10. Wasted Years “The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you’ll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years.” – Mignon McLaughlin What happens to a lot of people in therapy, especially if they start going later in life, is that they gain some important insights, which should […]...
11. Grief And Despair When confronted with the loss of an important human relationship the enemy is not grief but rather despair. Grieving is healthy and productive. Above all grief is natural. As much as we want to avoid those painful thoughts and feelings grief is the adaptive response to loss. Those who have the courage to confront their […]...
12. Do Not Put An Artificial Cap On How Long You Should Grieve What happens to a lot of people is that after going through a situation that elicits grief the community around them is at first supportive, willing to listen and empathize, but as the weeks go by this community stops being so empathetic and starts to apply obvious or subtle pressure to move on with life. […]...
13. Grieving Secondary Losses Loss Produces Grief Any significant loss will produce grief. Whatever the main object of that grief is can be called the primary loss. So for example when a loved one passes away the primary loss is the loved one. But what’s often hidden from the full conscious awareness of many grievers is that countless secondary losses follow […]...
14. Nostalgia We all know the feeling. Our memories wrap around us like a warm blanket, we are instantly transported backwards, and for a brief time our present disappears, replaced by powerful, pleasant sensations that allow us to relive some of our best experiences. What’s wrong with a little nostalgia once in a while? From a psychological […]...
15. Therapy For Deep Sadness The first and most important thing we need to understand in this article is that deep sadness and depression are not the same thing, not by a long shot. Actually in the existential psychological sense they are polar opposite states of being. It’s just that they usually share some symptoms, like crying. But the deep […]...
16. Regret “You can spend your time alone redigesting past regrets. Or you can come to terms and realize you’re the only one who can’t forgive yourself. Makes much more sense to live in the present tense.” -Eddie Vedder Regret is a normal human response to missed opportunities, mistakes, or having wronged someone. If your moral compass […]...
17. Ambivalence While Grieving Simultaneous Contradictory Thoughts and Feelings  Ambivalence, which is holding simultaneous contradictory thoughts or feelings, is a disconcerting experience even under normal circumstances. Our Western minds remain influenced by the philosophical legacy of Aristotle, who held that something can be ‘this’ or ‘that’ but never ‘this and that’. He created three maxims to explain it. The […]...
18. Grief Is The Price You Pay For Caring We’ve written that when it comes to losing a loved one, the expression ‘little love little grief, big love big grief’ helps people wrap positive meaning around the boundless emotional pain and suffering they’re experiencing. That pain and suffering is a testament to their loved one, a proof that this person was special and important […]...
19. Gaining The Courage To Grieve Mortality is the fundamental source of dread for human beings, the spring from which existential anxiety flows. And when a loved one passes away we’re forced to confront mortality, whether we want to or not. But many of us resort to a clever but ultimately destructive strategy for dealing with our loss and all that […]...
20. Grief And Transitions After losing someone important to them people in the throes of grief usually add to the vicious cycle of despair through their beliefs about how this loss is going to affect their situation. They’re likely to engage in the faulty thinking pattern called fortune telling, where they make predictions about the future and take these […]...