Acceptance Outshines Your Winning Recipe And Handles Grief

TO COMPENSATE FOR not being extroverted enough to succeed in the world you created a winning recipe as a young child.  The recipe now allows you to hide inside a socially acceptable way to be – agitated, detail-oriented, generous, relatable, or slow. Or any of the thousands of other roles introverts adopt to be successful.  For example, my recipe is to be process-driven by building step by step procedures to cope with life.

In Post #15 and Post #16 we addressed grief about a reputation, a dream, a sum of money, or something else you have lost other than a person close to you having died.  Here and in the next post we will talk about a death, or a break so severe with a loved one that it feels like a death.

Your winning recipe is no help in resolving grief. It does not even address it because you designed it for another purpose – to cope with an extroverted world.  And as I discovered it could well be the cause of your grief. 

My recipe led to a divorce that cost me my little girl and boy.

How I Discovered The Acceptance Solution

AFTER MY DIVORCE I became a rookie personal computer salesman in Coral Gables, Florida, earning enough to stay alive.  

But the money was not enough to keep my young children.  My ex-wife moved with them to New Jersey to be near her parents. She did that not as revenge but to start a new life, since the only financial help I could afford was meager child support. 

The loss of my little girl, age nine, and little boy, age six, was devastating.  I lived in a single rented room and had no words to describe the intensity of the grief I felt. 

My winning recipe encouraged me to throw myself into my work. It advised me to drive a step by step process known as the sales funnel, something salespeople used to help ensure success.  I did so but that only intensified my grief.

I was so distraught over the loss of my children that I resolved to try the “death exercise,” something I learned the year before in a New Age personal development program called the est Training.  The exercise was designed to help you get complete with someone in your life who had died.  The children were still alive but in my intense anguish felt it like they were not. 

I sat in my darkened room and brought each one of them to me in my imagination, holding them close for the longest time and as I told them over and over that I loved them.  They then withdrew into an elevator that I imagined in front of me, smiling and saying they loved me as the doors closed and they disappeared forever from my life. 

The pain was searing and I cried for over an hour.  But it took the sting out of their memories, leaving me with a dull ache.  When grief came back a week or so later I went through the brutal exercise again.  Eventually the pain morphed into a warm feeling whenever I thought of them. 

Unpacking The Acceptance Solution

The solution to the grief was not my recipe, but acceptance – utterly and thoroughly accepting the reality of their departure by coming as close as possible to experiencing the loss as if they had died.

Psychologists tell us that grief occurs in stages that start with denial and end in acceptance, meaning coming to terms with the reality of it.  The experience I put myself through sped up the various stages so much that I got to acceptance in just a few hours of intense pain rather than in weeks or months of gradually decreasing agony. 

This is a severe solution, but one that works in an area of life where your winning recipe is useless.

How To Lessen Your Grief By Accepting The Loss

If you are grieving for someone you love who has died, or if it feels like they have passed away because your anguish at separation from them is so acute, here is how to accelerate your movement towards acceptance.

Step 1.  Get set up.  Go alone into a quiet room and turn off the phone and the lights.  Put a box of tissues nearby.

Step 2.  Visualize bringing the departed person to you.  Close your eyes, and imagine them stepping out of an elevator across the room in front of you.  See them coming to throw their arms around you. Hold them and weep, knowing that this is the last time you will ever see them.  Recall how beautiful that person was, and smart, and so very dear; cry and cry, rocking back and forth with them in your arms until you think you have more tears left.

Step 3.  Let them go.  When you sense it is time for them leave, gently release them from your arms. Look at them as they stand in front of you, reaching out to touch your face and give you a kiss, then feel them throw their arms around your neck one last time and tell you that they will always love you. Gently release them again, and see them slowly start to back away from you, blowing kisses and waving. See the elevator doors open, watch them step inside and blow another kiss to you, and disappear.

Then sob for as long as you need to, lost in loneliness and despair.  When you are exhausted, turn on the lights and gulp down a glass of water to replenish the fluid you cast off as tears.

Step 4.  Repeat as needed.  If days or weeks later acute grief returns, go through the exercise again as soon as you have the strength.

I Invite You To Use Acceptance To Dispel Your Grief Today

• How well did this exercise work for you?  If you would like us to consider sharing your story with The Satisfied Introvert community anonymously please email it to me at thesatisfiedintrovert@gmail.com.
• How can I help you to complete the exercise? Please go to the Contact page and enter your name, email, and questions. I cannot answer everyone, but will do my best – especially if the answer could benefit others.
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Welcome to the peace that comes from accepting

the death of a loved one, and the comfort

of knowing that they will

always love you

© 2022 The Satisfied Introvert LLC