love

Lost Children

Ron Johnson Connection, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, love, mindfulness, relationships

There are many lost children in the world. We hear of “trafficking of children, often originating in Africa, and many other tragedies of lost children, the most recent being the apparent thousands of children killed in Gaza. I have seen many examples of “lost children” recently from many different perspectives including the loss of children to death, the loss of children from divorce issues, and the loss of children from their own decisions to depart from their parents in some way, not always pleasantly. Some examples:

  • I have had the privilege of serving or attempting to serve many people in my office who have lost children to early deaths, this coming on the heels of our having lost our daughter four years ago. It seems remarkable that I have had six patients in the recent four or five years who have lost a child to an early death.
  • I know of a man who has lost a second child after having lost his first child to death. This lost child has separated himself from his biological family, seemingly primarily from the father, for reasons that are not yet entirely clear.
  • I have a patient, also someone with two adult children, both of whom have been lost to his wife and him. One of their children “came out” as being “trans” and has separated himself (herself) from his (her) parents because of his perception that they were not “affirming” of his new gender status. Their other child has simply been distant from his parents for reasons that are not entirely clear
  • Another patient is in the midst of a contentious custody dispute as their divorce progresses. He has 3 biological children and one older child. His relationship with his older child is good and developing and his relationship with his seven-year old child is what to be expected with an elementary school child, but his relationship with the two middle children is quite problematic. One, the older of the two of them, is now in college but hasn’t communicated much to him about her desires in life while his 15-year old has refused to see him at all, allegedly from the standpoint of the father, due to the influence of the mother of these children.
  • I know of a grandfather who has not had much of a relationship with his (only) grandson largely due to the fact several incidents that have happened over the past couple of years, one of which during the several months this young man lived with his grandparents during the beginning of Covid restrictions and another incident that was quite offensive to the grandfather when he stayed with them again a couple years ago.
  • Another patient has is in a less than successful marriage, which has actually been unsuccessful for its 30 years of existence. Due somewhat to his wife’s behavior over the years, and due to his complicity with her desires for the children, now adults, there is a large rift between parents and children, albeit somewhat subtle.
  • I know of many children who have never seen one or both of their biological parents, and many children who rarely or never saw their biological fathers.
  • A man lost one child and nearly has lost another. This man is an evangelical and raised his children within that arena of faith. One child “came out” as trans and is evidently in the process of adjustment to his (now her) life. He has cut off all contact with his parents. The man is also less than satisfied with his relationship with his other son. Both parents are grieving, thinking, and wondering.
  • I know of a man who only over the past two or three years did he have any contact with his daughter after a contentious divorce when the daughter was 4 or 5. Now, 15 years later they are finding their way together.

I know of many more such examples of “lost children”, often through unhappy marriages and other stressors in life. Likewise, I have known of stepparents who have continued good relationships even after the divorces and many feeling their stepchildren ripped from their hearts after a divorce.

What are the feeling associated with these lost children and their lost parents?

In a word: sadness. But then this sadness has migrated into various coping mechanisms, most of them not healthy or healing. I know of many parents and stepparents who have found some kind of addition to cope with their losses, whether chemical or behavioral. It is remarkable how people can not only “drown their sorrows” in alcohol but do a different kind of drowning with promiscuity, gambling, overeating, or isolation. None of these things actually helps. Many other people do not find addictions per se but find ways to hole up with their feelings and have a certain resistance to facing the feelings that they have. One of the cases I mentioned above has developed an attitude of “not caring” about his two lost children “if they’re going to act that way.” Other parents spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about the children, often in connection with complaining about ex-spouses. Some people simply keep all their feelings to themselves, usually finding some solace in addictive behaviors like TV-watching, video gaming, or eating. All of these ways of “coping” and “accommodating” to the loss of children are ways to avoid the real feeling: sadness.

What can be done to deal with the feelings associated with the loss of a child?

In a word: grieve. Deb and I allowed ourselves a good deal of time to face the loss of our daughter when she died four years ago including a “grieving trip” that we took to be away from home and the challenges of a life now without the life of our daughter. We talked to people, often random people like a cashier at a coffee shop or a passer-by at a waterfall that we saw, sometimes revealing out loss, sometimes our feelings trying not to burden the people who happened to listen to us. This speaking to people we knew and more often to people that we didn’t know allowed us to share the grief and end the grief.

I actually think it is easier to lose a child to death than it is to lose a child who is still living. I can grieve, and however hard grieving might be, it does end, and it always ends if I allow it to run its course. It is much harder for a parent to grieve the loss of a living child often because that child might live five blocks away (a real incident) or “might” come back into the parent’s life. So, how would a person “grieve” the loss of a child who lives 5 blocks away or a child of 15 who refuses to see you, or a stepson whose mother won’t let you see him? All of these require grief but all of them require different forms of grieving.

Grieving, if it is “finished,” as we say, does not change history. It changes the emotion associated with history. The resolution of PTSD is not in changing history, forgetting the loss that was caused the trauma. It is not complaining about the person, persons, or situations that caused the trauma. It is finishing the feelings that come when I have been traumatized. The loss of a child is a trauma in whatever form it comes. So if you have lost a child in some way who is still living (as I hope), your grief will need to be substantially different from someone like me who can simply (and profoundly) grieve for a certain amount of time and end it. How do you do this seemingly ongoing loss? Ongoing grief? No really.

I am reminded of a patient I saw for many years who was in a nursing home because he had deteriorating muscular dystrophy (MS). His loss was not of a child, per se, although he had lost the opportunity to be with his children and grandchildren due to his MS. His loss was the daily experience of not being able to move, feed himself and care for his bodily needs. I helped Jim (not his real name of course) to learn to grieve every day. At first, he thought this was crazy and would only make matters worse. I didn’t want him to complain and feel awful every day. I wanted him to find, face, feel, and finish the grief of not being able to move effectively. He slowly and painfully learned to grieve every morning, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for minutes, until his grief was finished for the day. They he could go about doing what he was able to do without feeling the burden of being disabled. Sounds impossible? It is not. Grief ends, it always ends, if you give it room, time, and place.

Grieving sufficiently

In this light I try to help parents face the lost children first and foremost recognize that they “have a love problem” as Deb and I say to patients all the time. A love problem means that I love something or have loved something that I have lost. This is the cause of grief, nothing less. If felt, it will finish, but usually grief is not sufficiently felt to finish, and people get used to the secondary emotions and accommodations that occur if they do not grieve sufficiently. This can be done is private or in the company of a friend, family member, or therapist, but to share grief with someone is not to get advice or even “support” but to share the grief with someone. A good friend (family member or therapist) actually enjoys the privilege of sharing the grief because that person is sharing in the love as well as the lost.

If you can grieve sufficiently, you will arrive at a place where you have accepted the loss. When you arrive at this place, you still love what you have lost but you are no longer grieving, much less anguishing, feeling angry or feeling fear. If you can get to this place, you might be in the place to do or say something, but you can’t do anything or say anything until you actually find the end of grieving, which is always the love you have for you loss. Grieving for the loss of a living child doesn’t mean giving up on him or her, much less giving up hope for some reconciliation and rekindling of the relationship. It means you aren’t angry anymore. It is very hard for a man or a woman to get beyond being angry at a former spouse for having caused a separation from a child but it is necessary before you take any kind of action or say anything to the child or the other person. We use the 10-2-1 rule, which means feel ten times, think twice, and then act or say something once. The problem is not in the action, it is in premature action (or words). The solution is to feel it until it is finished. Then you can think clearly so you can act or speak decisively. If it stops with feeling and you never think or never act, you have not been honest. Indeed, you may have to wait for months or years before you can speak or act, but eventually, you will need to do both. But only when you are free of anger and fear.

Resolution of Trauma

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, love, Mental, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

Not long ago I wrote a blog entitled “the only mental health diagnosis” identifying it as trauma-related, and hence PTSD. This remains my opinion of the plethora of diagnoses that are so popular these days. As I previously noted, people simply want to make sense of ails them, whether their feelings, their behavior, their thinking, or their relationships. In almost all cases the ailment is due to the traumata that they have had in their lives, particularly the emotions associated with the traumata. In this blog I want to suggest how a person can get over the causes of his or her PTSD, ideally without even labeling it as PTSD, much less anything else. We will briefly discuss the following:

  • What is a trauma
  • What is PTSD
  • Finding the trauma
  • Facing the trauma
  • Feeling the trauma
  • Finishing the trauma
  • Forgetting about the trauma
  • Forgiveness regarding the trauma

What is a “trauma”?

A trauma is any unsuspected event that has deleterious effects on the individual. This negative effects could be physical, emotional, cognitive, or relational. In other words traumata are not restricted to the physical assaults, like sexual assaults, that occur to people or the physical wounds that one acquires in the theater of war. The essence of a trauma is not the event or the damage done to the individual, but rather to unexpected nature. In other words, we are traumatized by something harmful to us in some way that we did not expect. The general categories of traumata include:

  • Physical trauma includes sexual abuse, physical abuse, physical damage that occurs in the course of a day, or physical damage that occurs because of war
  • Emotional trauma is perhaps the most significant part of traumata and it is the most subtle. In fact, the large majority of PTSD comes from emotional trauma such as:
    • Not being given the privilege of feeling sad or angry when traumatized. Many children are simply not given the opportunity to feel these emotions.
    • Being given too much privilege of feeling these things. Some kids are given too much freedom of expression, which has the effect of their failing to govern their emotional expressions in adult life
    • Having an overwhelming feeling of fear during a trauma. This can cause an overwhelming feeling of not being safe in the world
  • Cognitive trauma is less frequent but occurs when an individual is not allowed to think, express these thoughts, and experiment with engaging the world with appropriate thought.
  • Relational trauma is usually mixed with cognitive and emotional traumata. Its essence is in the failure of an individual to develop meaningful relationships with other people.
  • Neglect trauma. More prevalent in undeveloped countries, this is the phenomenon of an individual, usually an infant, who is not given enough nurturance or comfort to allow the brain to develop. Romanian orphanages are full of such children due to the former regime’s demand that Romanians have more children.

You can see that all of these traumata fall in the realm of the unexpected. I do not expect an adult to assault me, neglect me, or fail to allow me to think or feel.

What happens with one is traumatized and suffers PTSD? I encourage you to examine the many resources available, like Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and the many articles that fall under treatment of PTSD, like EMDR. Very simply put, when traumatized, the brain has a reaction that ideally allows the mind to make sense of what has happened. I could be traumatized by seeing a child drown but not suffer PTSD if I am allowed to feel through, think through, and perhaps act through this situation. Again, very simply put, there is a brain function that occurs with any trauma, which is first emotional, secondly, cognitive, and thirdly behaviors. Of these three operations the usual cause for PTSD is the failure to feel the emotion associated with the trauma. Thus, most PTSD is the brain’s having failed to find, face, feel, and finish the emotions associated with the trauma, and then go further to forgetting and forgiving as deemed necessary.

Finding the trauma in PTSD

This can be an easy task or a difficult one because the trauma could be forgotten or repressed in memory or for some other reason, like having suffered something that seemed right at the time and necessary. Some people artificially “forgive” a parent for abuse or neglect because they love their parents and understand that their parents were not able to avoid physical abuse or neglect given their parents’ own personal history or other circumstances. A woman whom I see in marital therapy was raised in an environment where she was not allowed to have any expression of sadness or anger in addition to her mother being delusional. There are other more complicated cases when a parent is physically or mentally unable to properly care for a child. In wartime soldiers often think something like, “this is necessary to do, and there is not time or place for feeling sad, angry, or afraid because I need to the job at hand.” Circumstances like this impairs the individual from feeling, thinking and doing something in the face of the trauma. In almost all such cases the child does the right thing to keep feelings, thoughts, and behavior to a minimum to avoid being more seriously damaged. I just met with a young woman who knew that her mother was inclined to rage and abuse, so she wisely kept her feelings and thoughts to herself and “managed the situation quite well,” as she said. This wisely keeping thoughts, feelings, and behavior to oneself is the cause of almost all PTSD.

Find the trauma or trauma in one’s life can be taxing. First, you don’t want to do it. Naturally, you don’t want to dredge up “dirty laundry” and “focus on what was wrong,” admirable behavior but also emotionally costly and ultimately costly. A man a recently saw for a neuropsychological evaluation said such things about his childhood, which was evidence of his good character development, but also evidence of why he suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which is well established as caused by PTSD. So, finding the trauma can be traumatic in itself as you try to see where you were first traumatized. Furthermore, if you suffer PTSD, you have had one or more experiences of being re-traumatized over your lifetime. This means that you had the original trauma, say being left alone for an extended period of time, but you have been “left alone” for necessary reasons many times in your life since then, and perhaps many of these felt traumatic. Read Van der Kolk’s book on how the brain gets re-traumatized.

Finding the trauma or traumata can be challenging. First, of course, you don’t want to do it because it will bring up painful memories. Secondly, you can’t do this alone. You need a competent therapist to assist you in the process. Let’s go on to the process

Facing the trauma

Facing the trauma takes a bit of time. This could be seconds or days but not months or years. Facing something that you have perhaps lived with for years is a challenge because it has become part of you operating fabric while not really a part of the fabric of your soul. Facing the trauma is naming it for what it was: traumatic. You might be able to label it more specifically as abuse, neglect, or indulgence but that may not actually be necessary. Yes, indulgence can be traumatic because you weren’t given the opportunity to see limits of life and feel sad by not having what you want. It is enough that you find the origin of your PTSD the best that you can. In fact, you may not be able to find time, place, or person involved in the original trauma, but you can find how you felt.

When you face the trauma, you will face the three things that we have discussed: feeling, thoughts, and action. In other words, you will see how you felt emotionally, what you thought cognitively, and what you did as a result of being traumatized. You need to recognize all three of these elements of trauma in order to resolve the trauma because you ultimately need to feel through the trauma, think through the trauma, and possibly take some action in your current life. You may, for instance, fallen into a dangerous relationship with someone that you need to end because the individual re-traumatizes you; you may be in a job that is not good for you because it re-traumatizes you; or you may need to move out of you home state or back to your home state. In all of these actions, you thinking must be clear, not affected by emotion. But to be able to make a good rational decision as to what to do, you have to do the hardest part: feeling the emotion that is always associated with traumas.

Feeling the trauma and finishing it

This is the hard part, but the essential. It is hard to find the trauma and face the trauma but it is truly challenging to feel the trauma. What it mean to “feel the trauma”? It means to feel what you were unable to feel when you were originally traumatized. Furthermore the feelings, primarily the emotions, that trouble you in your current life were the feelings that you had when you were traumatized. The emotions were three, and possibly all four of the basic four emotions that we have as human beings: sorrow, anger, fear, and joy. The most lasting emotion that you have is fear, which then migrates into some form of anxiety. The frequent emotion that occurs with PTSD people is anger, often taken out on other people and oneself. The most important emotion you felt was sadness. Generally, you retain the fear most of all, the anger, secondly, the sadness thirdly. You might even have some residual joy in the experience odd at that might sound. Sexual abuse victims sometimes have to admit to themselves that they had some sexual pleasure when being violated, and army veterans have to admit to having some pleasure in killing people. More often, however, the predominant emotion is fear, which constitutes the bulk of the phenomenon of PTSD: people retain the fear associated with having been helpless in the traumatic situation. Feeling this fear is the hardest part because your brain most certainly does not want you to feel fear of any kind and will work against you feeling this emotion. If you feel fear and stay with it, you will then gravitate to the next stage of emotion, which is the heart of trauma resolution: feeling sad.

If you face the trauma, you will face the fact that you lost something that you loved. Most importantly, you will see that you lost a piece of yourself. You will see that your basic self was assaulted in some way and as a result you no longer felt entirely human. As a result of trauma, many people developed “dissociation,” which means a kind of separating their thoughts and feelings from reality, something that they learned to do when they were in the traumatic situation. Feeling the emotions associated with a trauma is difficult because you probably dissociated in some way at the time of the trauma in order to get through it. Indeed, you did “get through it” but at the cost of your having to repress the feelings of fear, anger, and sadness. Repression of these emotions is the heart of PTSD in your current life but you brain “helped” you get through the trauma by doing that very thing. Naturally, you don’t want to feel these emotions now, and your brain will try to keep you away from them, but the task is to feel all of them in order to be restored to your true self. Facing the anger you felt (but couldn’t express) is the easiest part, even though it is difficult, and fear is much harder to feel, but the most important thing you have to face is the sadness associated with the loss you suffered. If you lost a leg in war but weren’t allowed to feel sad, you need to feel sad now in order to resolve the trauma. If you lost a sense of self, or perhaps self-respect, when you were sexually, physically, or emotionally traumatized, you need to feel the sadness of having lost a part of yourself.

Fear is the most basic emotion we have and it keeps us alive. Sadness is the most important emotion we have and it allows us to love, lose, cope with loss, and love again. You want to love again, but you will be able to do this only when you no longer hide the sadness you have from the original trauma. You can feel sadness and it will end but you most certainly don’t want to feel this sadness. No one does. You need a good therapist to help you through this grieving process. Perhaps you lost an arm, your voice, or something physical like your favorite toy, but the most serious loss you have suffered in the loss of self. Grieve the loss of self and you will find self. You will be free to love again, lose again, and love again all over again. You have finished your grief. When you have finished grieving, you can think clearly and then take action. It is not enough to just feel sad. You need to see how what you might need to do in your current life that takes courageous action based on wise thinking. You can think wisely and act courageously when you are not burdened by old hurts. You’re almost done. You need to forget and maybe to forgive.

Forgetting the trauma and forgiving

I have to be careful in discussing the forgetting process of trauma resolution because it is not a failing to remember the event or events that were traumatic in your life. Rather, it is no longer focusing on them, no longer being dominated by the unfinished business of grief associated with old traumas. People who have “finished” the feelings associated with sexual trauma, for instance, remember the time, place, and person during the trauma but they are not fixated on this event. It is history but it is not current events. What they have done is to have faced the fact of the trauma and faced the feelings associated with the trauma. Now, they don’t have to look back at this horrible time in their lives with fear, anger, or sadness. It is history. When a war veteran can speak of having killed some 13-year old boy who was shooting at him in Afghanistan, and then allow himself to feel the fear, anger, and sadness related to this event, he will not forget the boy nor having killed this boy but he will be free of the emotions associated with this tragic event so he can go on with his current life unburdened by old emotions that belong in the past, not in the present.  He might even go further: he might need to forgive….

But what is he forgiving. He is forgiving the boy for shooting at him, the Taliban who recruited this boy to shoot him, and American President who started the war in Afghanistan, and the captain who ordered him to kill this boy (or be killed by him). He might even need to forgive himself, although forgiving oneself is a bit more complicated and not a part of this discussion.

Find, face, feel, finish, forget and forgive. That is the resolution of traumata and resolving the PTSD that often results from it. Find a good therapist who can help you do these things.

The Centrality of Disappointment

Ron Johnson appreciation, Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, love, mindfulness, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

One of the most important terms to use daily is “disappointment.” Think about it: how many times during a single day are you actually disappointed. If you’re careful to note your feelings and thoughts, you will notice that disappointment is an experience that occurs several times a day. I want to discuss what disappointment is, how to handle it, when to express it, and how to use it profitably on a daily basis. Simply stated, if you can observe, feel, and selectively express your disappointment, you will ultimately reduce anger and fear substantially, you will improve your relationships, and you will find life much more enjoyable. How weird does that sound? Feel more disappointment and feel better about life? Yes.

What is disappointment?

Disappointment is, quite simply, the feeling of sadness that occurs when you have lost something. We might also add that there is often a feeling of hurt that almost always accompanies the feeling sadness. In fact, these three terms are largely equivalent, but I think the term “disappointment” is the most palatable and understandable of the three. I often help people to feel disappointment in their daily lives and hence forestall anger, fear, and agitation. Deb and I have seen the centrality of the feeling of sadness in life for decades and published our first book, The Positive Power of Sadness: Good Grief, and on this experience as well as good portions of our second book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel.

Disappointment (and sadness and hurt) come when I lose something, usually something that I did not expect to lose. Most of our daily disappointments are of simple, often trivial, matters:

  • I spill my cup of coffee
  • I take wrong turn on the highway
  • I forgot to drink enough water in the day
  • I didn’t get a call from my daughter
  • My friend was late to our pizza date
  • My computer took forever to boot up in the morning
  • I pressed the wrong key on my computer and ended up with a note from Ethiopia
  • I bit into an apple and realized I just bit into a worm hole

There are more significant disappointments that often occur frequently, of not usually daily:

  • I lost a game of golf on an important tournament
  • My book didn’t get published as I expected it would
  • I lost my job
  • My spouse left me for another person
  • A good friend or relative died
  • I had a heart attack

While the simple and profound disappointments are both essentially sad and often hurtful, the degree of sadness and hurt is obviously greater. In our Good Grief book we wrote a lot about “little sads,” which are spilling my coffee and such, as perhaps the most important ways to learn of the centrality of sadness and find good ways to cope with these disappointments. If I can learn that I have many disappointments in a normal day, I will be better equipped to deal with the larger losses and consequent disappointments that will most certainly occur in my life.

Why do I have so many disappointments?

Because you love a lot. Love a lot? What does that mean? We talk about people have various “love problems,” which means that they love a lot of things and are disappointed a lot. Let me explain. Let’s review the small disappointments, the “small sads” as we call them, and see how each one of them has a love factor imbedded in it:

  • I spill my cup of coffee: I love to have a good cuppa and a clean floor.
  • I take wrong turn on the highway: I love to drive on the right road.
  • I forgot to drink enough water in the day: I love to engage in healthy endeavors.
  • I didn’t get a call from my daughter: I love hearing from my daughter.
  • My friend was late to our pizza date: I love having people be on time.
  • My computer took forever to boot up in the morning: I love jumping right into my computer work.
  • I pressed the wrong key on my computer and ended up with a note from Ethiopia: I love to be efficient on my computer.
  • I bit into an apple and realized I just bit into a worm hole: I love good apples.

Now, you might not normally use the term “love” for all of these activities, but I think it is actually the best word. You could use “value” or “what’s important to me” but these terms are equivalent to love, albeit we have different amount of love for all of them.

You can see how the more significant losses are also love-based, like losing a love one, losing a job, or losing your health. If you can conceive that every time you are disappointed, you have a “love problem,” you will begin to see how central love is in your life. You might prefer the term “value” to love but I think it is better to use the term “love” because it brings us closer to how we can handle these regular and unavoidable disappointments that come from some kind of loss.

How exactly do we process disappointments?

Simply stated, by being sad. This is simple but immensely hard, perhaps especially for us Americans who are generally not particularly good at feeling sad. One of the greatest things about America is the pioneering spirit that has made this country so great and successful. This pioneering spirit drives us to move forward, to get through, to forge ahead, and to not stop when we have found some kind of impediment in our way. I read Lewis and Clark’s journal of their trek west from St. Louis to the Portland, OR area and back again. They forged through and opened up the west for America. We might notice, however, that this opening up of the west for “Americans” also set the stage for the displacement of Native Americans, a thought that deserves some attention in our discussion with our tendency to move forward when we meet some challenge or disappointment,

The process of disappointment is simple but hard, meaning that the process is a clear road but the road is a tough one. What makes the road tough is the emotion of sadness that is always at the heart of disappointment. Simply stated, it is hard to be sad, at least it is hard for most people, certainly most Americans, and generally harder for men than for women. The beauty of feeling naturally disappointed, and eventually sad, is that sadness ends. Thus, disappointment ends. We tend to interrupt the process of sadness by some other means, usually with anger, fear, resentment, cognition, or action. In other words, instead of simply feeling sad, we tend to run away from it into anger or fear, action, or thought. I just had a session with a man who has lost his job, talked about having lost his marriage some years ago, and how is afraid of continuing in a female relationship. All of this has to do with the fact that he hasn’t felt disappointed and eventually sad, felt the sadness through, and then being able to think clearly and take clear action. The process of (natural) disappointment is all about love:

  • I love something
  • I am assaulted (I may “assault” myself by doing some untoward)
  • I lose something
  • I feel disappointed
  • I feel sad
  • I continue to feel sad until I no longer feel sad
  • I now can think clearly with the impediment of fear, anger, or fear
  • I feel some hope of resolution or adjustment if that is necessary
  • I take action
  • I review my action…which may be good or less than good
  • I adjust my action of necessary.

Notice that the core of this whole array is the emotion of sadness caused by being disappointed. It is not anger, it is not anxiety, it is not resentment, it is not getting even, it is not avoidance, and it is not denial. So what is it? It is the realization that when I am disappointed, I am helpless, at least for the moment. I cannot change the past (with anger) and I cannot change the future (with retribution). I cannot change the present. Rather, I need to simply (but with difficulty) feel sad and let sadness run its course. What does “run its course” mean? It means finishing sadness.

How do I “finish” feeling sad?

We say this about sadness: “Find it, feel it, feel it, feel it…, finish it.” This means that I have to notice the disappointments that I have every day. I have to admit that I feel disappointment. Then I have to simply be sad about the loss that I suffered, which might actually be something that I caused. Then I have to bear the burden of feeling sad and seeing that whatever I lost, I can never have back again. I might have something as good or even better, but I can’t retrieve what I lost. I can’t go back in time and take the right road. I can’t unspill my coffee. I can’t bring my friend back to life. I have to be sad, sad, sad…until I no longer am sad.

But how can I ever get over being sad about losing my child, like Deb and I did when we lost our dear daughter, Krissie, three years ago? When I think about Krissie these days, I often feel nostalgic: nostalgic about the good and the not so good; about what I did right and what I did wrong. And as I do this, my love for Krissie rises in my heart and I feel tearful. These are tears of love and mostly joyful tears and perhaps a few sadness tears. But largely, my sadness of Krissie dying is largely gone these days. But, of course, Deb and I did a good deal of grieving, crying, and sharing our grief in order to no longer be sad about this tragic loss. If I can get through the sadness of losing a child, you can get through the sadness of spilling your coffee or hitting yourself with the hammer by accident…without being angry. Just feel the disappointment and ultimately the sadness, and it will finish.

An important aspect of finishing sadness is that you now become a better person. You are a better person because you realize that you are a person of love. You have loved and lost, and now you know that you will love and lose again…and again…and again. You will get better and better at the loving-and-losing process. You will be a more loving person…because you are now a person who knows how to love and lose, so you will actually be better at loving. You will not hang on to things, people, property, and ideas when they have been lost. You will remember what you have lost, remember the love you had…and have…for what you lost.

So, Love much, Lose much, Love again, and Love better.