The bulk of the work we do with people is to help them recover from the losses that they have suffered in life. With very few exceptions, the only meaningful diagnosis we ever give anyone is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because all mental health disturbances, relationship disturbances, and other life difficulties originate with the losses we have suffered. While we occasionally use the PTSD diagnosis, we much prefer to simply state that people have suffered in the past and have continued to suffer because the losses that have occurred in their lives are not finished. 

What does “finishing” a loss mean? We don’t actually start with the finishing part of the process. Rather, we help people find the losses they have had in life, face the nature and intensity of these losses, feel through these losses, and then finish these losses. Let me explain this finding, facing, feeling, and finishing process.

Finding

What are we trying to find? This is sometimes a challenge because you might not actually know what happened in your past that adversely affects you in the present. Know this, however: if you suffer anxiety, depression, disordered thinking, and emotional imbalance, these conditions likely erupt from one or more events that occurred in your past. The biggest challenge is to find what these events were so you can go on to the facing, feeling, and finishing part of the process.

This might take a little bit of work. You don’t need to unpack all that has happened in your life in order to finish adverse past events. You do need to find those that are unfinished. Start with feeling the anxiety or sadness that may be a part of your life. It might even work for you to allow yourself to feel confused, emotionally distraught, or generally upset in the present. Feel these feelings the best that you can without trying to fix anything about you. Allow yourself to feel something, think something, or remember something until one or more things come together for you. Most of your past is resolved. Most of it has been good. We are simply looking for the one or more things that are still in your brain and mind that adversely affect you.

You might discover something trivial, like when you spilled your coffee on your new outfit, or a time when a friend or parent yelled at you calling your stupid, or your having tripped while walking up the stairs. You might find something that has relational implications like someone laughing at you, teasing you, unfairly blaming you, or threatening you. You might find one or more times of real damage to you, whether that was physical, emotional, or relational.

Take just one of these traumas: trivial, hurtful, or damaging. You have done the first part: you have found it. There may be more “its” but just start with one. Preferably something trivial or just hurtful.

Facing

Once you have found one event in your life, one time when you suffered, one time that you were hurt in some way, face it. This means remember as much as you can about what you said or did, what someone else said or did. Look at the situation as well as you can remember. Don’t yet go into feeling it. Just face it. Say, you were assaulted some way, perhaps by some bully in class when you were a sixth-grader. Maybe your pants fell down when you were playing in the gym. Maybe you just spilled your milk in the school cafeteria. Remember the situation, the people around you, the physical place. Remember where you were in all of this: standing, sitting, falling down, or maybe even asleep when you heard a loud crash in your house. You are facing it. Now is the time to feel it.

Feeling

This is the hard part. You will feel three, maybe four emotions: fear, anger, sadness, and possibly joy. In other words, you will feel all four of the basic emotions that all humans have. When you feel any of these emotions, keep in mind that emotions are never wrong. They may be happy (joy), sad (sadness), scary (fear), or irritating (anger), but none of these emotions is wrong.

Secondly, when you face the feelings you have about an event, or perhaps a series of events, that are in the past and yet unfinished, you will come right into thoughts and feelings that evolve into emotions. You will see something that was unpleasant. You will remember something that was hard to see or hear. You will see what you did do that you shouldn’t have done, or you will see something that you should have done that you didn’t do. You will see not only what happened that you wish hadn’t happened and see things that didn’t happen that should have happened. This is what makes the feeling part of this program hard.

The emotions that will dominate you are first fear and secondly anger. You will actually remember the fear that you had at the time, and you will remember the anger you had at the time, both of which you were unable to feel at the event (or series of events). Allow yourself to feel the fear you had and the anger you had. This is the start of feeling through these traumas.

When you have felt the fear and anger, you will then begin to feel sad. You need to feel sad, as much as you can, as much as is there in this situation years ago. It is much easier to feel anger and fear than it is to feel sad. Anger might have been something that you should have felt but didn’t feel. You certainly felt fear at the time. More importantly, however, you felt sad.

Why did you feel sad? Because you lost something. You lost a friend; you lost a feeling of safety; you lost a piece of property; you lost an idea; you lost an argument or a fight. You lost a part of yourself, namely something that you loved and lost. This is sad. Yes, you were afraid and angry but these two emotions didn’t help you feel the real important emotion: sadness. Sadness is a “love problem” as we say all the time to our clients. If you feel sad enough, you will finish feeling sad.  By the way, you will also finish the fear and anger that you had during the process of having been hurt and having lost something.

Then you can begin to finish this old hurt, this old damage, this old trauma.

Finishing

You do this feeling of sadness, you will finish feeling sad. You will also finish feeling angry and you will finish feeling afraid.

It will be a surprise to you that you are no longer sad, much less angry and afraid, when you look back at a loss or a series of losses you had in your earlier life.

The beauty of finishing sadness is that you will be better at loving. You will appreciate more; you will be more grateful for what you have; you will see that what you now have is a result of what you have loved, some of which you lost. You are no longer that person who pines away thinking that you should have done this or that, or that the other guy should have done this or that. You will see the very same situation that made you afraid, angry, and sad and feel none of these emotions.

You will be finished.