Allowing ourselves to live

When I tell people that I offer grief therapy, they often ask me: “How do you find the strength, the courage to do that? It must be incredibly hard to hear about death all the time!” I answer them my grieving clients have not always lost a loved one through death but that working with people who have lost someone is actually very rewarding.

I have offered therapy to people who have lost children, parents, friends, colleagues, or pets and who felt trapped in a state of intense suffering. What I have observed is that even those who are stuck in their pain, and doubt that they will ever be able to move on, are, in fact, capable of gathering from their loss more energy than they ever had before it.

I often observe that my grieving clients do not allow themselves to be HAPPY. They maintain the BELIEF that if they love their child, parent, spouse, or friend, if they really love them, they cannot be happy. They believe that if they can enjoy their life, it means that they don’t truly love them. A person who holds this sort of belief can stay stuck in the turbulence of grief for a very long time.

What helps in this case, is to realize that the most beautiful present one can offer to their deceased loved one is not to feel bad but, on the contrary, to feel great. Often, I ask my grieving clients to inverse the roles and to imagine that their loved one is alive while they are the one who is dead. I ask them: “What would you tell your loved one? Would you say ‘be depressed if you love me’? Or would you say ‘Enjoy your life!’’?”

In reality, the best way to honor the person you lost is to authorize yourself to laugh again. It is to allow yourself to live your dreams. It is to transform this loss into a source of energy. So that 10 years from now, when people ask you: “Where did you find all this strength?” “How did you get all this determination?”, you could answer: “One thing that gives me energy and strength today is the possibility of honoring someone who was dear to me and that I lost. Each time I do something for myself, I do it for both of us.”