Is it possible to reset life? Everything will pass but nothing will be forgotten… Rebirth is a painful business… Is it easy to be born? Is it the one who is born or the one who gives birth? Is it pain or helplessness that forces you to live “from scratch”?
Do we only mourn what is finished and lost, or do we also mourn something we wanted to have but couldn’t? Prof. Dr. Vamık Volkan describes mourning as “the act of mourning” and defines it as follows: Mourning means ‘establishing an intense relationship with the mental twin of the lost person or thing.’
We continue on our path by losing. Paradoxically, “loss” is what moves us forward. We move forward by losing… In fact, we move forward by giving up. In fact, we move forward thanks to our giving up. Sometimes the mourning we experience is not about a concrete object of loss. We also mourn the part of ourselves we lost in the past. Like the sadness of our own self… “Mourning the part of ourselves that we lost”…
Stages of Grief
In the story of the stages of grief, John Bowlby, who studied the bond between parents and their babies in the 1960s, and Colin Murray Parkes, who has books on grief, stand out. Bowlby and Parkes spoke to 22 people who had lost a spouse and identified four stages of grief: numbness, searching and longing, depression, and reorganizing one’s life.
Then Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who was deeply interested in the treatment of dying people and who did extensive work on this, came up with the five stages as we know them today, as a result of her interactions with dying patients. These stages were very well accepted, so we saw them being used for other emotional reactions as well.
The stages of grief are now familiar to everyone; Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Researchers found that disbelief (denial) is the weakest emotion and acceptance is the strongest. Longing is the second strongest emotion and in fact, depressive mood is dominant in all stages. Also, these emotions do not have a sharp order. However, the order in the five-stage theory is more consistent.
Again, it is seen that the research determines the decline of negative emotions after six months, but the decline of these emotions does not mean that this mourning is completely completed for the person who is grieving. The continuation of emotions is one thing, coping with these emotions is another. We see the continuity of emotions, but we also see the differences in overcoming them better after this period.
Although the word anger in the anger phase may reflect negatively on you; in the clinic, the anger phase can be a clue that tells you that denial is over and acceptance has begun. The most painful phase I have experienced in psychotherapy is the bargaining phase. ‘‘If I had given the medicine, would he have lived longer?’’, ‘‘Wouldn’t he have been upset if I hadn’t said that word?’’ etc.. it takes time to continue from here, in fact this phase is a progressive phase. In fact, it is another proof that you don’t have to go through all the phases in order.
A client of mine said the following: ‘‘If my mourning ends, wouldn’t that be unfair to him?’’ What I noticed here is the word “ending”. The word ending sounds threatening and makes you feel guilty. Therefore, completion should be used instead of ending. Mourning does not end, mourning settles and is completed. If you look at the completion of mourning as the correct positioning in your life, you will see the accompanying form of mourning.
The Subtle Connection of Loss
Have you heard the scientific information that flowers scream when they are stressed? Hearing silent screams is valid for all living things. The connection of living things to living things is based on this. The fact that someone who says I hear their silent screams is a stranger to a moment when you are screaming also causes mourning… Here, there is the mourning of the action you cannot see, the trust you have lost. In other words, there is again a piece of loss. Where there is mourning, there is always a loss. So what I want to show is; Loss & Mourning synchrony.
Here, while talking about the missing piece, it would be valuable to make a meaning about the piece. There is an Italian children’s book: Pezzettino. Pezzettino means “a small piece” in Italian and the book questions a meaning about this piece. We, living beings, become whole when the pieces come together. We become whole with our pieces. So sometimes the thing that hurts is one of our pieces. That piece hurts. This does not destroy our wholeness.
Don’t you think that when something falls and breaks into pieces, it proves that it is whole? When you are broken and sad, we feel like we are broken into pieces. That’s when wholeness comes into play but we cannot feel it because of the pain and ache…
Every mourning begins with a loss… It is completed when you reunite with yourself. When you get in touch with that trauma and yourself, many things change… Again, there is an Italian saying: ‘‘Tutto passa niente si dimentica.’’ It means: ‘‘Everything passes, nothing is forgotten.’’ A part that heals but is not forgotten in mourning, trying to position itself in the most beautiful position.
It turns out that what we call mourning… everyone can give fingerprint answers to a sentence that starts with this. In other words, research has shown that there is no “right” or “wrong” way of mourning. Everyone goes through different experiences. A person mourns according to these different experiences and their unique characteristics. There is always a feeling of loss, but mourning changes shape over time.
The point is not to reset life, but to adapt to the changing form and give it new meaning… the name of this section may be zero, maybe one, maybe three… It may not be possible to reset life, but to live it from the beginning…