A recent, personal loss has given me a chance to reflect on how values can help us to navigate the complex process of grief. This is a personal blog, that you may find upsetting if you have also recently lost someone close to you.
Using an Acceptance and Commitment approach
At Becoming International we use an acceptance and commitment approach (ACT) to working with clients, whether individually or in groups. As a result, uncovering and working with values are often a key element in our sessions. Values, in ACT, are a tool to provide direction in life, a compass toward a full and meaningful life.
I use ACT in many parts of my life and know the benefit of paying attention to flexibly acting on values. However, a recent loss got me thinking how values. and the way these are used in ACT, might help me navigate the complex process of grief.
This thing called grief
Recently, my mum died, quite suddenly. For the first time in my life, I found myself wondering how I would navigate this thing called grief. I’d lost beloved pets and three close grandparents. but this was my first experience of losing someone who had been a steady, constant and loving presence in my life for 60 years.
We all know that there is no manual, no five-point checklist for wading through the mire of grief. One friend helpfully described it as a veil descending, which she assured me, would one day lift again. There was at least hope in imagining the fog would someday clear.
However, other friends, in trying to be helpful, proceeded to tell me that I must be feeling X or Y and most definitely Z. Not only that, but I was also assured that, in their experience, all their friends had felt that way too.
At that point I don’t think I knew what I was feeling. Despite my training in psychology, I was struggling to name any feelings as I sat the middle of this fog of grief. Well, except for the incredible feeling of guilt – guilt that here I was, a daughter who’d lost her mum, and yet in my grieving, I wasn’t sad enough, crying enough or feeling the pain of loss enough. It kept going round my mind “What a terrible heartless person I must be. Did I not love my mum enough to feel X or Y or Z?”
Navigating grief
What I did know was that a fog had descended (which undoubtedly carried my un-nameable emotions and thoughts) and it was pulling me around and out of shape. So that’s when I turned to ACT.
I reached first for my favourite ACT tool of Dropping Anchor: acknowledging my thoughts and feelings as best I can (or at least naming them ‘the fog’); coming back into my body by pushing my feet in the floor, sitting up straight and taking a breath; then whilst noticing the room around me and engaging back in what I am doing. Repeating the cycle of dropping anchor gave me the space to remind myself of, and use my values to navigate the grief process.
Values to navigate by
Values provide a compass for our lives. Following our values helps us to move towards the life we want to lead and the person we want to be. In my experience with clients, we can often easily see how to live our values in the way we treat other people. We know how to be caring towards others, to act in a way that builds trust, to be enthusiastic with other people and so on. But we find it much more difficult to apply our values to how we treat ourselves.
Applying our values to ourselves means asking the question, “I how can I be [insert one of your values here] with myself?” You can remind yourself of a few of your key values as you do this. For me, it meant asking, “What does it mean when I am courageous with myself, or find freedom in myself, or act in a way that is authentic with myself?”
Applying my values to myself
What a lightbulb moment that was. Just like in the rest of my life, my values acted as a compass through the fog and uncertainty of grief. When I applied three of my core values to myself, to how I want to be in the midst of all this, it helped me to see how I might act. It went something like this:
Courage – to back myself and my instinct, to believe my body knows how to grieve even if I’ve never experienced anything to this depth before, to be brave enough to feel what I feel and not what someone has told me I ought to feel, recognising that might change over time.
Freedom – to let myself go with the emotions, to call my emotions fog if that describes the jumble of feelings wrapped in that white misty veil, to choose what I say yes to doing and to stand on my firm ground and decline events when they don’t seem to enhance my life right now.
Authenticity – to remember how much my mum loved me, to feel the value she placed on me and who I am, just as me, to loosen the grip on needing to be anyone other than me as I grieve.
A way of being in grief
Suddenly I had a way of being each day. It no longer seemed that I was lost in the fog. I am not suggesting I had a road map for the grieving process, or any idea when it might lessen or reduce. But what I did have was a compass. Living my values allowed me to take a step towards who I wanted to be and how I wanted to act as I navigated the emotional impact of losing my beautiful, lovely mum who had loved me for over 60 years.
In loving memory of Helen Cunningham, 1933-2023.
