What Abi Taught Us Read Free Page A

Bonanno, whose work I refer to in this book, is one of the few pioneering researchers pursuing this line of scientific inquiry. However, his findings have yet to have a significant impact on the mainstream public. Ask anyone what they know about grief and loss, and it’s the five-stages model, not Bonanno’s studies indicating the substantial numbers of resilient grievers, that they’ll tell you about.
    Fearful of being accused of applying additional pressures on the bereaved, mainstream grief advice maintains its experience-focused stance and its ‘anything goes’ approach. As a result, most mourners are unaware that there are things they can do that assist the process of healthy bereavement. When wellbeing science has proved that the way we choose to think and the way we choose to act have a substantial influence on our wellbeing, and resilience studies have shown how most people naturally bounce back from all sorts of traumas (including bereavement),it struck me as time to test the effectiveness of my own research field on my personal trauma.
    I freely acknowledge that many mourners won’t want to adopt a self-help approach to bereavement, but it is also my experience that many do. This book aims to give those people a range of evidence-backed tools to experiment with, to support their gradual return to living fully engaged and meaningful lives.
    THE WAY WE CHOOSE TO THINK AND THE WAY WE CHOOSE TO ACT HAVE A SUBSTANTIAL INFLUENCE ON OUR WELLBEING.
    Trevor and I agreed from the outset that, if we were going to try to return to normal as quickly as we could, that did not mean we were going into denial. If we did this (went back to work, went out and socialised, carried on with our lives), then we had to promise ourselves that when we felt like shit we’d admit it. We still do. When we want to cry, we will let ourselves. When we want to leave somewhere because staying on seems too futile, we’ll get up and go. No questions asked, no explanation required. When we want to stay in bed, we’ll do that too.
    Throwing yourselves into recovery doesn’t mean hiding from grief, pain, misery, aching. It just means you go with the present experience—when these emotions come, you open up to them and let them in—but you choose to get up in the morning and get out in the knowledge that, if you want to win this fight for survival, you’ve got to step up and take control.
    We had no choice in Abi’s death, but I believe we do have choices in the way we grieve, and that exerting intentional control over our thoughts and actions helped us weather thoseterrible first six months, and have continued to be useful as months begin to turn into years. Borrowing again from Viktor Frankl: ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’ 6 While my way may not be your way, I have included here the strategies (ways of thinking and acting) that many others have used to nurture their personal resilience in the face of adversity.
    Because the passage of time undoubtedly plays its own role in our journey through grief, this book is divided into two parts. Chapters 2 – 11 concern Recovery , and contain strategies I found helpful in the immediate aftermath of the girls’ deaths. The remaining chapters focus on Reappraisal and Renewal as we start to reassess our lives in the wake of our loss, and consider the myriad ways to honour our loved ones and move forward into the future without them there. Grieving is no linear progression (meaning, you don’t start at A and work your way to Z); it’s more like an exhausting, frustrating and ghoulish game of Snakes and Ladders (back and forth, up and down). Your grief is unlikely to follow the same progression as mine, so just dip in and out, read back and forth, take your time and find which pieces of grief ’s jigsaw work for you. The pieces that helped me make sense of