I attended two introductory Healthy Grieving workshops and the two-day training. The introductory workshops are like snapshots, whereas in the two-day training you get to experience and understand the process more in slow motion.

The workshops and the training reinforced the awareness that I have conceptualized my experience rather than living it or feeling it. I was able to clearly see my pattern of withholding and intellectualizing my experience.  I know that as a result of early trauma and a near death experience, I was drawn to study psychology, and was seduced by the framework of understanding the pyscho-social journey. I more or less turned over my identification to the process of studying these concepts.  They all made sense to me but they did not touch into my personal emotional experience; they conceptualized it but they weren’t it.

Psychology is a template. It isn’t the real thing. It’s a description of something.  It’s like taking a photograph of the experience. It’s not actually what you’re experiencing; it’s a way of objectifying what is going on within the experience.  It’s very easy to fall in love with understanding. Very easy.  It’s a descriptor, but it is not the direct experience.  I became hypnotized by understanding.   I would say that the training reinforced the awareness that I have conceptualized my experience rather than living it or feeling it.

I very much appreciated the awareness of knowing what I have been doing to myself — which was substituting concepts for direct experience.  In studying psychology I put myself in a state where I was somewhat satisfied with understanding cause and effect. That became a soothing kind of state, but it was not the direct state of feeling; it was more thinking.

When I attended the first Healthy Grieving workshop, I saw people being directed into feeling. I volunteered at the next workshop so that I would not be so quick to intellectualize what I was experiencing.  I also had the opportunity to see others do what I do, and then go into experiencing and feeling. That’s the wonderful power of a group, the opportunity to see others and to see yourself in others.  What you get to observe in the workshops and the training is very powerful.

The Healthy Grieving work is touching in on a fundamental principle to feel, not understanding — which is helpful — but directly experiencing and releasing emotion, which is what  I watched others  experience in that first demonstration and I wanted to experience myself. So I volunteered to be the subject because I wanted to be directed — almost pushed — into feeling, rather than talking about feelings or understanding why the feelings were there.  Those are important, but they are not the same as directly having the experience . . . . which I learned very  early in life to avoid.  I just shut down.

I was excited about the opportunity of being taken through the process, participating in a direct experience and the challenge to be within the scenes that had been intellectualized within me, to directly experience them,  because I knew I had  really intellectualized a lot of my way of looking at myself and others

Going through the process of being within the field of those emotions — not talking about them but being in them — requires courage.  There is a risk there.  But the idea that you can feel what you have covered up is a very simple thing. And the beauty is that as you’re tasting it, it gets dismantled. It’s dissolved. You discover that it has no real power.  All the power has been in the denial and the suppression of the event. In itself, it’s really quite harmless. The emotion that was there in the past — I carried that trauma for decades — was real in the past. In the present it gets dissolved.

I would describe the effect of going through the process by saying that it renewed my own life.  It renewed the willingness I had to go into feelings and let them teach me. What I can say about the Healthy Grieving process is that I had a direct knowing.  A direct experience that has renewed my life.

Another real benefit of the workshops and training was that I saw so clearly that I have been disengaged.  And I have been able to take that awareness into my life. I can’t say that my resistance to feeling is completely gone, but there has been a lasting effect from the Healthy Grieving experience. It has made me more sensitive to my own history of intellectualizing or withdrawing. I no longer have the willingness to withdraw as I might have prior to the experience.

This work has the potential to be meaningful and liberating. Those are the possibilities of the Healthy Grieving process. I also want to say that rather than David’s lack of academic training in psychology being any sort of a drawback, I think it’s a real asset. I find his approach very refreshing because he is not constrained by the conventions of our training. He is able to see things and express things in a fresh and new way that really gets to the heart of the matter.

For anyone who reads the description of the Healthy Grieving process and feels themselves drawn to it… I would say, pay attention to the draw. Come to a workshop or training and have the Healthy Grieving experience.

Robert Kaplan, MSW

Robert has studied and trained in secular psychotherapy, pastoral counseling and hospice service. In addition to a private practice, Robert’s background includes teaching Adult Development in the Transpersonal Counseling program at Naropa University and serving as a volunteer chaplain at Boulder Community Hospital.   

Although it is not officially one of the six steps of the Healthy Grieving process, we sometimes begin the process by defining the relationship to the person being grieved. This requires diving deep, being brave, and being honest (Step #1 of the process) because the actual relationship is often not obvious or not what we have told ourselves.

For example, a daughter, when asked to define her relationship with her mother, started by saying, “I was her daughter.”  But when asked to go a little deeper and describe the relationship more accurately, she realized, “I was a caretaker to my mother.”

A married woman who lost her husband might easily say that she was a wife to her husband, but the actual relationship might be better described as a needy child who was taken care of by her husband – or, on the flip side, sometimes a woman is a mother to her husband and takes care of him.

A girl whose older brother had died started by describing the relationship as one of brother and sister, but taken a little deeper, realized that the actual relationship was that she was an admirer who worshipped her older brother but was always ignored by him.

Another woman in grieving her father realized that the relationship wasn’t really a father/daughter relationship; they were more peers, and indeed she was often the more emotionally mature person in the relationship.

Other examples include: My mother was my biggest fan. I was a competitor to my sister. I was a parent to my little brother. I was a subject to my wife who was my boss. My best friend was my buffer from aloneness. I was a buddy to my dad, a trophy to my boyfriend, a meal ticket to my wife.

The point of the exercise is to look beneath the label (daughter, son, friend, grandfather, husband, wife, etc.) and ask yourself what was the real relationship or the actual dynamic.

Why is this important?

One of the most basic principles of the Healthy Grieving process is that “no healing can take place at the level of a story.”  It is common for someone to start with one description – “We were very close, we were soul mates, we had a wonderful marriage, I adored my older brother, my sister was my best friend” – and end up somewhere quite different.

Starting the grieving process by honestly describing the relationship to the person you have lost can help get underneath the story of the relationship to the actual dynamic.  This can be a powerful first step on in being honest, which is an important prerequisite to real and lasting healing.