Coping With Grief and Loss | Exercise

(Transcript of the video)

Back in Athens

I’m back in Athens for a couple of weeks, so I’m filming this video in my hometown. This is where I spent the first 30 years of my life. John Milton described Athens as the eye of Greece, mother of arts and eloquence.

But for me, Athens is the city that shaped my identity, my ideals and what I call home.

As I was writing the script for this video I stumbled upon a poem written by Lord Byron in 1810. You might think how’s this related to grief, but stay with me, it will make sense in a bit. So back to that poem about Athens.

Maid of Athens, ere we part,

Give, oh give me back my heart !

Or, since that has left my breast,

Keep it now, and take the rest !

Hear my vow before I go,

Αθήνα, Ζωή μου, σε αγαπώ!

He used Greek in the last verse, and the thing is that I had to record this several times as there was a knot down my throat while I was reading out loud these verses.

So, in today’s video, I’ll show you an exercise you can use when dealing with grief. This exercise is based on expressive therapy.

Expressive therapy is a method that incorporates creativity and artistic activities, like drawing, dancing, acting, writing poetry, and playing music, as a means of treatment.

The end goal of expressive therapy is to give people the ability to express themselves in a very personal way. To express themselves through an experience.

And now you might think, well what’s the link between grief and the introduction about Athens?

You see, I enjoy making these exercise videos because as I film them, I do the exercise I give you myself.

So, inevitably, I’m expressing my most intimate thoughts in these videos as I go through the exercises.

The Two Types of Losses

And today’s video is about grief. Freud says that in grief, the world appears poor, because of the loss of the loved one.

However, there are two types of losses: There’s the physical loss, which refers to tangible loss, such as the loss of a relationship, or the death of a loved one; and then there’s the symbolic loss, which refers to abstract loss, such as the loss of a homeland, the loss of social environment, the loss of social identity which many immigrants, like my self, experience.

So as I go through today’s exercise I will use as an example the Grief that I have felt for having left my country and the people I love behind. You can use whatever makes you grieve. Maybe it’s a relationship that ended, a relationship that never started, the loss of a loved one, or any kind of attachment that has been lost.

Because, fundamentally, that’s what grief is. It’s the process we’re going through every time an attachment we had to someone or something, has been lost.

So, before we grab a pen and paper to go through the exercise, let’s say a couple of words about the stages of grief.

The Stages of Grief

You can think of grief being completed in four stages:

The first one is Numbness: It’s the phase that immediately follows the loss. In order to emotionally survive the initial shock of the loss, we shut down our feelings and we feel numb.

The second is Yearning and Searching: This phase is characterized by many feelings, such as sadness, anger, anxiety, and confusion. When we enter this phase, we experience a longing for the person or situation we lost and we want them to return to fill the emptiness we feel.

The third one is Disorganization and Despair: Where we start to accept the reality of the loss. When we reach that phase we experience feelings of apathy, anger, despair, and hopelessness. This makes us want to withdraw and disengage from others and the activities we enjoyed.

The fourth and last phase is Reorganization and Recovery: which is where we begin to return to the new state of "normal." The feelings of sadness, anger, and despair begin to decrease and more positive memories of the person or the situation we lost begin to emerge.

At that fourth stage is where our normal energy levels and weight will stabilize and we’ll start feeling better again. That’s because during the previous three stages, we usually experience eating disorders and sleeplessness which brings our entire system down.

What often happens is that when we grieve and the grief is unresolved, we get stuck in the second stage. The stage of yearning and searching. And when we get stuck there for a prolonged period of time, then we internalize the mourning and that’s what usually leads to major depression.

Grief Exercise

Now that we clarified some basic things about grief, grab a pen and paper and lets start wit the exercise! I have my notebook here, where I do all me exercises, and I’ll show you through my example how this works.

Today’s exercise is very simple. It’s divided in 2 steps. The first step is to draw a picture of your grief. Yep, it’s as simple as that. And at the second step we’ll ask ourselves some specific questions about our drawing.

This is not a drawing contest, you don’t need to know how to draw and you don’t need to have any special talents. The idea is not to create a Picasso masterpiece but to find an expressive path to explore your grief.

You can use just a pen, coloured pencils, or markers, whatever you feel will help you express yourself. See it as a time to play. No one will judge you here.

So I will start drawing something that I often use in my dreams and is linked to my journey away from home. See when I was at the yearning and searching stage of my grief for leaving Athens, and I was feeling this endless sadness and anger for having left Greece, I often saw the same dream.

In my dream, I’m in this deep dark tunnel. There is some light at the end of it, but when I walk to reach the part where the light comes from, I see that it’s not the end of the tunnel. It’s just that the tunnel has a glass part, where I could see the outside world.

And the outside world looks extraordinary. But then I have to continue down the tunnel to find the next glass part, and the next one. In my dream, I know that I’m going in the right direction but I can’t see the end of the tunnel. I just see the glass bits along the way.

What’s really interesting is to observe the feelings that emerge as I’m doing those exercises with you.

Here are some other examples of famous artists who expressed their Grief through their drawings.

This one is called ‘Oak Fractured by Lightning’ by Maxim Vorobiev. He draw this painting in 1842 ****as an allegory on his wife’s death. You can see how this emotionally-charged picture captures the shock and pain of losing a loved one.

This one is called ‘Still Life with Skull, Leeks and Pitcher’ painted in 1945 by Pablo Picasso. Picasso was deeply affected by the Second World War. The huge change war brought to people’s lives, the death, migration, and overall change in what people thought was normal.

Picasso’s painting invites us to think about where loss and death fit into our daily existence by placing a skull amongst everyday objects.

The last one I’ll show you is ‘Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate)’ by Vincent Van Gogh, 1890. This is the painting of a war veteran named Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland. Writing in his diary, Van Gogh described the sight of the grieving old man as proof of the existence of “something on high”, calling it “unutterably moving” to see him bent double in sadness and grief.

And this is the drawing of my grief. Nothing like the masterpieces I just showed you, but it does the job for what I feel.

Questions to Ask

Now let’s go to the second part of the exercise where we’ll ask 3 very specific questions.

The first one is:

How did drawing your grief make you feel? It might sound a very simplistic question but going deep into it may give you some useful insight.

The thing with drawing is that it involves the imagination and forces our brains to create a mental image of the subject or the idea we have in our brains.

In other words, drawing enables us to think in a different manner, in amore open-ended manner. It boosts our critical thinking skills, which can produce new insights and creative thoughts.

So when I was drawing my picture I could feel the anticipation of looking though the glass opening. I could feel that I was where I had to be regardless of how bad it made me feel. Because I knew that I’m going to the right way.

On top of that, when we draw, our brain releases endorphins, and helps build new connections and pathways. We actively use both sides of our brain, the right for creativity, and the left for logical thinking. And this helps us develop the ability to focus and think strategically.

So another thing that I felt as I was drawing the tunnel, was a. ways to get out of it faster and b. If I can’t get out if faster, what can I learn from this experience? The experience of being in the tunnel that is.

The second question is:

What do the elements of my drawing mean to me?

So in my example I have 3 elements. The first one is the tunnel. Which if I think about it, represents the dark place I am when I feel the grief for having left behind my loved ones and my hometown.

The other element is the glass parts of the tunnel, which gives me the ability to have a glimpses of the world that awaits me outside of the tunnel. So these glass bits are there to give me some small hope of what coming, even though I don’t know when its coming.

And the last element is the world outside of the tunnel. Now, I do not know how this looks. It’s blurry and I can’t really tell what’s out there. But the fact that my heart jumps every time I reach the glass parts, makes me think that there’s something good waiting for me at the end of the tunnel, even though I can’t clearly see the end.

So write down those questions, start drawing and see what comes out for you! You don’t have to be an artist, just let the pen flow and scribble a picture of your grief. Set a timer for 20 minutes and start drawing!

Drawing makes us slow down, be patient and pay attention. It helps us express emotions we might find hard to express through words because it engages both our mind and our body.

And when this happens there’s little room for distractions. This makes us focus in solutions and can help us get out of the yearning and despair phases of grief.

So grab a pen and start drawing the picture of your grief!

If you liked this video hit the like button. It’s a small act you can do that means a lot to me and to the future of this channel.

Im Dimitris and I share insights and tools on how to live a well-lived life.

References

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Parkes, C.M., 2010. Grief: Lessons from the Past, Visions for the Future. Psychologica Belgica, 50(1-2), pp.7–26. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/pb-50-1-2-7

Parkes, Colin. (1998). Facing loss. BMJ (Clinical research ed.). 316. 1521-4.

Lear J. Freud. 2. utg. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

Kanwal GS. Death: The last chapter. I: Akhtar S, Kanwal GS, red. Bereavement. Personal Experiences and Clinical Reflections. New York and London: Routledge, 2016: 169–90

Kernberg O. Some observations on the process of mourning. Int J Psychoanal 2010; 91: 601–19. [PubMed][CrossRef]

Bruce, C.A. (2007). Helping patients, families, caregivers, and physicians, in the grieving process. J Am Osteopath Assoc. 107(12 Suppl 7):ES33–ES40.

Tyler, Christopher W, and Lora T Likova. “The role of the visual arts in the enhancing the learning process.” Frontiers in human neuroscience vol. 6 8. 8 Feb. 2012, doi:10.3389/fnhum.2012.00008