Hypnosis, Grief and Sadness: living through a loss

Grief is not an illness

Grief is a normal reaction to loss, and it runs on no calendar

Grief is a normal process in the face of a loss: a person, a pet, a break-up, a job, a social standing…

It touches the emotions, the body, sleep and concentration, and both its intensity and its length vary enormously from one person and one bond to the next (Canadian Mental Health Association, Quebec division).

There is no "normal" duration, no date by which you should have "moved on". And the well-meant instructions ("you have to turn the page", "life goes on") say more about the discomfort of the people around you than about what you should be feeling.

A word too about the famous "stages of grief" (denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, acceptance): that model, widespread as it is, does not describe a compulsory route. Accepting a loss (of a person, of a particular relationship, of a working life or even of a whole part of your life, as with emigration) does not climb steps in order.

It swings, with waves that come and go, steps back that are nothing of the sort, guilty lulls and relapses on a cold Sunday in November or while looking at family photographs. If you are not "following the stages", you are doing nothing wrong: you are grieving like a human being.

What Hypnosis offers in the face of a loss

What hypnosis does, concretely, and what it will never do

Let us say first what it will never do: make you forget, erase the attachment, or hurry a process that has its own pace.

What it does:

• Calm the flooding
  When the waves are so violent that they stop you functioning (sleeping, eating, looking after the children…), the work in therapeutic hypnosis puts supports in place: an inner place of respite, anchors of calm, sleep that comes back (see Sleep).
  Not to run from the pain, but to cross it without drowning.
• Free the good memories from the images of the end.
  This is one of the most valuable pieces of work in the field: when the last image has planted itself across all the others, gentle work at putting it at a distance takes away its violence and gives access back to the good. That work happens at your pace, in safety, never by "reliving" difficult moments.
• Loosen the guilt.
  The "I should haves" of grief resist logic. You can know perfectly well that you could not have foreseen it, and the guilt still holds.
  In hypnosis, you can revisit the context with what you knew at the time, not what you know now. And sometimes ask for, and receive, forgiveness symbolically.
• Say what was not said.
  Symbolic dialogue under hypnosis (speaking to the person, telling them the love, sometimes the anger, the goodbye…) is one of the oldest and most soothing tools in supporting grief. It claims nothing more than what it is: words finally spoken, which release the person carrying them.
• Lift the ban on feeling better.
  Finding taste again, laughing again, loving again without betraying anyone, because feeling better is not forgetting, and faithfulness to those we have loved is not measured in suffering.

The losses we support people through

• The loss of someone close: a partner, a parent, a friend…
  With its particular shapes: sudden loss with no preparation and no goodbye, or the grief of a family carer, worn out by years of caring and adrift when the role stops.
• The loss of a child and perinatal grief
  The most painful there is. Our support then happens in connection with specialised professionals and associations, never on its own.
• Break-ups and divorces
  A separation is a real bereavement: of the person, but also of the life imagined together, and it deserves better than "you will find someone else" (see Love Life and Relationships).
• The loss of a pet
  Too often minimised ("it was only a cat") when the bond was daily and the love real. Your sorrow is legitimate, full stop.
• And the losses nobody sees:
  The country left behind after a hurried emigration, the miscarriage nobody was told about, the retirement that turned out too quiet after an intense working life...
  These bereavements without "official" recognition are often the loneliest, and having a space to live them changes a great deal.
• Children and grief have their own kind of support: stories, drawings, rituals at their level. With one recommendation: do not keep them at a distance "to protect them", because children grieve with what is explained to them, and often imagine worse from what is kept from them (see Hypnosis for Children).

When other kinds of help come first, and the signals to take seriously

In the first weeks, it is the people around you, the rituals and close support that carry you. Our kind of support often finds its place later, once everyone has gone home and the telephone has stopped ringing.

Some situations, though, are first a matter for health professionals: when, after long months, the pain stays as crushing as on the first day and stops you functioning. What the medical references describe as grief that finds no way out (Mayo Clinic). A psychologist or a doctor is then the right door, and our support will come alongside.