John the Atheist

One Way to Handle Grief: Just Get Over It. Some People Resume Their Lives Without Obsessing About a Loss They've Suffered. It Seems to Work.

By Charles Zanor

Special to The Washington Post

Tuesday, July 29, 2008; HE04

The day after Eleanor Clift's husband died of kidney cancer in March 2005, "The McLaughlin Group" host John McLaughlin phoned. Would Clift, a Newsweek contributing editor, be in the television studio the next day, he wanted to know, for the customary Friday taping of the show?

After consulting with her son, Clift agreed.

A mildly startling decision, perhaps, but a reflection of a kind of resilience that is often overlooked.

Clift's recently published book, "Two Weeks of Life," chronicling her final days with her husband, Tom Brazaitis, demonstrates they had a solid marriage and a healthy dependence on each other. Her decision to occupy her usual seat that Friday and bat around the political issues of the day did not reflect a lack of caring but a way of coping.

When I asked her if she had drawn any positive lessons from her experience, Clift named only one:

"It's really a gift to help usher someone out of life. It's a moving experience, and I kept trying to be mindful of the fact that this is part of life. . . . And if I could just somehow get through it and honor his memory and keep on living life as best I can and as normal as I can, that's what I would do."

That response is one Christopher Davis, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, has come to recognize. Davis has spent more than a decade studying how people respond to the death of a loved one. Eight years after a mine disaster in Nova Scotia took the lives of 26 coal miners, he and his colleagues interviewed 52 surviving family members, including 11 widows. Three groups emerged from his analysis of the responses: mullers (who extract positive lessons from the experience), chronic grievers and copers (like Clift).

The Nova Scotia interviews lasted two to three hours or longer, giving the family members plenty of room to speak their minds -- almost unheard of in these days of multiple-choice questionnaires and checklists. The people the researchers spoke with "wanted to tell their story," Davis told me.

The interviewers asked about the personal impact of the loss, whether anything positive had come of it, how it affected their philosophy of life and whether they ever tried to find a purpose for the death: the big "Why did this happen to me [or my husband or son or father]?"

The mullers were exactly the collection of successful grievers that Davis had expected to find. As he wrote in the 2008 "Handbook of Bereavement Research and Clinical Practice," published by the American Psychological Association, "People in this cluster tended to report losing a part of themselves, searching for and finding some meaning . . . and describing positive [personal] changes."

As Davis notes, this is consistent with 20 years of psychological literature reporting that many people eventually feel that a wrenching loss also had some benefits. I have a mnemonic device for this reaction: CPR. The "C" is for character (these people have been tested and strengthened); "P" is for perspective (they now see the world in a new way); "R" is for relationships (important people in their lives have taken on increased emotional significance).

The second group fared less well. They were the chronic grievers, stuck in many ways where they had been eight years earlier.

Almost all asked "Why did this happen?" Almost none found answers. The overwhelming majority felt nothing good had come from the experience, that it had shattered their beliefs about justice and the benevolent intentions of others.

The third group, the copers, were a surprise for Davis. Had he not designed the study to let participants speak for themselves, he might have missed them.

"They had an orientation to life, a way of looking at life, that said, 'You know what? [Bad stuff] happens. When it comes along, well, here it is.'

"I was blown away by one comment that one of the participants made . . . : 'If it hadn't been the explosion, it would have been a car accident, or it might have been cancer. It might have been something else.' You know, his days were numbered. It happened this way, and get used to it."

In contrast to the chronic grievers and the mullers, virtually none of the copers asked the "why" question. They did not feel the death had given them inner strength, and almost two-thirds said that as far as they could tell, nothing good had come of it.

The quiet coping response has not received a lot of attention in the loss literature. Yet if you look around, quiet copers seem to be everywhere.

When I asked a friend about the death of his mother several years ago, he told me this story:

"My father never complained during my mother's [neurodegenerative] illness. He just took care of her by himself until we finally had to put her in a nursing facility. . . . She was there for about a month before she died. . . . Right after that he went into planning mode, asking each of the [adult] kids how they felt about this and that funeral arrangement. . . . If you asked him how he felt, he'd tell you: I feel torn apart, I feel relieved, I miss her. But unless you asked him how he felt, he didn't really talk about his feelings."

About three days after the funeral, my friend noticed that his father didn't have his wedding ring on. (The removal, by the way, was no easy task; he had to have it done at the local fire station.) My friend asked him why he wasn't wearing it. Even though I can see his answer coming from a mile away, it still slays me: "Because I'm not married anymore."

He never had a period of nonfunctioning after his wife's death, and he soon found volunteer activities (a food-share program, a community garden) to devote time to. He made connections at the senior center as well.

He embodies the best qualities of the quiet copers, the people who roll up their sleeves and get to work, who deal with things by dealing with things.

It would be a big mistake to think, however, that the sleeve-rollers just move along without looking back.

Eleanor Clift told me that she continues to think about her husband every day: When she has a decision to make, she'll try to figure out what advice he would give her.

As a psychologist, I am a muller and a rehasher. I have to be. If I brought in casseroles for my patients instead of reviewing life events, I wouldn't be doing my job. Besides, I couldn't stop rehashing things if you paid me.

But can there be too much talking, reflecting, uncovering and exploring one's feelings? Sometimes it has to be better to just shut up and have a sandwich.

We mullers have managed to infuse popular culture with the idea that the unfailing exploration of your feelings will put you on the main road to personal happiness. Well, tell that to the copers. They seem to be doing just fine.

******************************

Charles Zanor is a practicing psychologist in Massachusetts. Comments:health@washpost.com.

The So-Called Law of Attraction is Commercial BS

Just Notice (& Do!) What Works - A Powerful Life Lesson

Many years ago I met a businessman who said he'd turned his $40,000 per year business into a $400,000 per year business in just 2 years. He asked if I wanted to know how he did it. I replied that of course I wanted to know. At the time I was struggling with my computer games business. I was able to pay my bills, but I wasn't getting ahead.

The lesson he taught me was quite simple. In fact, it's so simple that you're likely to dismiss it as obvious. I agree that it sounds like common sense, but it's not commonly applied. When you really put this idea into action, you can take your results to a whole new next level.
In a nutshell this was the lesson:

In life you will always have your ups and downs, your successes and failures. Sometimes things go well for you. Sometimes they go poorly.

When you succeed or fail, there's always a cause. You can backtrack your results to figure out what caused them. You might not be able to do this perfectly, but you'll usually have a pretty good idea of the contributing factors.

What caused your income, your health, and your relationships to improve over the past several years? What caused things to get worse? Can you identify the specific causes of your best and worst results?

Once you know the contributing factors to your hits and your misses, your goal is to deliberately do more of what causes the successes and deliberately do less of what caused the failures.

Of course some of the contributing factors may not be under your direct control, but some of those factors will be. Focus your efforts on what you can control, and don't worry about what's outside your control.

I must admit that it was hard for me to take this exercise seriously, but I decided to try it anyway. The businessman was certainly doing a lot better than I was, so maybe he knew something I didn't. I figured I had nothing to lose.

Let me give you a specific example of how I applied this to my games business.

When I first did this simple exercise, I noticed that my sales went up whenever I released a new computer game, and they tended to decline if I went too long without releasing something. That probably sounds obvious, but it was a powerful distinction for me at the time. You see... most of my time was actually spent developing games, which is definitely not the same thing as releasing games. I thought that as long as I was working on creating new games, I was doing intelligent, productive work that would eventually benefit my business financially. How wrong I was!

I got the idea that maybe I should turn my attention to releasing games instead of spending so much time and energy developing them. So instead of developing a whole new game from scratch, for my next project I created an expansion pack as an add-on product for my most successful game. The original game took six months to develop, but the expansion pack only took two weeks because it didn't require any special programming. It was just a pack of 20 extra levels for the same game.

This expansion pack earned about 35% as much money as the original game, which was an excellent return for so little effort. How would you like to permanently increase your income by 35% just by doing slightly different work for the next two weeks?

Next, I released a second expansion pack for the same game. This time I didn't even create the levels myself -- I had someone else do the work. Again there was a similar jump in sales. We're talking sustained increases, not a temporary surge followed by a drop.

Later I released a new version of the same game with five times as many levels as there were in the original release. Most of those levels were created by other people, so all I had to do was bundle everything together. I raised the price to reflect the added value, and that new version sold well for many years, earning many times what the original release earned. If I'd stopped at the original version, I'd have left most of the potential sales untapped.

Then I turned around and licensed that game to other companies, so I earned royalties from their sales as well. When another publisher released one of my games to their audience, my income went up again. It was the act of releasing games that made the difference. I didn't have to be the one to do it personally. I just had to set the cause in motion in order to enjoy the result.

Finally, I went on to publish other developer's games, paying a sales-based royalty to the original developer. By introducing other developers' games to my audience, I was able to release many more products than I could develop with my own team. This was a win for me, a win for the developers, and a win for my customers. In one month my business managed to release three new games whereas previously I was lucky to release one game per year. For my small business, that was quite an achievement.

I stopped publishing games years ago, but to this day I still receive monthly royalty checks. The checks are admittedly quite small now, but it's a nice reminder of the power of noticing what works.

By noticing that my results were improved by releasing games, not by developing them, I found a way to do more of the work that caused my sales to increase and less of the work that didn't. My business began to thrive, and it was profitable every year after I started applying this simple yet valuable lesson.

I used a similar strategy to build my personal development business, especially during the first year. When I somehow managed to get a small traffic increase, I figured out what caused it and tried to do more of it. When my traffic stagnated or went down, again I figured out the cause and tried to do less of it. Once I had a decent level of traffic, I did the same thing with respect to generating income.

When I was first launching StevePavlina.com, I didn't know how to build a successful business in this field, but by noticing what worked and what didn't, I was able to adjust course to increase the hits and reduce the misses. Some of those lessons seemed counter-intuitive at first, but the hard data doesn't lie.

You can apply this same idea to improve your results in any area of your life -- your income, your career, your relationships, your health -- even your spiritual development. Notice what creates a hit for you, and do more of it. Notice what causes a flop or a dry spell, and do less of it.

A corollary to the above is that if you haven't had a hit for a long time, you can basically throw out whatever you're currently doing in that area because it clearly isn't working. You'll have to experiment more to figure out what does work. If you already know that your current efforts aren't working, there's no point in continuing along the same path.

You aren't doomed to become a victim of your past, but your past surely contains clues that can help you enjoy an even better present and future.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best.