When change comes round, it can often take us aback, setting us off course and leading us down a rocky road of uncertainty.
You might be reading this now, wondering how on earth you got here and what comes next. Change can be scary, but understanding the route to mental freedom is half the battle to feeling like yourself again.
As a practitioner, I walk alongside fellow travelers to help them understand how the brain works, and how we can navigate the change or grief we are enduring. Each of us has the capacity to survive change; knowing how that actually happens, and what you can do to protect yourself through it, is the practice of solution-focused hypnotherapy.
It may seem counterintuitive to think about "solutions" when you are grieving. This approach in no way minimizes or denigrates the pain you are going through; rather, it is there to protect and serve you through these stages in small, incremental ways.
When we lose someone or something of significance, they have been a part of our daily existence for a long time. Our brains have been "programmed" to expect the patterns of the people we love. When we lose them, our brains literally have to unlearn those patterns.
A Lesson from the Hospice
Once a week, I head to a hospice to work an evening shift of a couple of hours, supporting patients and relatives. I have been doing this for a while now, and it is incredibly humbling. Recently, the realization of just how deeply I connect with and enjoy the company of the people I meet there really hit me.
For a number of weeks, I had been visiting one lady who had seen many of her fellow companions depart this world from her room. Over time, that room became synonymous with her, and I grew attached to her. I only had a short time with her in the grand scheme of things, but her stories and companionship were incredibly valuable to me—and I hope mine was to her.
After she passed, making my way past her room left me with a sharp pang of sadness. I missed her. My brain had associated that specific door number with her presence. Getting myself past it—and past the expectation of seeing her—is going to take some time to assimilate.
I know logically that it is possible to navigate this difference, but the heart processes things much slower than the head. Training my brain to realize that time and space have moved on is a practice I will have to work at.
Why the Brain Struggles to Catch Up
Think of a physical space you associate with someone you have lost, or even a simple object—like a dining table that has been in the exact same spot for as long as you can remember. When that object is moved, our hearts register the change immediately, but it takes a while for our brains to fully "clock" it.
If your brain expects to experience something and doesn't, studies show that a particular variety of neurons fire in a way that is detectable through an electroencephalogram (EEG). The electrodes on a person's scalp detect a distinct change in electrical voltage the very millisecond the brain recognizes that the "wrong" thing has happened or that something is missing.
In short: When we lose someone, our brains take time to physically catch up to the new reality.
Our sense of loss is measured in closeness. When we lose that physical closeness, our subconscious still believes the person is there. Despite all conscious logic telling us they are gone, the brain's mismatch can make us feel a strange sense of guilt—as if we simply aren't trying hard enough to find them.
When I reached that empty room in the hospice and struggled to walk past it, I knew intellectually that the lovely lady was gone. Yet, my brain's automated programming insisted otherwise. And that was without the profound closeness I would have felt had she been a member of my own family.
Giving Ourselves Grace
Giving ourselves the time to comprehend a loss is critical. We cannot rush it. We must give our bodies and our brains the grace and time to catch up with one another.
Hypnotherapy cannot "cure" grief—grief is not a disease, but a natural, painful, and beautiful part of the human existence. However, hypnotherapy can provide you with the safe space and time to gently assimilate to your "new norm." Allowing yourself the space to understand why you feel this way is the first step toward finding your footing again.
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