Timothy often took a lawn chair to the cemetery to sit by Sally’s grave and talk to her. He’d tell her what he had been doing and how much he loved her. He often left the cemetery in tears. They’d been married 32 years. Two years after her death, Timothy still grieved her loss.
This was understandable, but when I discovered that he broke off every new relationship out of guilt, and that he went to the cemetery to cleanse himself for allowing a female friend in his life, I realized something was wrong. Timothy wasn’t progressing through the healing process of grief. He was “stuck.”
Many people who see pastors for counseling after the loss of a loved one (usually through death or divorce) come because they struggle to move through their pain and into new life. Time may have begun the healing, but it hasn’t finished the job. Not all their stories, however, are as unusual as Timothy’s.
Sue and Bill lost their baby in the ninth month of gestation. On a rainy afternoon, they invited me into their family room to plan the funeral. As we discussed the service, they also expressed the anger they both felt.
“I’m confused and I don’t understand why this happened,” said Bill. “Who is to blame?”
“I blame God,” Sue said. “I prayed for this pregnancy. I prayed for this baby. How could God do this?”
For months Bill and Sue came to my office. Often they would lash out at God, accusing him of killing their baby and robbing them of their future. At one level, their behavior was a normal display of the anger associated with grieving. But over time this pattern became an invariable mantra of woe. Their attitude toward God spilled anger into every area of their lives. Instead of progressing into further stages of grief, Sue and Bill were “stuck” in anger.
While the process of grieving varies from individual to individual, it typically follows a pattern. When the progression toward healing is obstructed, people often need help. And pastors can help them get “unstuck.”
Diagnosing the dilemma
One familiar progression of grief is the five-stage process outlined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, guilt or depression, and acceptance, in that order.
You can recognize a person who is “stuck” in one of these stages when his or her attitude, behaviors, relationships, or even theology become defined by one of the stages of grief over a prolonged period of time. Bill and Sue, for example, had allowed anger to dominate their emotions, and they consistently redefined God through that lens. For Timothy, his relational patterns suggested that he was stuck in guilt and depression.
I met Nancy several years ago at a grief workshop for a hospital staff. Each of the 12 participants shared their stories of grief. When Nancy’s turn came, she rigidly sat on the edge of her chair. Her voice cracked as she told us of the death of her mother when Nancy was six years old. The day of the funeral, when she expressed her want for attention by being loud and obnoxious, an aunt took her aside and demanded that she shape up and “be good” if she wanted to see her mother again in heaven.
For 30 years Nancy defined good grief as shaping up, pretending it didn’t hurt. After telling her story, she cried, and when we gave her permission to express her grief, she convulsed in a violent display of emotion that embarrassed her. She didn’t know how to express grief. She never returned to a workshop session.
Even after 30 years, she could not healthily admit and express grief. She couldn’t weep and “be good” at the same time. She was stuck in denial.
Our church’s minister to single adults, Dr. Wayne Hunsucker, and one of our deacons, Dr. Allan Josephson, who is also chair of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Department of the Medical College of Georgia, and I identified two techniques to enable the “grief-stuck” to continue the healing process.
Draw the line
Initially, grieving individuals tend to continue relating as they were accustomed to before their loss. They haven’t learned any other way to live except in relationship with the person they lost. In the case of a divorced woman, for example, she might continue living with the hope that if she could prove her love just one more time, he might not leave her after all. In the case of a widower, he might continue talking to his wife daily, for he hasn’t learned where else to turn.
Even though continuing in the old relationship is no longer possible, a grieving person may have a difficult time accepting the new reality and might not know how to move through the pain to begin a new life. The first thing we can do to help is to enable them to recognize the conclusion of the old life and the beginning of the new.
Wayne Hunsucker uses a technique he calls “drawing the line.” He draws a bold, white line across a chalkboard in front of the grieving person. “That line,” he says, “separates where you were from where you are now, between what was and what is.”
This simple, visual image helps people to understand that they have been reacting to life according to old patterns that just don’t work anymore. In grieving, many people react to their emotions as if those emotions are all that matter. The intense feelings stop them from seeing the life that could be lived. Drawing a concrete, practical line removes some of the focus on feelings and helps people visualize for the first time that life can exist after grief.
Many people respond with great energy to the idea of drawing an imaginary line. By keeping that line in their minds they begin to recognize their old, incapacitating patterns and adopt new, healthy patterns.
When Wayne met Jennifer, she was defeated. At our church’s divorce recovery workshop, Jennifer anxiously told her story. When she and Bob divorced after ten years of marriage, she felt a great deal of guilt. Bob had become more critical and less attentive to Jennifer over the years, and Jennifer responded by becoming more docile and malleable to Bob’s demands, trying to live the way Bob said she should. When he finally divorced her, she blamed herself for not living up to Bob’s expectations.
Wayne drew the line on the chalkboard for her and encouraged her over weeks of further counseling to draw it in her mind.
Then, one day, an excited, exuberant Jennifer called, “I got it! I got it!” She had been vacuuming when it hit her. She saw the bold, white line in her mind. She saw herself drawing the line. She was finally able to understand that she was Bob’s wife no more. And since she was no longer married to Bob, Bob had no authority over her home. Jennifer said she suddenly threw down the vacuum cleaner wand, thrust her hands on her hips, and shouted with great confidence, “This is my house!” From room to room she went, saying over and over again in each new room, “This is my house!” Jennifer was able to demarcate for herself a line between where she had been and where she was. She had begun the work of being present in her life, today.
For our earlier example, Timothy, his fixation on his deceased wife was denying him his future. A pastor could suggest that Timothy draw the line between the life he had with his wife and the new life he was called to. Yes, his love, respect, and appreciation for his wife will always be an important part of his life, but located in an appropriate place, his memory. Timothy could be reminded of an important hospice quote, “If we don’t let our loved ones die, they won’t let us live.”
Reframing
After a line has been drawn, life has forever been changed. But changed to what? How are new tomorrows shaped?
“Reframing” is a counseling technique that invites the person to focus on his or her loss from a different perspective. The loss doesn’t change, but the way one looks at the loss, understands the loss, and responds to the loss does. Just as a painting takes on new dimensions when given a new frame, people who reframe their grief can discover new strength.
The author of Hebrews gives an example: “If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desired a better country” (Heb. 11:15-16). Instead of bemoaning the loss of comforts in the previous land (as the Moses-led Israelites did many years later), Abraham’s people trusted that God was leading and blessing them. For Abraham, the “promised land” was more than a new place in which to dwell, it was also a reality of mind and heart, reframing life in the belief that God had called him to a significant new life.
Barbara and Mary had both been in grief counseling over their divorces. Each of these women was in her mid-forties and had been married for 20 years. The grief of divorce was similar for each of these women, but their willingness to reframe their lives was dramatically different.
Barbara was willing to allow her life and faith to be reshaped. She said, “This pain of divorce, my grief, has forced me to question my beliefs. My faith is being stretched and enlarged. The God I now believe in at age 45 is different from the God I believed in at age 25. I wonder, though, which of us has changed.”
In contrast, Mary remarked, “It has been a long time since my divorce, and things ought to be getting better. I don’t want my friends around, not even my church friends. Where is God in all my pain?”
While Barbara was willing to risk change with the prospect of growth, Mary was stuck. She refused to reframe her life.
Getting fitted for frames
Traumatic moments change people’s lives. They change people’s views of God, of themselves, and of life. Rather than battling to resist those changes, reframing frees a person to grow through them. But how do you help a person find the right frame?
For Bill and Sue, who lost their baby, their grief was stuck between their understanding that God shouldn’t allow such pain and the fact of their obvious suffering. Something needed to change to release that anger and enable them to resume a healthy grieving process.
After we talked about reframing, I guided them to look at the Psalms of lament (Psalm 22, 102, 130, and so on). I helped them to look at their child’s death, not inside the frame of a God who couldn’t understand suffering, but in the frame of a God present in it. Today, Bill and Sue are the parents of four healthy children. I still remember that rainy afternoon in their family room and thank God that he is present in our beginning and in all of our new beginnings.
Sheila had been married for 32 years when she discovered that her husband was having an affair. She was devastated. Though there were efforts at reconciliation, the affair only gave the couple reason to end a marriage that had long been dying.
When Wayne met Sheila she was an angry woman. She attended the first session of a divorce recovery workshop and sat through the entire two hours, not saying a word or physically responding to anything that was discussed.
As it happened, Sheila and Wayne walked out to the parking lot together. He asked her if she was all right, that it seemed to him she was very angry. She immediately told him that she would not be coming back to the workshop the next week because she did not need what we were offering.
“But you are so angry,” Wayne said. “Don’t you think it would be wise to pay attention to that anger, try to understand what to do with your anger?”
Sheila stopped, turned, then took a step toward Wayne. She leaned into his face and said, “I am divorced. What am I supposed to be other than angry?”
Wayne said that what she was supposed to do was the work of recovering from that loss, that she was supposed to try visualizing Sheila without a husband, Sheila as a person standing on her own two feet, focused on her own life, regardless of what had happened in her marriage. Wayne told her that staying focused on her anger at her former husband left her no energy for focusing on how she was going to develop her life after the divorce.
Without saying a word, her countenance changed again. Her eyes softened. She did not blink, but stood there looking at Wayne, studying him.
Wayne said, “This is your life, Sheila, not his. What are you going to do with Sheila’s life?”
Sheila needed that simple reframing. She had to see her life without her husband’s presence. She could feel bad all she wanted—feel bad that her marriage had ended, that he had the affair—but those bad feelings would not help her with reframing her life into something useful for the present day. Reframing eventually helped Sheila learn new and healthy ways to deal with her anger.
C. S. Lewis writes poignantly in his book A Grief Observed after the death of his wife: “I thought I could make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
When travelers can take another step, we can gently nudge them in the right direction.
Rodger Murchison is associate pastor of First Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia.
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