Thursday's Therapy - What Makes a Grief Group Therapeutic?

Thursday's Therapy

What Makes a Grief Group Therapeutic?

A few weeks ago, a mother came onto one of the grief groups available on the internet, totally exasperated and asked, in effect,

What good is any of this we do, just sharing our pain with one another? I just get depressed with all of our hurt and pain. So please tell me how any of this is helping; how is it doing us any good?

Our hurt and pain can be overwhelming to walk through. It can also be overwhelming to read about others' pain. Timing is everything, and even the degree of pain that we take in at any given time needs to be managed. But what about this woman's question? What good does our sharing and responding to one another's pain do?

Tommy and I were watching a stress video available through Netflix streaming not too long ago. The scientist on this video shared:

Now that we have brain imaging, we can begin to see what happens in the brain when we are doing any number of activities.

She said that when people shared their pain and received verbal comfort back, the parts of the brain lit up that showed there was comfort being received! But what surprised me was the scientist shared that even one's giving verbal comfort to someone else would also stir up the same comfort zones in one's brain!

So not only receiving, but also giving comfort can stir the elements in the brain to bring comfort to our grief-torn hearts, souls, and brains!

*****

We are all substantially flawed, wounded, angry, hurt, here on Earth. But this human condition, so painful to us, and in some ways shameful--because we feel we are weak when the reality of ourselves is exposed--is made much more bearable when it is shared, face-to-face, in words that have expressive human eyes behind them.

~Alice Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved

*****

Saki Santorelli, in his book, Heal Thy Self: Lessons on Mindfulness in Medicine, talks about his therapeutic groups he leads. I am sure much pain is verbalized within these groups, yet somehow the groups are therapeutic overall for the people. What is it about these groups that enables great pain to be processed through, yet is therapeutic for all there? Santorelli first shares some of the stories people tell about their own individual struggles. Then he summarizes the process of what happens to make this communication a therapeutic process for all:

Curiously, in the midst of these unfolding stories I notice a lightness emerging. There is an unburdening here that is not simply cathartic. The most pronounced feeling in the room is not one of heaviness but one of deep acknowledgment. Such honoring is nothing less than an expression of strength and courage that feels akin to a collective rolling up of our sleeves rather than the bursting of an emotional dike that will sweep us away in helplessness and despair. It is the beginning of a relationship.

We are revealing our wounds to one another. We are naming them but not being decimated by them. Quite the contrary. The usual tendency to strongly identify with and elevate "my" pain or "my" problem is slowly being dissolved in the recognition of our collective condition and in our willingness to live together, even for a few moments, inside this shared reality. There is a spontaneous arising of mindfulness--of awareness cultivated by our willingness to hear one another, to sit together without judgment, without giving advice, without reaching for easy answers or invoking shallow affirmations.

(W)e are all…attending to and making bearable our wounds, by sharing as Alice Walker describes it,

"face to face, in words that have expressive human eyes behind them."

Picture, thanks to Google Images

Thursday's Therapy - Tend and Befriend: How Women Grieve

Thursday's Therapy

Tend and Befriend:

How Women Grieve

I have noticed that many of us this week in the grief groups in which I am involved have been seemingly "stuck" in unresolvable issues with close friends and even family members.

I haven't quite figured out yet why our secondary wounds cause us so much grief since our loss of our child far outweighs any other kind of loss or grief, but somehow they do!

At the moment, the greatest guess I have is that social support is such a basic element in the repertoire of our tools for healing or at least for soothing our deep grief.

So when you notice that the exact opposite is too often coming your way,

• social meanness,
• social harassment,
• social callousness,
• social expectations of the impossible for your moving on from your grief,
• a social piety of sorts for the conventional "wisdom" of how grief should be done (seems right to them, but is so wrong for us Child-Loss grievers),
• social discrimination that we pick up on of people judging us and deciding we are "belaboring" our grief instead of moving on from it as they think should be done, etc.,

you begin to catch a glimpse at how dismal are our options for social support in this deep, deep grief that no-one-but-another-child-loss-griever seems to understand!

But when the social milieu is loving and supportive of us, it has amazing qualities for our potential healing. And even though it is often difficult to be a part of grief groups in that I cry many tears for others' pain, the love and understanding that is there is remarkably comforting. Even my tears for others somehow seems to help my own grief for my child to be released!

Notice the findings of the following excerpts from a summary of a recent UCLA study done on how women deal with stress as opposed to men!

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more.

Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research---most of it on men---upside down. Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible, explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight; In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone---which men produce in high levels when they're under stress---seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it….

It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There's no doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us live longer.

In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%.

Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidants was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight.

And that's not all. When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all (Huh? No, not the biggest! Child-Loss has got to be the BIGGEST stressor of all!) those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate. Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). The following paragraph is, in my opinion, very, very true and something all women should be aware of and NOT put our female friends on the back burners.

…That's really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they're with other women. It's a very healing experience.

~From "UCLA Study on Friendship Among Women: An alternative to fight or flight as summarized by Gale Berkowitz, 2002

~Comment, mine

Taylor, S. E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. Behaviorial Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight" Psychol Rev, 107(3):41-429. (Full text of article in PDF format)

Geary DC, Flinn MV. Sex differences in behavioral and hormonal response to social threat: commentary on Taylor et al. Psychol Rev 2002 Oct;109(4):745-50; discussion 751-3

Cousino Klein L, Corwin EJ. Seeing the unexpected: how sex differences in stress responses may provide a new perspective on the manifestation of psychiatric disorders. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2002 Dec;4(6):441-8.

Paintings ~by Megan Kingery, artist, from her gallery - http://megankingery.homestead.com/gallery2.html

Study Article: UCLA Researchers Identify Key Biobehavioral Pattern Used By Women To Manage Stress (Science Daily (May 22, 2000)

Article cited: UCLA Study on Friendship Among Women: An alternative to fight or flight 2002, Gale Berkowitz