7 Ways To Manage Estrangement Grief

Here are 7  ways to manage estrangement grief:

1- Acknowledge and discuss your family composition. Notice who is present and who is missing. Discuss how the estrangement feels for each person who is present. This is not about censoring, debating, guiding, solving or resolving – it’s about simply being present to hear with our whole hearts, how others are feeling.If your family isn’t used to talking about loss together, discussing that openly can help you all learn how to move closer to an open and authentic grieving process.

If you are on your own, this is something you can do in a journal, or during meditative, self reflecection.

2- Allow yourself, and each family member to get clear about:

*  What is it they feel they have lost?

*  Why do they think they lost it?

*  How do they really feel about the loss?

*  Why do they miss it?

Remember, everyone in the family is likely to have different answers to these questions. They are also likely to be in different places with their grieving.

3- Accept that attachments, relationships and losses are a normal part of life. We have so much collective baggage in our culture about families. Blood is thicker than water. Families stick together, no matter what. These are lovely ideals, but they are not necessarily real or desirable for all families.  The Buddhist notion of impermanence is tremendously affirmative when we must face and deal with loss. Please allow your family’s experiences to be normal, for your family.

4- Act to help ourselves and other family members move through grieving processes. Each of us must decide what things and memories we need to keep, which to let go of, and when to do so. We can’t decide these things for anyone else , and we cannot force their process. We can however create room for people to openly feel and express their feelings, even when they are very different from our own.

5- FEEL what you feel. Allow feelings to rise up, be fully expressed and released. Crying and sadness are normal. Anger is normal. Ambivalence is normal. Whatever it is that you are feeling … is normal.

6- Move on. Understand that grief and loss is only one element of what’s going on for your family. Permit grief and loss to flow, like a wave. See it building, cresting, ebbing … then support each other to refocus energy and attention to the here and now to enjoy your gathering as best you can.

7- Create new meanings and rituals which allow room for authentic feeling to emerge. In my family we light a candle on Christmas eve in remembrance of all the family who are not with us. We leave the candle to burn out on its own, and when it does, we think of it as a symbolic signal to carefully place the losses aside and be present, joyfully, with each other and our celebrations. Find your own rituals and traditions which acknowledge the reality of estrangement.

Family estrangement is something of an open wound and grief and loss is not something you can just “do”and be done with. Estrangement grief can flare and be livid, then subside for a good long time, only to re-emerge again later. If we are estranged we will very likely have to learn to move gracefully through cyclical experiences of grieving. It can be good to know that even though grief and loss may be ongoing features of family estrangement, when we allow an open and healthy grieving process to occur, it gets easier and less painful each time.