Episode 74: How to deal with question after question
8/28/24
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You are listening to the Life Reconstructed podcast with me, Teresa Amaral Beshwate, grief expert, best-selling author and widow. I’m so glad you’re here because in this and every episode, I shine a light on the widowed way forward.
Hello and welcome to episode 74. In this episode, I explain what to do when your brain poses question after question, keeping you in a painful spin cycle.
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Whenever I speak to newly widowed people, the first thing I want them to know is that grieving is learning. To grieve the loss of your spouse is to learn who you are, now, how to navigate your life after loss, and how to interact with other people and so much more.
One of the most important things to learn, in my opinion, is your own brain. How it functions differently now, and its normal tendencies given the uncharted territory you’ve found yourself in.
One such tendency is to pose questions. Maybe you’ve noticed that you ask yourself question after question. It might sound like,
Why didn’t I see the signs?
Why wasn’t I able to diagnose this sooner?
Why wasn’t I a better spouse?
Why didn’t I go to the doctor with him?
Why didn’t I realize how seriously ill she was?
Why didn’t I realize he was dying?
What am I doing with my life?
Was I a good enough spouse?
Why don’t I know my purpose in life by now?
Why aren’t I doing better by now?
When the brain poses a barrage of questions like this, we find ourselves stuck in a spin cycle.
And when we’re stuck, we make no forward progress. It feels terrible and the worst part is that it feels hopeless.
We feel stuck because there are no good answers to questions like this. They’re really pretty mean. They’re questions that you would never ask another person who is grieving their spouse.
And yet we ask them of ourselves, over and over again.
It’s common, and it’s normal. So nothing has gone wrong. But given that questions like these lead to nowhere other than extra suffering and hopelessness, it’s not a place to stay.
The key is to redirect your own brain.
There are a few ways to do that.
First, notice that your brain is posing questions.
Then, either answer the question if you can. Or make the question into a sentence with a period at the end. For example, “Why aren’t I doing better by now?” made into a sentence becomes, “I should be doing better by now.” That’s the thought the brain is offering.
It’s easier to deal with thoughts in the form of sentences than questions.
When we look at the sentence, we can examine it objectively. Decide if it’s factually true. In this example of “I should be doing better by now,” there is no truth to it. There is no rule book or owner’s manual for the loss of a spouse. There are no measurable milestones. There are no grief police. There is no one “right” way to grieve.
So if it isn’t a fact, then it’s a thought. Which is good news because thoughts are just sentences in our minds. They’re not necessarily true, they’re sometimes not at all useful. They can cause extra, unnecessary suffering. They’re sometimes habitual, and other times random.
But the best news is that thoughts are 100% optional. We humans have the ability to think about what we think about.
When the brain offers a thought, we can decide it’s useful. One way to determine whether it’s useful is to notice how it feels to think that thought. If it feels extra terrible, it’s very likely not a useful thought.
If there are an infinite number of thoughts available, there’s no reason to entertain a thought that feels terrible, that keeps us stuck.
We humans have the ability to decide what thoughts to think, on purpose. Let’s not forfeit that ability. So if your brain offers you the thought, “I should be doing better by now,” ask your brain in what ways ARE you doing better?
Think back to the early days, when drawing the next breath took every ounce of energy you had. When getting out of bed was your biggest accomplishment. When you had to will your heart to beat.
Notice all that you’ve done since those dark, early days. How many decisions you’ve made. How much paperwork you completed. How you kept stepping through a life that seemed like it had ended.
Any thought your brain offers you can be questioned in this way. Ask yourself if the opposite may be true. This is mental flexibility and it is the most powerful skill in life after loss. It’s at the core of what we do inside of my coaching program exclusively for widowed people called Life Reconstructed. Which, if you’re listening to this episode as it’s released, the September group closes tonight at midnight. I hope you’ll join us.
If this episode was helpful, please share it with a widowed friend. And remember that I believe in you, and I’m here for you. Take care.
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If you’ve found this podcast helpful, I invite you to join Life Reconstructed, my coaching program exclusively for widowed people. It will help you step forward toward a life you will love again. Simply go to thesuddenwidowcoach.com and click work with me.
