Continuing With My Life

© Richard Bolstad

The Grief Process

It was great to read Steve and Connirae Andreas’ article on their NLP Grief process in the February 2002 edition of Anchor Point. These days, when I teach this process at Master Practitioner trainings, I don’t get the scepticism I used to. Instead, the room goes quiet and people lean forward and listen with bated breath. I used to use the death of my grandfather as my teaching example. Since last year I use the death of my lover and life partner, Margot Hamblett. It seems that people find the new example more convincing.

The main section of this article is a simple case study, done in the first person, of an NLP approach to grieving. I know from talking to others that my experience of grief has been dramatically different to the experience most people in this situation have. I want to begin by thanking Steve and Connirae, for the gift they delivered to me and to the world with this one.  Before discussing my own experiences, it is useful for you to have a summary of the process as taught by them, and as related to grieving for a life partner or spouse. The process has two parts:

1. Reunion with the lost experience: Shift the memory of the person who is no longer there into the submodalities of a person who has left your life and yet whose remembrance evokes positive feelings related to them as an ongoing resource.
2. Re-engaging with the world: Identify the qualities which were provided by the person who is no longer there, and imagine these qualities being available in future.

To clarify this summary, here is an example of its use, written up by Margot Hamblett herself in our book Transforming Communication (1998, p 209-210).

Margot’s Example

When Gail came to see me, her husband had died 15 years earlier. Gail had successfully brought up three children on her own, and was a successful businessperson. But she was constantly struggling with depression, and was distressed by her frequent angry outbursts at her teenage children. After all this time, she felt a deep sense of rage at being abandoned. Whenever someone asked if she had a husband, tears would instantly spring to her eyes, and she would experience an agonising sense of pain and absence. She found this distressing and embarrassing. Although Gail often met men she liked, and wanted a new relationship, she felt there was a part of her that was “still waiting” for her husband to come back.

I asked Gail to think of someone she used to be close to, perhaps when she was much younger, who she no longer had contact with. Someone she could think of now with a really good feeling. She smiled with pleasure as she talked about a friend Linda, who was a student with her, twenty years ago. Linda had since moved overseas, and Gail had lost touch with her, but she still enjoyed remembering her. I asked Gail to notice the visual image of Linda that she could see when she thought of her. Then I asked questions about the submodalities of the image. We discovered that Gail was making a large, clear, brightly coloured picture of Linda. The picture seemed to be about one foot in front of her, a little to her left. In the image, Linda was laughing happily.

When I asked Gail how she pictured her husband, she saw him in the hospital bed, where he had died. This time, the picture was small, dark, and shadowy. It was a little further away, about two feet in front, to her right. She tensed up again as she thought of him. I checked with her that it would be okay to have the same kind of good feelings she had when she thought about Linda, when she thought about her husband. She said that would be amazing, and just what she wanted.

“Okay,” I said, “now just imagine that picture of your husband moving rapidly away from you, out in front of you, until it disappears as a tiny dot off the horizon. Now I’d like you to bring back from the horizon a new picture, and bring it to this place where the picture of Linda was. The new picture is an image of your husband at a time he was well and happy, a time you can enjoy remembering. Bring it right here now, (gesturing the position) and make it big, and bright, and really clear. How does that look now?”

She let out a long breath, and relaxed. “That looks really good,” she said, with a smile. Then she frowned. “But it doesn’t seem like this  picture will stay there.”

“That’s right,”  I said. “Let’s just repeat that until it stays. Get back that old picture of him over there, make it go way out to the horizon, then bring back the new picture over here, big and bright and clear. Now repeat that as quickly as you can until you cant get back the old picture any more.”

She concentrated for a few minutes, then relaxed and smiled again. “It’s gone.  I can only get the new one now”

“In addition to this, it can be very helpful to spend a few minutes reviewing all the positive experiences you had with your husband in the past, and all the positive qualities of your relationship. Realise that all these experiences and qualities are now an important and precious part of you which you now carry with you into all your future experiences…. So how is that different now?”

“It’s amazing. I feel really calm…….I feel at peace. It’s strange in a way, because I feel as if now I really know that he’s dead, but at the same time, I feel much closer to him. I have a sense that he will always be with me.”

Following this session, Gail’s mood lifted, and she reported enjoying her life again. She said she did not think of her husband so often now, but when she did, she enjoyed recalling the good times they had shared. She had stopped “snapping” at her kids, and was aware of positive experiences she was enjoying in her life.

Richard’s Example: The First Three Weeks

What would it be like if this woman had had the grief process available 15 years before, at the time of her husband’s death? Some understanding of this can be gained by considering my own experience over the last year. My partner Margot died on February 6^th, 2001. Although she had been living with a very fast growing breast cancer for 18 months, her death from heart failure in the middle of that night was quite unexpected.

The following morning was the most difficult time for me, as I mentally reviewed the last days and months, asking myself what I had done (or failed to do) that might have contributed to her death. This is not a question which has a useful answer. As I was tormenting myself with this question, I was also coping with arranging the funeral, contacting friends, family and the NLP community, and supporting the hundred or so people who came to our place to see Margot’s body. A few well-placed reframes from NLP friends helped me to let go of this very irrational process of self-blaming.

Over the next three weeks I went through our house tidying up all Margot’s things, and consequently sorting through my own entire collection of physical possessions. This in itself was a metaphorical grief process, as was the funeral ceremony. Every decision to “tidy up” was also a decision to let go of the way things had been. It meant moving beyond the “frozen in time” impression that people sometimes create by turning the person’s room into a mausoleum with everything “just as it was”. I also took myself systematically through the NLP Grief process (as described above by Margot) three times. Much of what I said at Margot’s funeral sprang from these experiences of the process (particularly talking about what things I had gained from Margot’s presence which I would wanted to incorporate into my own future life).

Although this use of the NLP grief process seemed to stop me feeling “sad”, I was aware that I wasn’t laughing, wasn’t enjoying life as I usually would, and had a reduced appetite. I also cried a few times each day –though this did not feel at all unpleasant, simply comforting. In a sense though, I felt as if my own life had come to a conclusion too. The “grief” experience I was dealing with involved my lover, my best friend, and my colleague all at once. I wasn’t sure that I could manage my business by myself, and it was difficult to imagine getting back on track with my sense of life-mission. Many areas of my life had, in fact, suddenly stopped functioning.

My first NLP session, at the end of this time, focused on whether I wanted to live. The most powerful process NLP trainer Lynn Timpany took me through in that session was a simple submodality shift to reinstall the belief that Margot had loved me. This powerfully important affirming belief, which I had maintained almost unquestioningly for twenty years, had been shaken by my “guilt strategy” over the first few days after her death. I noticed before this session that I could feel happy again if I simply remembered that I loved Margot; and allowed myself to feel the joy of that as it had always been (instead of thinking that I couldn’t allow myself that joy because there was no-one to reciprocate). This is clearly a key element of the first section of the grief process, and the need for it indicated that I had still not fully “completed” the submodality shift there. To restate, I ran the process systematically a few times, and each time felt that I deepened the experience of change. There’s no need to assume that “once is enough”.

Specific To Losing A Lover

My response to others’ attempts at empathy was interesting at this time too. It did not help when people simply said “I know how you feel.” Several people told me something along the lines of “I know just how you feel. My parakeet died last year so I have some understanding of this.” It was clear to me, however, that each type of grief experience had unique challenges. The challenges of losing a life partner were different to the challenges of losing a friend, or again from those of losing a child. For example, it was certainly devastating to lose my partner. And yet there were ways in which I, having lost my partner, could support myself psychologically, which would not have been so easily available if my child had died (eg I could remind myself what a great life Margot had, or feel glad for the length of time we had spent together). On the other hand, there were supports which I could have accessed if it had been another friend who had died, that I could not access when it was my lover. Having a friend die, having a child die, and having a lover die are all quite different experiences. Two weeks after Margot’s death, an elderly woman whose husband had died the previous year came up to me and said “It’s not easy is it. My husband died last year.” I looked into her eyes and truly believed that she knew what my particular experience was like. That felt very good.

One interesting phenomenon I observed was that there was not one grief event, but hundreds of small events. The first time I went out to the movies after Margot’s death, I was returning home and suddenly realised that there was no-one that I could talk about that movie with the depth of shared experience that Margot had. There were many moments like this; moments where I discovered another aspect of my life that was now different.

It almost shocked me how supportive my friends and family were over the first months after Margot’s death. I was clearly more emotionally labile than usual, and found that I was often moved to tears by the continuous little gifts of time and resources, and the constant checking that I was okay. I both did my first teaching and wrote my first articles four weeks after Margot’s death. It had taken all that time to get back into a state where that was manageable, but it felt really good to do. After that teaching, I knew I could, in fact, manage my life “alone”.  I had begun to redefine myself as a person separate from Margot, even enjoying rediscovering aspects of myself (such as my taste in rock music) which had been held in abeyance while I was in our relationship. 

Exactly a month after Margot’s death I noticed I was actually enjoying a conversation with a woman hairdresser, and feeling the same kind of relaxed ease that I might have when Margot was alive. That made me realise I had been holding myself back from feeling any closeness to women in case I “betrayed” my relationship with Margot. Two months after her death I first went out on a kind of date. When I arranged it, I felt like I was doing it most of all because it made me feel like I wanted to be alive. Rather than being based in a genuine interest in the other person, I was still nurturing myself.

Actually, when I thought about the possibility of having a relationship with another person, I could not see the point. I felt as if “the love of my life” was Margot; as if any new partner needed to understand that my heart belonged to Margot. At this time, the two pieces of the grief process seemed imperfectly aligned. Holding Margot’s memory close to my heart (the result of the submodality shift in part one of the process) made it seem less significant whether I got many of the things she had given me from other experiences in life (the result of the second part of the process). However, increasingly I noticed that when I allowed myself to feel “in love” (with Margot or with someone new), life felt suddenly richer and more worth living. By four months after Margot’s death, I was more focused on the feeling of loving, rather than on the specific person needing to be Margot. This made it possible for me to enjoy having another intimate relationship one year after Margot’s death.

The death of Margot brought some realistic losses with it, of course. Whatever I did internally, the logistics of my daily life were different. I did not have ready access to sex, to discussions with someone who shared so much life experience with me (this was the biggest loss of all) or to someone who would help out with my workload.

“Ongoing Contact”

Approximately 50% of all people who lose a life partner say that they continue to talk to their former partner as if that person were still alive. Perhaps this is a response to the realistic need for communication with someone who knows us and loves us. Perhaps it is based on some “real” continuation of life beyond death. Over the six months after Margot’s death, I had a long series of very unusual dreams, which created the experience (sceptically, I might say: the illusion) of ongoing contact with her. Illusory or real, this was such a significant part of my “healing from grief” that I want to mention these phenomena here.

The first dream occurred just a week after Margot’s death. I felt fully awake in the dream (I was aware of who I was, and of all the usual events of life, and I knew that I was dreaming). The visual background of the dream was quite strange. Usually my dreams are, if anything, darker than normal reality. In this dream, only Margot and I were present, and the background was an uninterrupted, intense but undazzling bright white light. I knew that Margot was dead, and in the first dreams I discussed this with her, puzzling over the fact that I could “touch” her dream body. I expressed surprise at the submodalities and said that I didn’t usually have such convincing kinesthetics in a dream. The content of these dreams involved very simple discussions where Margot’s main goal seemed to be to tell me “I’m fine, and you’ll be fine too.” It was also easy for me to decide, during the day, what questions I wanted to “ask Margot” and ask them during that night’s dream.

Three months after Margot’s death, the submodality structure of these dreams changed, suddenly and inexplicably. In one of the white light dreams, a low wall suddenly appeared behind Margot. She took my hand and we walked across it (with me thinking sceptically that this was an interesting metaphorical occurrence). Suddenly, we were walking together down a hill to a beach, which I realised somehow was near a town in the north of Europe. “Do you remember this place?” Margot asked. “No.” I replied puzzled. “Your name was Willy [she said it Veellee] and my name was…” Suddenly I had the most extraordinary realisation. I “recalled” an entire lifetime of memories which seemed as vivid as my actual current life memories from our life together in New Zealand. Memories of a lifetime living in a village in north Germany, with the person who would one day be Margot. I am completely sceptical about “past life memories” (actually I’m completely sceptical about present life memories, as I say in my article on the Future of Memory). But the message I took from this dream was that life is like this -we meet people we love, are parted for a time, and meet them again under other names. In a way, that is the message of the NLP grief process too.

During the day, I have had numerous experiences where I hear Margot’s voice, or feel her hand touching mine, and I have had “clairvoyants” who’ve never met me before and who tell me that there is a woman with dark hair beside me smiling at me as I teach. I’ve had experiences where I seem to “get information from Margot” which I cannot explain easily in other ways. The meaning I take out of all these events is that Margot’s life continues in some sense. It really doesn’t matter how concretely that continuity is occurring. The sense of her ongoing life is a significant part of my adjustment to her death, exactly as Connirae and Steve’s Grief process would predict.

In the same way, I found it useful to read about the experiences of people who had died and been revived. Understanding what it was like to die (see my article in the November, 2001 Anchor Point) helped me to frame those moments as a far less traumatic time. While the minutes of Margot’s actual death might have been distressing to me, it helped me to understand that they were highly likely to have been pleasant for her. Its worth mentioning that I had also run the NLP Trauma Process on certain earlier events which I had found disturbing in the period of Margot’s illness. This is an important addition to the grief process, mentioned by the Andreases (1989).

A Year Later

Looking back on the first year after Margot’s death, I’m struck by the speed with which I began living life again. As the “anniversary” of her death occurred, many people contacted me to check that I was managing okay. That was almost amusing. I felt fine, and I actually found it hard to work out how people could run the “anniversary syndrome” as this annual repeat of grieving is called in the literature.

However, my life will never be the same. I wouldn’t want it to be. From the perspective I have now, my previous life was sheltered from the truth of death. I didn’t want to really believe in death. Even as a nurse, who had seen death many times, I always thought at some level that an exception might be made in my case! The truth is that life and death are two aspects of a system. A profound sense of the impermanence of “things” remains with me today. I have much less interest in accumulating toys for this life here on earth. I have very much clearer priorities. I feel as if I now know what is really important and what doesn’t matter at all. As a result, I do a lot less worrying, and I get annoyed a lot less.

What did I learn about that would be useful to others who face situations similar to my own? I guess I’d summarise my discoveries under the following ten headings. 

1. Grief can be completely, fundamentally different to what we have expected socially. It can be easy to resolve, without denial and without lifelong anguish.
2. The NLP grief process as described by the Andreases is an immensely powerful way to achieve this
3. Intervening early is better
4. Resolving issues about guilt and anger is a first priority
5. Running the NLP trauma cure on disturbing aspects of the story is important
6. Each grieving situation is unique
7. There are multiple triggers to grief; not just one experience to change
8. Social supports are extremely important
9. Experiences of ongoing “extrasensory” contact with a dead person have their own intrinsic value, whatever your beliefs
10. The new perspective gained from contact with death adds to the richness of life

Thanks again to all those in the NLP community who were part of my extended social support network as I went through this time.

-Richard

Bibliography:

• Andreas, C. and Andreas, S. Heart Of The Mind Real People Press, Moab, Utah, 1989
• Andreas, S. and Andreas, C. “Resolving Grief” p 4-16 in Anchor Point Volume 16, No. 2, February 2002
• Bolstad, R. and Hamblett, M. Transforming Communication Addison-Wesley-Longman, Auckland, 1998
• Bolstad, R. “Being of Light” p 3-12 in Anchor Point Vol 15, No. 11, November 2001
• Bolstad, R. “The Future of Memory” p 3-7 in Anchor Point Vol 15, No. 10, October 2001

Richard Bolstad is an NLP trainer. Until her death in 2001, his partner Margot Hamblett wrote and taught together with him. Currently, Richard lives happily in New Zealand and continues writing and teaching NLP around the world. He can be reached at learn@transformations.org.nz