Charles
Runels, MD Because I've seen so many people suffer loss and have felt loss in my own life, I think it's useful to review what ill effects loss can have and how to avoid the ill effects and use loss to help construct something useful.
First, consider the difference between the pain of injury and disease and the pain of loss. With the pain of injury or disease, usually there's a tangible etiology. As with a strained back or a broken arm, the cause of pain can be seen on an X-ray photograph. The surgeon can move the bone back into place. Healing can be measured and seen.
Pain with loss can not be photographed by X-ray. With the loss of a loved one (through death, divorce, or separation), the loss of a career, the loss of money or house (through bankruptcy or divorce), the loss of a friend (through disagreement/ misunderstanding), there is not picture to be taken.
Unlike the pain of a broken arm, where your first instinct is to protect the injury and preserve the body's function...with the pain of loss, most people will have the urge to act in a way that destroys health. Unhealthy ways of dealing with pain include drinking to excess, eating to excess, using drugs, sexual promiscuity, and even suicide. You can name other ways that people who suffer loss can destroy their own health in an effort to relieve the intense spiritual pain of loss. Because all people will suffer in this way and to help you avoid the self destructive ways of relieving this type of pain, I'd like to present a ways you can deal with such pain in a healthy way.
The other painful thing about the pain of loss that differs from physical pain: unlike a broken arm that may heal and then never hurt again, the pain of loss can return intermittently and sometimes unexpectedly throughout a lifetime.
For the next few days, I offer what I've seen my patients do successfully and what I have used in my own life to deal with the pain of loss. I don't claim to know a way to make the pain leave. But, I do know how I've seen others convert the pain into something useful and with meaning; this conversion makes the pain endurable and can improve rather than destroy health.
The first idea is to consider the pain as an energy source that drives you to do something good that would not have happened without your pain. An example may demonstrate this idea better than explanation.
Walt Whitman said that his work Leaves of Grass was inspired by the loss of a loved one. A woman who lost a child to a drunk driver was inspired to start Mother's Against Drunk Drivers. Pilgrim's Progress and The Consolation of Philosophy were both written by men confined to prison. More recently, I heard an interview of Stephen King the novelist. He said he would have preferred the boring life of running out of things to write at 50 but that after being run over by a truck and suffering multiple fractures and near death, the was given new material and new inspiration.
Most people that I've seen with intense loss tell me the same thing...they'd prefer to have skipped the pain of loss, but having been dealt the hand, they give meaning to the pain by using the pain as and engine to move them to create something useful.