When a Loved One Has Been Lost
Reported by Carl Johnson, Ph.D., ABPP
When someone has lost a loved one, the agony has many dimensions, particularly in cases of violence. I have learned to focus first on barriers to the survivor’s ability to experience a spiritual closeness to the person who has been lost. Starting anywhere else fails to honor the magnitude of the loss and to recognize the natural difficulties that people have in processing the sudden, senseless death of their loved one.
I learned this in a refugee camp near Oslo, Norway, in May 1999, during the Kosovo war. It turned out to be an invaluable understanding during my subsequent nine trips to Kosovo as well for my work with survivors in Rwanda, the Congo, and other areas of warfare and ethnic violence. My visit to Norway took place nine months prior to my first trip to Kosovo. I treated an ethnic Albanian refugee for his grief following the war death of his mother. After some initial progress, the muscle tests weren’t revealing any further weaknesses in his energy system, yet he consistently reported that his SUD, which started at 10, had come down only to 5. It never got lower than that.
There are several things practitioners should assess when muscle testing and self-report measures don’t correlate, but none of these accounted for my patient’s stalled SUD level. Upon reflection, and after discussion with the refugee camp staff, I concluded that more than wanting relief from his traumatic suffering, the man wanted to retrieve his lost mother or, if that proved impossible, he wanted to hold onto what little he did have that remained of her: his suffering.
Death of a loved one is the most frequent trauma in areas of unnatural disaster. In Rwanda, “presenting problems” that do not include death are rare. The patient would like to be praising the positive aspects of the lost one’s life, cherishing fond memories, reviewing the wise counsel received from the deceased, and going through the rest of life in a spiritual closeness with that person. Successful treatment must honor the deceased and enable the survivor to do so. It must enhance closeness between survivor and deceased.
So the “problem,” the focus, becomes something like ”the block to our closeness,” and the treatment objective is to clear the block. When the block reaches 0, the closeness reaches 10, and the patient is at peace. Thus, the most important aspect of the traumatic event-the loss of life-is treated purely. Once the block has been cleared, my patients and I then focus on ”the rest of the matter” or ”any remaining horror,” including the evil. I always propose to my patients that we view their issues of grief this way, and it tends to be almost unanimously appreciated everywhere I have been.
When the survivor is able to hold the beautiful memories and all the person had contributed, and talk about these, we are ready then to move on to the other horrors of the events surrounding the death and loss.
Carl Johnson, Ph.D., ABBP, is a clinical psychologist, founder and director of The Global Institute of Thought Field Therapy, and a retired PTSD specialist with the Veteran’s Administration. He lives in Winchester, Virginia, and may be contacted via [email protected].
