Lesson Two

Promise for this lesson:

• You will be able to identify three Major Losses you’ve had in your life.

Somatic Grief Relief® Principle:

Your body is the path to the present.

6 Deadly D’s:

You’ve had a hard time like many of us. Many people don’t realize that they are in grief. Our job as grief companions, companioning the grieving, is to make sure that everything that needs to come up into the light to be healed is revealed. 

The first Deadly D is Divorce.

See the word “dead” in here? Each of these are a kind of death. The marriage is dead. The relationship is dead because of the breakup. It’s so interesting that people just don’t realize that grief is there even with divorce. When I experienced my divorce, I experienced it as anxiety. In all the other deaths, literally the five family deaths we had and other significant losses, I had never felt anxious. Boy did I feel it after my divorce.

The second Deadly D is Natural Disasters.

Hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and floods. All of these Deadly D’s result in trauma. Trauma lives in the body and it is usually very sudden, and it just impacts us and is stuck in the body. I remember as a little girl, there was a tornado that went through our acreage. No one was home at the time. When we got home from school, the boat house that we had built on our property as a rental to house a friend’s boat was down and the boat was too. I remember seeing that and the horror of that. For many years, I could still bring up that scene and feel it in my body. As I am sure you can with the things that have happened to you. 

Destruction is the third Deadly D.

People don’t realize that bullying can lead to death. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse. Someone that’s never had a hand laid on them but has been yelled at can have a tightly wound nervous system – I am one of those. Then of course there is the horror and destruction of war and then abandonment, kidnapped, murder, torture, witness of a traumatic event. All of them cause trauma to our systems.

Then we go down to Despair.

I will talk about the despair that I experienced recently. Every Tuesday morning for 4 weeks in a row, I would wake up in despair. So, I did what I always do, which is to ask: What state am I in? How old am I feeling? And is this mine? It’s so interesting because I was taking an Unpacking Whiteness: Seeing Race class. I was taking on the despair of the racial injustice and you know as a sensitive person that can happen to you, too. Then there’s despair and often depression, of being fired, so many people being laid off, retirement, and moving. Moving can uproot people and cause great despair and grief.

The fifth Deadly D is Diagnosis.

Our body is under attack. We may feel it has let us down. How often do people receive “You have Cancer.” and move directly into a treatment plan before grieving the loss of their physical health?

And then Death of our loved ones, our pets, or a dream.

Death of a dream, a way of being in the world.  

So many people who have had the traumatic loss as you have had, have part of their soul leave and they feel like they’re a shell of a person walking through life.

Loss Timeline:

Your Body Knows the Way Through Deep Grief:

The 5 Principles of the Rubenfeld Synergy Method®

1. Awareness is the first key to change
2. Change happens only in the present moment
3. The Body Tells the Truth
4. The Body’s Language is Metaphor
5. The Body is the Sanctuary of the Soul

The New Paradigm of Grief©

You are not broken by this loss. You are broken open to grow, like a seed, to grow in self-awareness and new connections.