💔FREE E-BOOK: How to Process Grief
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The reason why it's so important to organize your thoughts and feelings, which the Mentally STRONG Method has a great structure to do so, is that one emotion often is linked to or brings up other emotions. Often these feelings need to be dealt with in different ways. Grief can bring on guilt, watch now to see how to handle both and when they come hand in hand.
Dr. B has recently lost (December 2021) her precious daughter Miah, after this video was originally released. She is sharing her grief journey publicly in the hope that it will help others with their journeys. www.mentallystrong.com/grief
Dr. B here from Mentally STRONG!
October 30th was the anniversary of my son's death from DRPLA. That was Reggie. I lost a son Johnny in 2005 in a tragic drowning accident.
I need to make sure that I continue to take care of myself, and I want to turn that pain into purpose, but it has to be a conscious process. So, we're going to start this grief series.
Today I want to focus on guilt around grief, you know I hear this a lot when people are talking about grief and you'll notice I'm grabbing this, these are Reggie’s ashes that I wear with me and you know, there's sometimes guilt, shame, anger around a grief and this is why it's so important when we're teaching the Mentally STRONG Method is that we help you to separate these things.
I'm going to tell you about guilt today. The guilt of “could I have done something different? What did I do wrong? Could I have changed the outcome of that day?”
The day that Reggie passed I can honestly say as a nurse that his death that day was my fault. This is where it is so important to separate these things. In the grief and the decisions and the choices, it's OK to acknowledge something that you did wrong, but if I would have just sat and ruminated on what I'm about to tell you for the last five years. I would probably be suicidal, honestly. So, we have to make a choice. The ways of how we organize these things in our brain and what we do with them.
The night Reggie passed away he wasn't breathing well. Every time I go to the hospital, they never are able to do anything for him. He has really bad days and really good days and so I just thought it's a bad day. I didn't know that something bigger was going on. I typically have really good assessment skills. Like when somebody is not breathing right, that is always an emergency. What the heck was I thinking? I didn't call 911 until his saturations were going down and I couldn't get them back up. When the paramedics walked into Reggie's room, they knew that he was slipping fast. They immediately began CPR. I couldn't believe it. I was so wrong. I walked away, and I started praying. The paramedic asked me to call it, asked me to tell them to stop doing CPR on my own child. I couldn't do it. I'm a Nurse Practitioner, I've worked in emergency rooms, I've worked in jails and I missed the signs that my son couldn't breathe and was dying.
So, acknowledge if you did make a mistake.
Forgive yourself.
And allow yourself to grieve the loss.
You’ve got to figure out how to acknowledge and let it go. I think people are afraid to let it go because you know they feel like it's factual. They feel like everything around it is true. Even if it that's the case, you've got to let go of it emotionally in order to move on.
When we talk about the Mentally STRONG Method: Think, Organize, Choose. You can think about that, analyze where you went wrong, you've got to organize it. Put the grief in the right box. Put behaviors and choices in the right box. We are never going to do everything right.
You've got to let go of the emotional baggage, that weight that is on you in order to move forward.
So, grief and guilt.
Try to separate them.
The grief, you have to feel that pain.
The guilt, you have to forgive yourself and this is why:
I truly believe in empowering everyone to be able to confidently say “I am Mentally STRONG.”
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Dr. Cristi Bundukamara, Ed.D, PMHNP-BC --- A Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner and a Doctor of Healthcare Education has experienced unimaginable trials that have caused many feelings such as depression, anxiety, anger, & overwhelming stress.
However, she has developed a new pathway to becoming Mentally Strong & Choosing to be Happy. With purpose, Dr. B has developed the phases that were refined within the Mentally STRONG Method that she created and wants to share with you.
1 ноя 2021