Softening The Grieving Process

I am a hospice social worker and grief therapist. Before I used emotional freedom techniques (EFT) I spent a lot of hours hoping I was making a difference providing grief support. Its a proven fact that people that are grieving need to tell their stories so that they can process their grief, but this is slow work. And even though I am skilled in helping someone step through the wilderness of grief, I often felt like I wasnt really helping that much. When I started using EFT on all my grieving clients I saw a remarkable change in everyone involved.

I am often asked, “Why would you use EFT on grief? For some reason, there is a belief that we must suffer if we really loved someone who died. There are racks of books about recovering from grief, and its a slow process. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross tells us that well experience different stages; from denial, anger, bargaining, depression and then eventually acceptance. But the books often forget about regret, old hurt feelings, guilt, hate, shame, feelings of letting the person down, unspoken words, and a myriad of other emotions that assault us when someone we love dies.

Recovering from the loss of someone we love is a difficult task and the missing part doesnt completely go away with EFT tapping. But in my experience EFT removes the unnecessary emotions that can inflict terrible pain and suffering and lengthen the time it takes to recover by eliminating those unnecessary emotions with EFT. Grief can be softened. Here is an example of how it works:

Sara was a mother of twin boys, 3 years old. She worked part-time at the local grocery store and had been happily married for 5 years until her father died unexpectedly. After his death Sara had quit her job, left her boys at the babysitters all day long and stopped having anything to do with her husband. I met Sara 2 months after her father died. Her husband was threatening to leave her and she had heard that hospice might help her with the grief of her father. Sara came to her first appointment wearing baggy clothes, dirty, greasy hair covered with a ball cap, looking down at the floor with no eye contact. She had obviously been crying.

I told Sara a little about EFT and how it works, but I kept it short because I could see the emotional pain she was in. Grieving people are usually dehydrated, from lack of self care, so I gave her a 20 ounce bottle of water. I asked her to drink half of it. She complied without question. I asked her to tell me a little about why she was seeing me and she immediately started to cry. I asked her to measure her emotional level from 1-10 and she stated it was a 10+. We started tapping. I asked her to follow along as I tapped but it was obvious that she wasnt going to be able to, so I asked her permission to tap on her. She agreed.

Tagged as: grieving, process, Softening