It’s been nearly a month now since my Father passed away, and I can certainly say that knowing the change curve intimately does not give me the ability to circumvent it. Common change theory suggests that every change to our routine lives effects a response. After all we are closed loop systems, and our neurology is designed to maintain stability, so any impulse of change will be acted against by our systems.
And so I am destined to ride out the change curve whether I know about it or not. Perhaps knowing about it is actually worse, because I’m aware of the stages, I’m just not in control of when I will reach them.
There are many variations of the “loss curve”. One is known as “Sarah” - that is, the individual experiences (in this order):Â
S-hock
A-nger
R-ejection
A-cceptance
H-ealing
The more sudden and \ or extreme the change, the more likely it is that the physiological reaction will be great, or take considerable time to stabilise. Although Dad had a heart attack six years ago, a subsequent, fatal one, came out of the blue for me.
Dealing with the loss is taking a lot more time than I expected, I seem be having to re-evaluate a lot of very basic assumptions in my life. Although I didn’t see him every day, I did talk to him most days by email \ messenger \ phone, and that assumption that he was there, whenever I wanted to talk to him, was obviously a foundation presupposition in my thinking. Losing that seems to have been like some of the foundations of a house breaking away. Lots of brickwork to rebuild.
The last couple of weeks have been odd, lots of thinking, mulling over and rebuilding my map of the world, but my mood has been fairly positive. But the last 5 or 6 days I have found myself quiet, fairly uncommunicative and lethargic, three characteristics that my friends and family would say are not normally associated with me.
So I guess that this current state of mind is the result of me shuffling somewhat along the change curve. Unfortunately it would appear to be a downward move, so my concern is how much further am I likely to go down? Plus I am mindful that it could take years before I’m on the upward slope again…
Hence this post. I figure that getting these thoughts and feelings out will help the healing process. Sat alongside the motivational and nlp posts, perhaps I can speed things along and help myself get fully functional again…
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