THE GRIEF ULTIMATUM

Grief is the summary statement of the average life. It surrounds us in not only the deathly hellish things that occur, but in our momentary lives as well. For this reason, active and effective grief management is a daily must for all who wish to succeed. Allow me to illustrate.

Our main problem in life is we can’t live the way we want to live without certain negative consequences coming into play. We do too much or too little of certain things and we create problems for ourselves and others. Due to the very nature of these problems we have to face our grief of them or deny them and therefore avoid the grief.

The former is attending to the grief ultimatum; the latter sees us only dogged with further problems.

Every time we want to eat something but aren’t hungry, for instance, the subconscious mind is kicking against the rational mind, resisting the grief we feel for ‘missing out.’ There is a sad dissonance created within and we subconsciously want to reduce that tension. But the point is we can’t—not that way.

Denying our problems only increases the tension.

Let’s further consider the following problems:

è Consumer debt from ‘retail therapy’;

è Societal crime from discipline issues with children where parents couldn’t say “no,” or continually took the easy way out;

è Pre-marital or extra-marital sex and relationship breakdown.

We’ve already mentioned obesity/lax dietary control. All these are due to denial responses of the grief ultimatum. They’re a flat and proud rejection of truth.

Not always, but small problems generally lead to bigger problems.

Certainly small problems not met most often become larger.

The grief ultimatum is this: to succeed in life we must believe that grieving is so much an intrinsic part of us that it insists on our continual attention and compliance.

We must comply or we face the consequences. All of life applies to this principle.

Those people with great ‘will power’ are illustrative of those who’ve learned to cope effectively with their momentary grief. Indeed, they still grieve for the little things and ‘acts of want’ like others do; they just don’t give way to temptation as much. They’ve adapted to grief.

Grief is experienced almost continually. Even when we are in the heights of pleasured joy and sustained peace we suffer grief, as least subconsciously, simply because we know we can’t retain these halcyon emotions.

The only way we can get better at living life with these facts considered right at the forefront is to learn how to grieve better, and accept that active grief management for the never-ending miniature (as well as the massive and all sizes between) disappointments in life is the only way.

This is a sharp rejection of the denial response and the growing of the strength of resilience so it can be used at all available times.

And still, because none of us are perfect, we will still choose the denial response occasionally. This simply proves the eternal power of the grief ultimatum.

The grief ultimatum hits us and demands our attention in its unique ways, custom-designed to our distinctive personalities. Our task is to understand these and find ways of grieving appropriately.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.