Week 4 Of The Grief Support Group
[ Wednesday April 12th 2023 at 8:28 pm ]
Tonight was week 4 of the grief support group. I am happy with how it went. I've been enjoying attending this group. It is miserable. But this is a helpful miserable.
The theme of this session was self care. This is something I am already very familiar with. I try hard to help myself and do what I am able to have the best quality of life possible notwithstanding the challenges my leg cause in my day to day life.
I enjoyed the start of the sessions where all the group members and leaders take 3 to 5 minutes sharing about the past week. This is both highlights and challenges experienced. I don't mind talking about what is wrong or challenges I am facing when an immediate resolution isn't the focus of the dialogue. Simply not being alone while going through challenges helps me perform and respond better. This is one of the things I've really come to appreciate about the friends in my life. I am grateful to be able to simply talk to them about what is going on. I don't by any means know everything and it is helpful to get a different perspective or thought provoking questions for me to consider.
We did a group exercise that really didn't make sense to me when I attended the group in the fall. The exercise was creating a mandala. The idea is to have a symmetrical pattern with perhaps 5 to 8 sections. Then you identify an emotion for each section, assign it a color and a shape. The idea is bringing to the forefront a snap shot of your emotional well being. Then after identifying what is going on (emotionally speaking) you can plan for how to help yourself. I had printed off a sheet of emoji icons and the emotion wrote under each to help me with this. I did this for two reasons. In part I needed the prompting. This is on account of how much pain my legs are causing me. Also when my hip stopped working in 2006 I decided I was going to make the best out of my life. I decided I was going to be content in life regardless of what happened to me. The vast majority of the time I am simply content. This is because things could be much worse and there would still be room for improvement.
After this we broke into pairs. The purpose of this was to discuss strategies for self care. I like how the people who prepared this exercise created effective headings: Physical, Spiritual, Social, Emotional, Intellectual. There is some cross over. If I find myself struggling this gives me a good list to go back to. There are lots of options for each category that the group came up with.
The other group exercise was also interesting. It was themed around anticipating special events, identifying concerns in order to avoid being flooded with grief and possible actions to take. I enjoyed this. I made a few poor decisions after my mom died that this would have been helpful to me. This was worth talking about and making notes so I have something to go back to for when someone else I care about dies and help me respond as best as possible.
I've enjoyed tonight's session. This doesn't feel as fast past as when I attended the group in the fall. I can tell if this was the first time that it would be too fast. With the amount of pain I experience courtesy of my legs doing this a second time is time while spent and not "beating a dead horse".