rope-948677_640If you have lost a loved one, you most likely have done some ruminating. Rumination, of course, is just thinking about something. But in this context rumination is thinking specifically about a past upset such as the loss of a loved one. Even more specifically, it’s thinking about the upsetting event in a repetitive, circular way.

Is this sounding familiar? When you ask yourself over and over, “Why did this happen? Why did she have to die?” or repeat the thought, “I can’t believe he’s gone,” you are ruminating. I have done plenty of ruminating like that about Brady.

Grieving people also tend to worry, which is like rumination but involves repetitive thinking about some negative future possibility. Personally, I worry about things like safety of other loved ones, finances, changing relationships and health issues.

Unfortunately, research connects rumination and worry with difficulty resolving grief. Here’s a report of a study published in 2017 by a team of Dutch researchers that found worry was associated with more intense and longer-lasting anxiety, depression and prolonged grief among bereaved people. I don’t know about you, but more suffering that lasts longer is exactly not what I’m looking for.

What to do about this? Another study by some of the same researchers came out in 2014. As other studies have, it found that grieving people who ruminate tend to feel worse for a longer time. But it also distinguished between two types of rumination and found they had different effects. Basically, one was helpful and the other was not.

When somebody tended to ruminate more about the injustice of a death and how things might have turned out differently, that predicted more and more intense symptoms of complicated grief and depression. When grievers instead mostly ruminated about their own emotional reactions to the loss, however, it seemed to lead to less complicated grief and depression.

This explanation fits neatly into the dual process model of grieving. This model was proposed by some of these Dutch researchers in 1999 as a sort of replacement for the old five stages of grief model that dates back to the 1960s. The dual process model splits grieving into two types of coping. There is loss-oriented grieving, which is thinking about the loss, yearning for the lost loved one and so on — like the problem-causing ruminating that the 2014 study discussed. And there’s restoration-oriented coping, which is more like the helpful style of ruminating that focuses on the present and how survivors can deal with the emotional impact of the loss.

The conclusion I draw from this it may be a good idea to think more about what you’re  going to do to feel better — in other words, restoration-oriented thinking —  than about what happened to make you feel bad — loss-oriented thinking. A 2008 study by these busy Dutch researchers supports that. It found that bereaved people who do more restoration-oriented coping seem to feel better sooner than those more into loss-oriented coping.

Does this mean you should never think about your loved one’s death? Not at all. That would be crazy, not to mention impossible. You’re always going to do some of that, of course. But you might try to devote somewhat more time and energy to trying to figure out how you feel and how to feel better than you do to what happened to your lost loved one and how unfair it all is. In a nutshell, focus more on restoration than on loss, and you might actually feel restored sooner.  And getting better soon is what Grieve Well is all about.

I hope you find some peace today.