What Abi Taught Us (10 page)

Those students who had reported high resilience scores on the initial pre-9/11 survey did indeed demonstrate greater resilience in the aftermath of the event.
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They showed the fewest signs of clinical depression. What's more, positive emotions were the secret to their success. Fredrickson and colleagues found a strong association between higher levels of positive emotion and resilient coping styles. ‘People who bounced back were not in denial or selfish . . . Mixed in with their suffering and concern, they also experienced positive emotions. These resilient students felt joy, love, and gratitude when connecting with others . . . Perhaps they were inspired and awed by the groundswell of unity and compassion both within their local community and around the globe. Perhaps they were deeply curious about the unfolding world events, and hopeful about the future despite the grim reality of this trying time.'
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Whatever the source, the experience of positive emotions is what made the difference, effectively applying the handbrake to the students' negative emotions and enabling them to bounce back quickly.

It is true the students participating in this study were not directly involved in the attacks on the Twin Towers and, as far as we know, they weren't grieving. But the fact remains that Fredrickson's studies demonstrate that, even while we experience stress and negative emotions, having positive emotions in our
lives, however fleeting and whatever their source, is vital for our resilience. Furthermore, the finding that negativity can sit alongside positivity is also an important discovery for those of us who are grieving.

In the years since Fredrickson published this research, others have reached similar conclusions. Bonanno's work using survey data and intensive interviews from a large representative sample of New York residents (2752 participants) in the six months after the attacks showed that of the 392 participants who had a friend or relative killed on 9/11, 54 per cent were assessed as resilient.
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Similarly, positive emotions have been shown to interrupt and reduce the influence of negative emotions among grieving widows;
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it has also been shown that a significant proportion of older adults manage to experience positive emotions during bereavement. A more recent study by Ong, Bergeman and Boker, which investigated diary data from 300 older adults aged between 60 and 90 years, reached the same conclusion: compared to participants low in resilience, highly resilient individuals reported greater engagement in, and responsiveness to, daily positive events.
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As is the way in scientific research, once we've established a connection exists, further studies examine the reasons for these associations. In an online grief column for
Positive Psychology News Daily
, friend and colleague Kathryn Britton discusses the potential mechanisms at work by exploring the connections between experiencing positive emotions and maintaining important relationships during bereavement. She writes, ‘Bonanno describes mourning as an oscillation between sadness and other emotions, often positive ones including love, humour, curiosity, and awe. That's my experience. I think of the sadness of grief as waves
that rise, crest, and then roll away, sometimes at surprising times and with huge intensity. But in between, I have done a lot of laughing, telling stories, and remembering the quirky marvellous things about the person that is gone.'
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Britton has had six people die in her immediate circle in the last five years.

She continues by describing her own theory on why positive emotions are important for grief: ‘We laugh at stories about goofy things our loved ones did, we remember them with love, we discuss their positive qualities with awe, we have new experiences with other mourners that bring positive emotions. People used to think that positive emotions in the face of grief were a sign of denial (one of those Kübler-Ross stages). In their bereavement research, Bonanno and Keltner found that the more people laughed and smiled during the months after losing a spouse, the better their mental health evaluations over two years of bereavement.

‘Perhaps it's like coming up for air. Perhaps, also, it lightens the atmosphere around them making it easier for other people to stay by them. So perhaps positive emotions help keep their social connections with others going. As a friend of a bereaved spouse and bereaved parents, I certainly want them to have all the sad time they need. But I also find it a relief when we can laugh together.

‘So instead of five solid stages, think of grief as an oscillation between sadness and other emotions, often positive. The oscillation can occur frequently over the course of a day. The sadness lets us adjust to the loss. The other emotions allow us to engage with the world around us.'

Healthy grieving involves a wide range of emotions. I am certainly not suggesting that all anger, sadness, guilt and anxiety
must be minimised during bereavement—that makes no sense at all. A resilient person experiences all emotions; they just don't get stuck in one particular emotion. As Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar says, ‘The first thing to do to become happier, paradoxically, is to accept painful emotions, to accept them as a part and parcel of being alive. You know, there are two kinds of people who don't experience painful emotions such as anxiety or disappointment, sadness, envy; two kinds of people who don't experience these painful emotions. They are the psychopaths and the dead. So if we experience painful emotions at times, it's actually a good sign. It means that we're not a psychopath and we're alive. And the paradox is that when we give ourselves the permission to be human, the permission to experience the full gamut of human emotion, we open ourselves up to positive emotions as well.'
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Full emotional expression is an essential part of being resilient. That doesn't mean being falsely positive but rather finding the people, places and activities that prompt the experience of positive emotions. We know that negative emotions abound in grief; we're looking to balance them out with some of the positive emotions too. Ultimately, as my friend Dr Elaine O'Brien counsels: ‘I found that it was easier and more comforting to think of “appropriate emotions” during grief. I had a friend who would often, and innocently, ask me, “What's good?” I didn't/don't mean to be a downer, but sometimes this put me
over the edge. When things seemed overwhelming, it was hard to put on a good front, a good face. I felt more honest and true embracing my raw sadness and distress at times. It didn't feel right, and it actually felt bad to force happy feelings. It felt more true to accept the presence of emotions without judging them.'
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In his book, Bonanno describes how part of the evolutionary purpose of emotions is that we show them to others—sparking the necessary response from those around us. ‘We have . . . literally hundreds of individual muscle actions. For evolution to have resulted in such an elaborate system, the facial display of emotion must have carried great survival value,' he explains.
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For example, a look of disgust warns others to stay away (thereby keeping them from poisonous foods or damaging gases). So, what is the likely value of sadness? According to evolutionary psychologists, sadness facilitates adjustment to the loss: by focusing our attention inwards, and enabling us to take stock and readjust, it promotes deeper and more effective reflection. Essentially, sadness enforces time out, so that the evolutionary benefit of sadness is to prompt others to care for us. Deep and sustained introspection, accompanied by tears, clearly signals to others that we are in need of their help to survive. Isn't human adaptation clever? Other bereavement researchers suggest just a small increase in positive emotions has beneficial effects.
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To consider this from a practical perspective, it helps to start by listing
all
the positive emotions available to us. This draws our attention to their broad range. Experiencing positive emotions doesn't merely equate to being happy, but instead includes being curious, humorous and loving; feeling pride, awe, hope, inspiration and gratitude, and the quieter emotions such as serenity.

Outlined below are some of the positive emotions I have found helpful during my grieving. Consider how each emotion may support you as you journey through grief. Which positive emotions do you experience frequently; which could you do with intentionally seeking out and topping up on?

Curiosity

It took a while for my curiosity to kick in after the girls died, but somewhere in the second year I started reading. And reading and reading. I devoured anything I could get my hands on to describe and explain what I was going through; how and why I was feeling this maelstrom of emotions, tiredness and forgetfulness. I read academic journals, self-help books, personal accounts, poetry anthologies, one whole book dedicated to eulogies, blogs, psychology department websites, dissertations, newspaper and magazine articles.

I was looking for answers, I guess. I wanted to know the truth of what was happening to me, and (of course) how long it might last. But what I very rapidly sensed was that this curiosity was helpful. There were benefits in trying to understand what was going on inside my head and my body; it stopped me from thinking I was going mad; it soothed me to read other people's experiences, to find so many similarities between their journey and my own. I became aware that, far from being alone, I was
walking a well-trodden path navigated by many others before me, and that everything I was feeling and doing was normal. Curiosity put my own bereavement experience into perspective and was therefore reassuring.

Pride

Over these past terrible months, I have at times experienced such immense pride it literally felt as if my heart would burst. I know it sounds naff, but when I look around and see what people are doing for us, how all of us are soldiering on in spite of the girls' deaths, I get a sensation of physical expansion around my solar plexus that almost hurts. Pride at our sons, for all that they have achieved despite the odds, at how they've carried themselves and gone on to live good and full lives without their little sister; pride at my wider family for their empathy and immense capacity for love, compassion and thoughtfulness; pride at our local community for all the practical and emotional support they've given us, instinctively and in abundance—with no timelines attached. Pride has helped me notice the others in my life and strengthened those bonds. Seeing the boys and Trevor carry on encourages me to carry on too.

Awe

In September 2014 we were lucky enough to get away for a week to the Australian coast. One day, walking up to the lighthouse in beautiful Byron Bay, Trevor and I saw a pod of whales diving and leaping way out at sea. We stood, transfixed for a moment, staring at them and imagining life as a whale—at least, I was. As we stood there, side by side, not able to draw our eyes away from them, hungry for one more opportunity to see them dive and soar upwards, breaking the ocean's surface, we discussed how such awe-inspiring experiences may impact our resilience. If positive emotions broaden and build us, I asked, how does that work when we experience awe? Watching whales in their natural habitat makes us feel small, he replied. Their massive size and huge strength, their unknown world, makes our own world seem tiny and insignificant in comparison. Awe broadens our perspective.

He was right. Seeing these magnificent mammals reminded me that I'm part of a bigger universe, a tiny part of something bigger than just us and our life problems. A similar thing had happened when, a few months after the girls died, I had a desperate urge to go walking in the mountains, up to see the Rob Roy Glacier in Mount Aspiring National Park. My friend Marion and I skittered over frozen paths and clambered over rocks until we reached the top, stared at the glacier and the ancient mountains around us, and wept. Life is huge, we said, enormous, unfathomable and vast. Being up there, though, somehow felt better.

Hope

Writing about hope makes my chest tighten. Hope is the fuel that fires us to move forward in the world. The word for the alternative—hopelessness—says it all. I experienced hopelessness for the first time after Abi died; I woke up one morning in that first week and was shocked to find myself thinking, ‘I hate my life.' For someone who has always felt appreciation for all the good things, this was probably my bleakest moment.

I'm not sure what drives my hope, but I do know I'm not giving up on it. When I look back at the blogs I wrote in that first year, flickers of hope are apparent. I hope, for example, that our sons will ‘one day marry wonderful, caring women willing to share their hearts'. More recently I've been given a new form of hope. Working my way through the new bereavement science, reading stories of loss from websites like Tom Attig's, has sparked kernels of hope that we will manage to get through this awful process.
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That, while we will never stop loving or missing Abi, we will over the years learn to live with her loss, and go on to live full and meaningful lives. Having hope strengthens my resolve and determination to forge forward and hate my life much less than I did that day in June 2014.