This is Optimal Living Daily episode 421, 5 things to remember when someone you love loses someone they love, part 2, by Mark Sharanoff of markinangel.com and I'm Justin Mollick. Happy Saturday and welcome back or welcome for the first time. This is where I read you every single day to help you live a more meaningful life, covering personal development, productivity and minimalism mostly, from some of the best bloggers and authors you can find, and with their permission of course. And today's continuation from yesterday, the article is on the longer side so I broke it up into two, so if you're new here I recommend listening to yesterday's episode first, that's episode 420.
And that's it for now, let's continue that post and keep optimizing your life. 5 things to remember when someone you love loses someone they love, part 2, by Mark Sharanoff of markinangel.com. Number 3, the grieving process exhausts and consumes a person, which is why you can't take their withdrawn behavior personally. Relentless exhaustion is a common side effect of grief.
Just getting out of bed in the morning can be an overwhelming and excruciating experience for a while. Also someone suffering from grief may feel okay one moment and feel completely heartbroken the next, even if the environment around them hasn't changed one bit. This can result in them cancelling plans, departing get-togethers early, or saying no far more often than you'd like. Just remember it's not about you.
It has nothing to do with what you did or didn't do. These are just some of the prevalent side effects working through the grieving process. Do your best to not take anything they do too personally. People can only give to others what they have, and deep grief takes almost everything away from a person.
All your actions and words should come from a place of love, but that doesn't mean your grieving loved one will always be loving in return, and that's okay. When you do not take things personally, you liberate yourself. You open yourself to loving someone who truly needs you, generously, without letting needless expectations get in the way of the measurable amounts of support and affection you are capable of giving. Angel and I discuss this in more detail in the Relationships chapter of 1000 Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently.
Number 4, a person who's grieving still wants to smile about the good times, and it's okay to help them reminisce. In the long run, grief can devour us, or it can align us. It depends on what we focus on. We can decide that our relationship was all for nothing if it had to end earlier than we expected, or we can recognize that every single moment of it had more meaning than we dared to accept at the time.
So much meaning it frightened us, so we just lived, just took for granted the time spent together every day, and didn't allow ourselves to consider the sacredness of it. When a wonderful relationship ends abruptly, we suddenly see what was there all along. It wasn't just a hug and a smile, not just a long walk together, not just me for lunch and talking about politics, people, and another day at work. It was everything.
All the little intricacies of life shared by two souls. The answer to the mystery of living is the love and respect we share sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss awakens us to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of a wonderful relationship that's been lost, we're driven to our needs. When this happens to someone you love, when they are mounting the loss of someone they love, help them focus on all those good and perfect times worth smiling about. Help them counterbalance the weight of their loss with the weight of their gratitude for what preceded the loss.
Number five, grief can be a burden but also a healthy anchor for healing and living well. As human beings we sometimes get used to the weight of grief and how it holds us in place. For instance, Angel once told me, my brother will die over and over again for the rest of my life and I'm okay with that, it keeps me closer to him. This was Angel's way of reminding me that grief doesn't disappear.
Step by step, breath by breath, it becomes a part of us, and it can become a healthy part of us too. Although we may never completely stop grieving simply because we never stop loving the ones we've lost, we can effectively leverage our love for them in the present. We can love them and emulate them by living with their magnificence as our daily inspiration. By doing this, they live on in the warmth of our broken hearts that don't fully heal back up, and we will continue to grow and experience life even with our wounds.
It's like badly breaking an ankle that never heals perfectly and that still hurts when you dance, but you dance anyway with a slight limp, and this limp just adds to the depth of your performance and the authenticity of your character. Just knowing this and keeping it in mind, I think, can help us help our grieving loved ones dance again gradually. Angel and I build gradual grief-healing rituals with our students in the pain and hardship module of Getting Back to Happy. You just listened to part two of the post titled Five Things to Remember When Someone You Love Loses Someone They Love by Mark Sharanoff of MarkAnangel.com.
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