Remember Your First? (Why You Need A Fresh Look At Your Earliest Loss)

Do you remember your first?

Hello everyone. Today we are going to take a fresh look at our earliest memorable loss and use it to shed some light on how we navigate grief now. 

How we navigated our earliest loss, can actually tell us some things. The emotions we felt, the beliefs we had, how we responded to the loss, and the support we may or may not have received are all stored in our memory files. 

The body remembers and the unconscious mind remembers. 

Our unconscious mind tends to repeat what it knows. It turns to the familiar, even if it isn’t what’s best for us.

Looking back can actually serve us quite well. 

 Listen to find out why! 

Here's to your beautiful resilience!

 ~Diane

Will this be the summer that changes everything for you? You’ve done the grief support groups. You’ve thought about therapy. You’ve tried so hard to figure this out.  Yet, nothing seems to be bringing you inner peace, emotional stability, or a sense of purpose.

A lot of us get stuck here.

The good news: This summer I’ve opened my calendar to guide a small number of you 1:1. 

You’ll learn the most potent yet gentle coping strategies.  You’ll get j

Book a Call to learn more about working with me 1:1 this Summer https://link.crmdonebetter.com/widget/bookings/discovery-call-with-diane

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This podcast is not medical advice, psychotherapy or counseling. It is for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you or someone you know is in crisis dial or text 988 for the suicide crisis lifeline.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to the Grieving With More Freedom Podcast
• 1:15:13 Understanding Your First Grief Experience
• 5:00:13 Diane's Early Loss Stories
• 9:14:13 Reflecting on Your Grief Map
• 10:51:13 Outro and Resources

Transcript

Welcome to the Grieving With More Freedom podcast, where we talk about navigating loss in the real world, because grief can be unpredictable, demanding and immobilizing and, let's be honest, it doesn't wait until you're in your therapist's office. This is where I share real strategies that meet you in your everyday life with grief so you can ultimately connect to more peace, purpose and resilience. I'm your host, Diane Bonilla, grief therapist turned coach, with nearly three decades of experience in the grief and loss specialty. I'm a master practitioner of hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming, a certified grief-informed professional. But, most importantly, I too am walking my own path with grief. I understand all too well its complexities and challenges. So let's jump in. Here's to your beautiful resilience. 

Welcome to Episode 3 of the Grieving With More Freedom podcast. Do you remember your first? Hello everyone. Today we're going to take a fresh look at the past and use it to shed some light on how we navigate grief now. How we navigated our earliest memorable loss can actually tell us some valuable things. The emotions we felt, the beliefs we had, how we responded to the loss and the support we may or may not have received are all stored in our memory files. The body and the unconscious mind remember. Our unconscious mind tends to repeat what it knows. It turns to the familiar, and it does this even if it's not what's best for us. So looking back can actually serve us quite well. If we had a supported loss experience and if we initiated some healthy coping strategies, the body and the mind tend to remember this and that becomes the map for subsequent losses. 

And the same goes if we had a difficult time coping, if we found ourselves unsupported, and if we initiated some strategies that were not very effective. The body and the unconscious mind remember these too, and unless it gets corrected or repaired in some way throughout your life, that becomes the map for your grief. So this isn't to say you're doomed if you struggled to cope way back when or struggled to find support with your first loss, but I think we can learn something about what our responses tend to be now with loss and actually make some intentional changes with this new insight if we need to. It can also be validating to us if we're doing something right, if we're doing something that is helpful. We can absolutely update the map of our mind anytime. 

So reflecting on your first loss can provide some helpful insight as to why you tend to respond in certain ways to grief. It can shed light on emotions that tend to come up for you, beliefs that tend to come up for you and what you tend to choose in response to loss. So this understanding really is essential so that we can give ourselves some grace and compassion, but also make changes with our current grief experience. 

So take a moment to think about the earliest loss you remember. You know, go back to as far as you're able to remember and think about how old were you, where were you and it doesn't have to be the loss of a person, because, in fact, for many people, their first loss was something like a pet. 

Okay, so, once you've pinned this down, the period of time in your life, try to remember some of the details about it. How did you react? How did you feel with this loss? What did you say? Do you remember saying anything? Do you remember seeing anything in particular? Do you remember saying anything in particular? What do you remember hearing during this loss and who was there to support you? That's an important one. And what actions did you take? Also important One more thing to think about is were you included or not in some of the rituals and traditions around this loss? Okay, so I think you get the picture. 

I want you to just take a moment to think about it. If you're a person who likes to journal, this is something you can write about if you find that you can process things better that way, or just take some quiet time for a few minutes to think about this. Once you have all the details, what do you notice about your current grief experience that's similar to now? Has anything changed for the better since then? Has anything changed about your grieving process for the worse? Is it the same?

 So just explore that a little bit. You're doing a comparison. It's really amazing what you can potentially uncover with about 10 minutes of reflection. I'm big on walking. I walk about an hour four or five days a week and I use these walks to reflect and get downloads and insights. So if you're a person who thinks better on the move, walking might help you uncover some of these details. 

So I'll share with you a little bit. 

I thought about this on a recent walk and I came up with two different loss experiences that I had at a young age that I remember. For my first, I was about four when an older relative passed away and I was outside playing, and I remember my father coming over to me to tell me that we were going to have to go on a road trip for the funeral and that I would have to miss my best friend's birthday party. Well, I was upset, to say the least, admittedly not about the relative passing, but that I would be missing this Barbie birthday party, one where we would be making clothes for our Barbie. I was devastated. And of course now, as an adult, this seems so selfish, but I wasn't an adult, I was barely four. So when you do this, please be careful. Do not judge yourself. Okay, that's not the purpose of this exercise.

 What I do remember next is my dad getting furious with me and letting me know that he was very sad about this person passing away. And after a moment of shock because my sweet dad hardly ever yelled still doesn't I just felt so much empathy for him. I had no idea he was in so much pain. But at four I recognized that and, to be honest, I remember being embarrassed that I had protested about missing the party. It was a poignant moment of experiencing true empathy for someone else's pain, even at the age of four. Was this a foreshadowing of my career as a therapist, you know, specializing in grief, perhaps I don't know, but it opened my eyes to a little bit more to suffering. Today I'm very attuned to other people's pain and it is my passion to guide them through grief. 

My second experience with loss was my beloved parakeet Le Hing Mui. We lived in Hawaii at the time and I named him Le Hing Mui after my favorite treat, my favorite Hawaiian treat. It was a dried, sweet and sour plum with a pit. It was practically candy to me, and so I named this little blue parakeet after this treat. So don't ask me to sing you the Hawaiian commercial for Le Hing Mui, but I still remember it. Anyway, I adored this bird. I taught him to chirp back at me, to walk on my finger. I was about six and we kept him on a large mantle in front of a big, beautiful window in the bathroom and this way he could look outside. 

One day I entered the bathroom to find the cage door open and my beloved Le HIng Mui floating in the potty. This should have scarred me for life and it is amazing I turned out as normal as I did. Right, I remember my mother comforting me and gently explaining that my two-year-old brother must have opened the cage and unfortunately Le Hing Mui’s wings were clipped, so he really wasn't a steady flyer. So I think you get the picture there. 

I remember realizing that I couldn't control everything, even though I wanted to. I wasn't able to keep him safe, though a part of me knew I did my best. Having the support, the truth, and then being able to participate in a mini burial gave me just enough sense of control that I was okay. I grieved and I was okay. And thinking about today, today in my healing journey, truth is extremely important to me. Support is extremely important to me, and I remind myself I can't control everything, even when that little girl in me wants to, and that's how I deal with my grief map from my first couple grief experiences.

So now your job is to do the same. Go back in time and go through those questions that I listed before and see what you see now with new eyes. It's your chance to change the map that your mind and body have remembered and put on autopilot, because that's how you learned to do grief. It's your chance to change things up if you need to. It's also your chance to validate what is working well for you and go ahead and keep on doing it. All right, that is all for now. Here's to your beautiful resilience. 

If you felt a connection to today's episode, I would be so grateful if you shared this podcast with someone you know. Sharing helps the podcast to grow and reach more listeners. Don't forget to join my Facebook community Grieving With More Freedom and follow me on Instagram at Diane Bonilla Coaching. Ready for the next step in your grief journey? Book a 20 minute complimentary chat with me to learn more about a unique healing opportunity in my grief program, RLA, the resilient life Academy, a program that teaches you how to be your own grief expert, increase your confidence in navigating those unpredictable waves of emotion, and allows you the opportunity to let go of everything holding you back from grieving with more freedom. You'll find my calendar link in the show notes in my Instagram bio and inside my Facebook community. Thanks for listening. 

This podcast is not medical advice, psychotherapy or counseling. It is for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you or someone you know is in crisis dial or text 988 for the Suicide Crisis Lifeline.