Paul Cockayne – 07791 970406 – paulcockayne3@gmail.com
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In thinking about loss, a model I sometimes use is what I call a “needs wheel”. We need different things in our lives – to feel loved, to feel special, to feel useful and worthwhile, to feel physically healthy – and so on. Many different needs, and the relative importance of these needs is different for different people.
How do we meet these needs? Again, this is different for different people. Relationships are likely to be important – relationships with friends, family, loved ones. Work may be important to us, as may hobbies. We may get some comfort from going to the gym, or smoking, or alcohol. For each of us this is different, but we could construct a personal “needs wheel” – a pie chart in which different activities or people are represented by slices – their relative importance represented by their relative sizes.
So, then we can understand when we are likely to feel loss. If we lose something or someone that is a big slice of our wheel, our needs will not be met, and we will feel loss. If the loss is of something that is only a small slice, we will feel it much less.
We might express our losses in different ways – “I grieve for my mother”, “I miss my old dog”, “I’m bored since I gave up work”, “I’d love a cigarette” – but all these things express the fact that we are missing something that we used to have – we are feeling loss.
We may suffer loss in many different guises – it may be the loss of a person who is important to us, friends moving away, kids leaving home, separation from a partner, or death of a loved one.
But loss is not just about people. We might lose our job, for instance, or lose a major interest in our lives such as a hobby. We might also lose an idea – a client recently told me about an aunt who was a strong role model to her as a child. But as an adult things happened that caused her to change her view of the aunt – she saw a darker side of her – and the role model was lost, leaving her with many doubts about who she was and where she was going.
We can also lose dreams, or visions of the future. For instance, some people enter marriage focusing on setting up a home, having kids, and bringing up a happy family. But if they are unable to have kids for some reason, the vision they had is destroyed, and this can knock away a foundation stone and leave a huge hole in their lives.
So there are many different things that are important to us for various reasons, and if any of those are removed from our lives, we are likely to feel a loss. Some of these losses are great than others, of course – some are easier to overcome than others. More on this next time….