I Can Always Continue

By Franklin A. Díaz Lárez

The loss of a loved one is, perhaps, one of the greatest adversities that can be experienced. Grief and recovery are individual, personal, unique processes in each one. An instruction manual cannot be established to find a way out of pain when it is so intimate and exclusive. However, knowledge of other people's experiences can serve as a guide, as an orientation towards the exit path. This book is about that.
It contains a vast collection of experiences of people who have gone through the loss of a loved one, or similar situations, and have emerged strengthened.
It explains what human beings represent the notions of the past, present and future, and their close connection with the particular way in which some assume negative emotions and feelings.
It develops extensively what are the notions of grief, its phases and duration.
It explains in detail what meditation is, accompanying it with a wide range of mental and body relaxation exercises, very useful and effective in overcoming situations of bodily stress and / or mental depression.
It exposes the notion of "resilience" and the fundamental characteristics of resilient people, accompanied by true examples of individuals considered resilient with their example stories and self-improvement.
In the same way, it exposes the way in which the approaches of the so-called "Neurolinguistic Programming" can help to overcome difficult and traumatic situations and memories.
It contains a large list of recommended books to overcome the duel effectively, with its explanatory synopsis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Jan 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781071527917

Book preview

INDEX

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

THE CROSSROAD

CONCEPTION OF THE NOTES OF THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

LAST

THE FUTURE

THE PRESENT

THE DUEL. CONCEPT. PHASES AND DURATION

THE RESILENCE CONCEPT AND GENERAL.

INTERVIEW WITH THE PRESIDENT OF THE SPANISH INSTITUTE OF RESILIENCE.

EXAMPLES OF RESILIENT PEOPLE:

Silvia Mirta Válori

Stephen Hawking

Abraham Lincoln

Nelson Mandela

Ismael Santos

Anna Frank

Angel Sanz

Helen Keller

Kyle Maynard

Albert LLovera

The Hoyt Team

Kalpana Saroj

Pablo Pineda

Sean Maloney

Sara Navarro

Steve Jobs

Teresa Silva

Tim Guénard

Carlota Ruiz de Dulanto

THE MEDITATION. CONCEPT AND GENERAL.

BREATHING TECHNIQUES.

Exercises:

1st Watching our breath

2nd abdominal breathing

3rd full breath

4th The sigh

5th Breath and positive imagination

6th Breathing with meditation

7th Breathing and self-verbalizations

MUSCLE RELAXATION TECHNIQUES

Exercises:

1st Tension-relaxation practice (16 muscle groups)

2nd Tension-relaxation practice (8 muscle groups)

3rd Tension-relaxation practice (4 muscle groups)

4th Tension-relaxation practice (mental relaxation)

5th Passive muscle relaxation practice

6th Practice of conditioned relaxation

7th Differential Relaxation Practice

8th practice of rapid relaxation

9º Application of relaxation to stressful situations.

VISUALIZATION TECHNIQUES

Exercises:

1º Visualize an image for tension and another for relaxation.

2nd Display of a landscape

3rd Memories display

4th Exercise of the ideal workplace and mental relaxation

5th Health fire exercise

6th Active Imagination Exercise

7th Exercise of emotional change of our experiences

THE NEUROLINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING. CONCEPT AND GENERAL

RECOMMENDED READINGS. AUTHORS AND SYNOPSIS OF THEIR BOOKS

The power of now - Eckhart Tolle

Man in search of meaning - Viktor Frankl

Life time - Marcos Giralt Torrente

What has no name - Piedad Bonnett

The violet hour - Sergio del Molino

Say your name - Francisco Goldman

Tomb Song - Julián Herbert

My buried book - Mauro Libertella

The year of magical thinking - Joan Didion

Blue Nights - Joan Didion

A shame under observation - C.S. Lewis

Trauma, guilt and grief. Towards an integrative psychotherapy - Desclée de Brouwer

Let me cry - Anji Carmelo

Death, a new dawn - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

One of the greatest adversities that human beings can experience is the loss of a loved one. Those of us who have lived it know what it means, those who don't, just imagine it, suppose it, presume it.

Talking about it does not always have to mean recreating in pain, in suffering, on the contrary. It is a way out of him, to escape, to find a way out. Someone once said that when the joys are shared, they multiply, they get bigger, while when you share the pain you make it smaller, smaller, or, in any case, more bearable, more bearable.

This year marks the seventh anniversary that I lost my beloved wife. He left April 4, 2008. During all this time I have held dozens of conversations and exchange of opinions in forums and websites dedicated to the topic of grief and recovery, I have regularly eaten all the texts that have fallen into my hands referring to the subject, and even, I have created a Facebook page to exchange experiences and messages of reciprocal support among those who have crossed such a thorny path. I have called it Club of encounter between widowers and widows. From this knowledge, conversations and exchange of experiences, this book emerged.

It is often the case that the contemplation of situations similar to one's own is usually a very useful and effective tool when looking for a way out, an escape from one's own labyrinth. That has been, perhaps, the greatest of the conclusions I have reached.

When you have fallen into a well as deep as this, there are times when you think, that you are the only one with so much suffering, with so much pain. You don't understand how it is possible for the planet to continue spinning, for the sun to continue rising every day,that people continue to work, the children studying, the birds singing, and finally, that the world has not stopped before your catastrophe as, apparently, you have stopped.

The true fact is that the planet never stops, the Earth keeps spinning, and the World goes on its way. It is up to us only to continue with him or not. The decision is always personal.

THE CROSSROAD

Dr. Pilar, a psychologist who treated us in the chemotherapy section of the Hospital Mexoeiro of the Galician city of Vigo, once told me that her knowledge and experience of many years dealing with cancer patients and their families, told her that when it is crossed by a traumatic situation as it is a familiar loss, or the very news that one is sick of a mortal disease, usually one of two ways is taken; either one stagnates with his trauma anchoring in suffering indefinitely, or you use that experience as a lever to elevate yourself towards higher goals.

The choice is yours, he told me. As much as I try to help you out of there, if you don't want to, you won't leave."

He was right.

Everyone is free to choose which path to take when facing such a crossroads. In any case, I think it is necessary to have a lot of patience with that new me that has remained after the catastrophe. Even if the whole world does not understand our new situation, the important thing is that we understand each other.

Claudia, a Mexican girl of little more than thirty years with whom I corresponded through the page Club meeting between widowers and widows, said that her main problem was not knowing if she was going to get ahead or was going to be stuck in his trauma, but no one understood. He said he did not understand why people were not able to put themselves in their place, not even their closest relatives.

His case was especially unique. He had fallen madly in love with a married man and two young daughters. A worker who worked in the construction of a building. She had been the engineer of the work. After a long and hidden romance, they decided to tell their story in their families and start a life together. A few months later, the boy died in a traffic accident.

Two years after that, Claudia had abandoned everything; work, studies, home, savings, etc., and she was submerged in an abyss of pain from which she was not able to leave.

I asked these questions:

«Why is it so important for you that others put themselves in your place? Do you put yourself in their place? Don't you know that everyone also carries their own cross? Do you think that the only one who suffers with this whole situation is you? Don't you think about the damage you can be doing to your own family by seeing yourself, as you are now, in what you have become?

She answered me:

«I do put myself in the place of others, and that only adds more torment to my life. Believe it or not, I do not enjoy this, and I more than anyone else want to get out of here, what happens is that I am not able to find the way »

He had tried everything, or almost everything. I was in medical pharmacological treatment. I had recently started writing a blog that distilled pain just by looking at its dark, black appearance, not to mention the heartbreaking of each written word.

Little by little I gained his trust, to the point that at one point he confessed his real name, his address in Mexico, the university where he studied, and other personal life data of special relevance. However, he never showed me a picture of him, but not of his late husband and the rest of his family. That detail kept me greatly intrigued.

He never confessed to me the worst of his stigmata, and that I found out for myself after an exhaustive investigation done through the network. The girl had a terrible congenital malformation, known as cleft lip, which forced her to wear half of her face permanently covered with a scarf. It was an addition to his grief, which perhaps made her deeper, more tremendous.

When he learned that I knew, he said, Do you understand me better now?

It seems clear that, to the pain of her loss, there was the conviction of believing that she would never get someone else to love her like that boy, and that she would never find a partner again. I thought that if he had already achieved such important achievements in his life as finding a man who loved her, completing a university career, or getting a good job, he could return to have a partner if he intended, if he finally decided to leave that state of depression so tremendous and resumed control of his life with new vigor, with new illusions. The problem was that she didn't see it that way. He had lost faith in the future, and with it, confidence in himself, in his internal potential.

Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a doctor of Jewish origin who was a prisoner duringin several years in the Nazi concentration camps, he wrote a book entitled The Man in Search of Meaning. It explains what his own experience as a prisoner was, and some of his observations on how newcomers handled their new and traumatic situation.

I quote:

"The prisoner who lost faith in the future - in his future - was doomed. With the loss of faith in the future, he also lost his spiritual support; he abandoned himself and decayed and became the subject of physical and mental annihilation. As a general rule, this occurred suddenly, in the form of crises, whose symptoms were familiar to the inmate with experience in the field. We all feared this moment not for us, which would not have been important, but for our friends. It used to start when one morning the prisoner refused to