Keeping busy – I mean a-ma-zing-ly busy – is one of several options survivors of loss use to avoid thinking and talking about IT – their enormously pain-filled and devastating loss.

A quick look at their calendar – with its clutter of appointments, dates with friends, time set aside for family, along with the sprinkling of activities like errands, chores, work and church, too routine to even schedule – will quickly confirm this observation of amazingly busy.  Or….

You may be a survivor whose busy is not found on your calendar but in the hectic pace of your daily home or job activities.  Up early, you tackle tasks with a dedicated vengeance, eager to focus on anything – no task is too small or too large – that will help you avoid any stray thoughts of IT and possibly bring on that much feared flood gate of emotions with its dreaded meltdown potential.  ‘Good gawd NO!’, you think, quickly looking for something else to distract you.

Then comes that wake-up moment when survivors either realize they don’t give a damn if another task or chore is ever done, or they’ve run out of tasks to do.  For there is no corner or surface left unaddressed by their manic busy of polishing, sorting or tossing!  Or, they’re physically unable to keep up this ridiculous pace!

With this realization though, comes a moment of panic: ‘If I step away from busy, step off the treadmill, what will I do to avoid It?’  This is a very troubling thought – hence the feeling of panic – accompanied by the fear of slumping into a chair or onto a couch and plummeting into unwanted past imprints and memories of your beloved.  Fears that you may stay glued to that place of remembering for an unknown time, you silently say to yourself, ‘never!’  And yet there’s no real alternative because truly, you are out of gas.  Staying busy is no longer an option.

So some survivors self-medicate with drugs or alcohol to stay numb enough to avoid the past with its pain.  But once avoidance becomes a lifestyle, instead of a temporary strategy to manage a moment in life, survivors are in real trouble.  Other options – like chronic depression, chemical abuse, eating disorders or other mental health challenges – can become necessary to sustain a lifestyle of avoidance.  But at what cost to survivors?

But there is another alternative that leads to a healthy healing of your pain.  Yeah, you know where I‘m headed….grief counseling.  I’m just a call away.