Hi Gill sending you a welcome hug
It is eight years since my husband died and i still miss hime every single day and i think it was about 4 years before i stopped thinking about the horrid days at the end of his life and started replacing them with much better ones about the whole of his life and out lives together.But although of course i miss him i am not unhappt like i was then, i thought about if there was such a thing as an afterlife or somehow meeting up again a reunion would be amazing but how does that conversation go after a while - what did you do with your life - nothing, ust mourned losing you wouldnt take very long, and maybe he would be a bit upset that i threw away my life after he faught so hard for his - so i pretty much decided if i couldnt find reasons to live life for me then i would live it for him - go back to doing things we enjoyed doing together do some of the ones we never got round too or that he would have chosen to do and i would probably have sat out on.
Grief left me even more anxious and socially inept than i had been before so this meant overcoming - or finding ways around the barriers that threw up -but it has got better the more i have done it. I tried to join things locally and it didnt work for me because they were the wrong things and joining something just for the sake of it, then putting myself through the social interactions it involved didnt work - but it has worked really well for others here, we are all different and we all find different paths.So i selected the barriers which prevented me doing things i actually wanted too - did free online courses which boosted confidence in my abilitys and lead to other things.
The point at which i was terrified dangling on a zip wire over a gorge in Africa. but looking at the rainbow in a waterfall - something i had wanted to see since i was a child and he had said i would one day was the point at which i realised it was worth it for me, but also when i felt he was with with me, he isnt waiting to have the conversation on the off chance we meet in another world and even though i cant see or hear him there have been other occasions when i have felt that very strongly.
Traditional psychology focuses on us "letting go" other people think we should "move on and let go" i found a different theory called continuing bonds - because in a way we are afraid to let go of grief because we think it means letting go of the person we are grieving for but actually we dont need too ever let go of them, and although we also learn to live with grief and it no longer is the biggest part of us we can separate grief from the person we are grieving for so my philosophy now, is move forward,and take him with me, not as some-one missing from my life but as some-one still very much part of it just in different ways from when he was here in body.
Whether there is an afterlife or not, i dont know but it helps me to feel better in this one to think there mat be something so nothing to lose if there isnt. Whether its neurological and i am simply bringing up his memory i dont know, but again when those memorys are more positive ones it helps me to live life in a more positive way.
One thing i tried , to help me do that was, If you imagine a deck of cards and put pictures on them - when you are holding a flash back card imagine putting it on the bottom and replace that visualisation with one of better times - to do that you need to collect those better cards and the more of them there are the longer it will be before the bad cards come back to the top -until eventually you have so many good cards you can just throw away the ones at the bottom and still have a full pack.