The Ball in the Box

Saturday, March 9, 2019

Grief is a strange and unpredictable thing. We can't really control it, nor can we schedule its arrival when it's convenient for us.

Today I following a link on Facebook to an explanation of something called "The Ball in the Box." The woman who wrote the Twitter string on this concept shared an idea her doctor discussed with her about grief and how it affects our lives.

The idea is that our emotional life is a box, and is filled with all the feelings we have - love, joy, happiness, etc. Within that box is a "pain button," that reacts when one of those feelings bounces up against it.  When we lose someone we love, the ball that represents our grief is huge, and bounces around inside our emotional life constantly and crazily, pressing the pain button again and again, making our pain constant and unrelenting. It pushes all the other emotional balls out, leaving room for only grief and pain.



As time goes on, the ball that represents grief becomes smaller, which means it hits the pain button less frequently. There comes a time when there's room for other emotional balls, and it becomes possible to function in our daily lives without being overwhelmed all the time. But it's still present, and when the ball hits the button, it hurts just as much as it did when the ball was large.




The size of the ball shrinks and expands, depending on the time of year, outside factors, current mental health status, and other factors. But it never, ever goes away. And it sneaks up on you when you least expect it.

This happened to me about a month ago. I had a complete and total meltdown in the middle of the grocery store on my way home. I saw a kid picking out his Valentines for school, and it reminded me of an incident that occurred between Moe and me when she was a child. It was one of those incidents that when you look back on it, you know you could have made better choices at a parent, and you wish you could take it back, even though it was twenty years ago.

Well, that morphed into the "what if" thought process that leads into me blaming myself for her death, wishing I had been a better mother, and tearing myself up inside because I miss her so much. I utterly lost my shit. By the time I got home, I was wracked with sobs, and cried so long and hard I couldn't breathe. I haven't had a grief incident like that since the first year she was gone, the worst year of my life, and I was exhausted and bereft after I finally stopped crying. For some reason, when my grief ball hit my pain button that day, it was huge and overwhelming, and there was no way I could have predicted it, or prepared for it. It was just there, and demanded all my emotional energy until it passed.

At this point, I know that ball of grief will always be a part of my emotional life, and that it will wax and wane for the rest of my life. It doesn't make it easier to bear, but it does give me a framework I can use to think about my grief, and understand it when it overwhelms. 

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