Dealing with Grief

DEALING WITH GRIEF

1) Denial

In the first of the five stages of grief, we deny that our loved ones are gone. Soon after the death of our friend, our grieving takes the form of refusing to believe that our friend is actually dead. We use denial as a defense mechanism, defending ourselves from the change that death and bereavement represents. In the first of the stages of grief, we try to escape the reality of our friend’s death. This is the mind's way of shielding us from the other painful emotions associated with grief. 

2) Anger

In this stage, we are filled with anger over the death of our loved ones. Part of the steps of grief is searching for the source of our grief. We look for a cause to this tragedy, and we look for who or what is to blame. All of the books on grief and grieving cannot answer the nagging question: “Why me?” We cope with grief by blaming ourselves or others for the loss of our friend.

3) Bargaining

In the third of the grief stages, we try to bargain with God or with a higher power about reversing what has happened to us. We beg God (or fate) for second chances, using "What if?" and "If only" sort of pleas. Perhaps if I choose to devote my life to charitable causes, God will somehow undo the death of my loved one. The steps of grief have a way of driving people to ask the big questions in life; that happens during the bargaining stage of grieving. And that's where followme.org comes in: we hope to provide a safe place as you answer the difficult questions that your grief raises. Find out more below.

4) Depression

In this step, we feel the tremendous weight of our loved one’s death. We continue our bereavement by sinking into depression and the realization that our friend is really gone. During the fourth of the stages in grief, sadness, regret, fear, and sorrow well up in us. This stage is the darkest of the five stages of grief.

5) Acceptance

In this step, we finally begin to come to terms with the death of our friend. At the last of the stages of grief, we become aware that it’s going to be OK, that we will survive the loss of our loved one. In this phase of grieving, comfort sets in, and we realize that life will go on.

Finally, it’s important to note that a mourner may go through these stages in a different order, return to a given stage, and stay in a stage for a long time. These grief stages are a guide—not a rule. They encapsulate most of the broad emotions that a person goes through after a loss. 

FREEDOM with BONDAGE shows you how you can have your "freedom" and not your "bondage"  if you follow the Holy Spirit, who is your Helper in dealing with your everyday challenges and problems.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Injustice and Spiritual Wisdom

 INJUSTICE AND SPIRITUAL WISDOM

 

We are living in a world in which injustice and vengeance are rampant. Many of us are in the midst of this storm of unfairness that causes our unhappiness and even makes us choose the wrong choices and decisions, resulting in our wrongdoings.

 

A Case in Point

 

In 1984, Archbishop Valerian Trifa was deported from the United States after being accused a Nazi supporter, who not only had incited attacks on Jews, but also was responsible for executing many Jews in World War II.

 

After World War II, the Nazi supporter came to the United States as a refugee immigrant. He assumed the name of Valerian Trifa, and was ordained as a priest of the Rumanian church soon after his arrival in the United States. He rose quickly to the rank of bishop and archbishop, and lived in comfort in a 25-room farmhouse on a 200-acre estate maintained by his church.

 

Later on, a dentist, who was a Nazi survivor, recognized the Archbishop as the Nazi supporter. The case against him was then pursued for more than a decade by survivors of the Nazi years, Jewish organizations, journalists, and the Justice Department of the United States. Their efforts helped focus public attention on Nazi war criminals who were living in the United States.

 

At first, the Archbishop vehemently denied his former identity, despite some handwriting experts confirming that his handwriting was identical with that in some of the execution orders he had carried out while he was a Nazi supporter. As luck would have it, with the advancement of forensic science, some experts could incredibly still retrieve some DNA from those execution orders. That was his undoing, and his final judgment.

 

The Archbishop was ultimately ordered to leave the United States in 1982, but spent two years trying to find a country that would give him refuge. Portugal admitted him in 1984, and he finally settled in Estoril, where he died at the age of 72 of a heart attack.

 

Spiritual Wisdom

 

Do not avenge yourself; instead, leave it to the wrath of God, which is a repayment to man for something man has done wrong. Do not carry with you anger, bitterness, resentment, and revenge—they only make you unhappy.

 

^“Do not fret because of those who are evil
or be envious of those who do wrong;
for like the grass they will soon wither,
like green plants they will soon die away.

Trust in the Lord and do good;
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.

Take delight in the Lord,
 and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

(Psalm 37: 1-4)

Bottom line: Be happy and not depressed because there is so much injustice around.

 

FREEDOM with BONDAGE shows you how you can have your "freedom" and not your "bondage"  if you follow the Holy Spirit, who is your Helper in your everyday choices and decisions.

 

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Attachments and Depression

 ATTACHMENTS AND DEPRESSION

 

Attachment is no more than a safety blanket to overcome fear—fear of change and of the unknown from that change. To cope with that fear, all attachments become distractions.

 

We are living in a world with many problems that confront us in our everyday life, and many of these are not only unavoidable but also insoluble. To overcome these daily challenges, many of us just turn to attachment as a means of distracting ourselves from facing our problems head on, or adapting and changing ourselves in an ever-changing environment. All of our struggles in life, from anxiety to frustrations, from anger to sadness, from grief to worry—they all stem from the same thing: our attachment to how we want things to be, rather than relaxing into accepting and embracing whatever that might happen after we have put forth our best effort.

 

Attachment is the source of human depression. No attachment, no depression!

 

Career attachments

 

Your career may span over decades, involving many ups and downs, such as promotion and unemployment, changes of career and pursuits of higher qualifications, among others. They may have become your problematic attachments.

 

Money and wealth attachments

 

Money plays a major role in life. You need money for almost everything in life. Attachment to money and the riches of the material world is often a result of an inflated ego-self. You may want to keep up with the Joneses—driving a more expensive car than your neighbors and friends.

 

Relationship attachments

 

Living has to do with people, involving agreements and disagreements, often resulting in mixed emotional feelings of joy and sorrow, contentment and regret, among others, and they become attachments to the ego-self as memories that you may refuse to let go of—forgetting and forgiving, for example, are hurdles often difficult to overcome.

 

Success and failure attachments

 

Success in life often becomes an attachment in the form of expectation that it will continue, bringing more success. Failure, on the other hand, may generate disappointment and regret—an emotional attachment often difficult to let go of. 

 

Adversity and prosperity attachments

 

In the course of human life, loss and bereavement are as inevitable as death. Loss can be physical, material, and even spiritual, such as loss of hope and purpose. You may want to attach to the good old days, and refuse to let go of the current adversity. Adversity and prosperity attachments stem from the ego-self.

 

Time attachments

 

Time is a leveler of mankind: we all have only 24 hours a day, no more and no less, although the lifespan of each individual varies. Attachment to time is the reluctance to let go of time passing away, as well as the vain attempt to fully utilize every moment of time, leading to a compulsive mind, such as texting while driving.  

 

Sometimes we are so busy in the outside world that we seldom have an opportunity to look inside of ourselves, to understand who we really are and what really makes us happy—probably not the material things around us.

 

Attachments are the underlying causes of depression, a mental disorder affecting millions of people worldwide.

DEPRESSION NO DEPRESSION

FREEDOM with BONDAGE shows you how you can have your "freedom" and not your "bondage" in your everyday choices and decisions that give you your attachments.

 

Stephen Lau     

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Happiness Personality

 HAPPINESS PERSONALITY

Holistic wellness of the body, the mind, and the soul has much to do with happiness, which has its origin from personality development over the years.

Sometimes we wonder why some people are always happy while others are always unhappy. Just as Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian author, said in the beginning of his novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are alike; unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways.”

Indeed, your happiness has much to do with your personality development over your life. In other words, your own life experiences and your perceptions of those experiences not only define and shape your personality but also are uniquely yours. Therefore, it is impossible to say why some people are happy, and why others are unhappy.

Mental happiness and body wellness are interrelated. If you are happy, your body will even heal faster. It’s just that simple.

But happiness is not easy to come by, especially when your mind is not prepared to receive it. The mind needs wisdom to create happiness thoughts to stimulate the brain cells to produce chemicals that make one happy. Genuine human happiness comes from human thoughts that are the components of human personality. Therefore, understanding personality development may throw some light on why you are happy or unhappy.

But understanding personality development may throw some light on why you are happy or unhappy most of the time.

According to the famous psychologist Erik Erikson, your personality has evolved through several decades of changes and experiences, resulting in who and what you have now become. Therefore, profound human wisdom is to understand how those changes in your life have occurred and shaped your personality, and how adapting yourself to those changes now may still benefit you in the long run. According to Erik Erikson, there are eight life stages. through which we may have gone through to become who and what we are right now. These eight psychosocial development stages are as follows:

Trust and Mistrust

In this first stage, from birth to age one, we may experience and develop trust or mistrust that affects how we feel about the benevolence of the world around us.

Do you always have low trust or mistrust in others?

Independence and Doubt

In the toddler stage, we begin to develop our self-trust,  which leads to independence. With self-trust, we begin to learn how to walk. In this stage, however, we may also develop self-doubt that leads to shame later in life. This may be the underlying cause of failing to take risks in later life, missing some golden opportunities to improve our lives, and thus making us feel unhappy and unfulfilled.

Are you always self-confident?

Creativity and Guilt

In preschool years, we begin to exercise our minds to acquire initiative and express creativity. The capability to express freely our initiative and creativity helps us develop the playful and positive side of our nature. Under restraint, on the other hand, we may develop guilt, lack of self-confidence, and inability to get close to others.

Are you always creative and imaginative?

Industry and Inferiority

From age five to eleven, we experience fulfillment in accomplishment or disappointment in failure. This is often a result of acquiring our society’s work ethics. We begin to believe in our abilities and feel motivated to work hard. On the other hand, if we become lazy, we develop poor work habits that may adversely affect our careers later in life.

Are you always puttering from one job to another, always procrastinating and never meeting deadlines?

Identity and Diffusion

In adolescent, we begin to explore ourselves, finding out who we are and what we want out of life. We may channel our energy into a field we love, and derive pleasure from seeing what we have accomplished. This growth in our sense of self determines whether or not we have an “identity crisis.”

Are you always in search for a purpose in life?

Intimacy and Withdrawal

In early adulthood, we develop intimacy, which is a quality of an individual, and not the couple. The ability to develop and maintain a long-term relationship is an asset. However, many of us may experience difficulty in achieving closeness with others, or even maintaining a long-lasting relationship, resulting in inner loneliness that causes us to doubt even our own remarkable accomplishments in life.

Is your life worthwhile when it comes to relationships?

Compassion and Selfishness

In middle age, we become more connected to future generations, as evidenced by being parents, mentors, and supervisors. However, we may also become self-focusing, alienating ourselves from the next generation, and thus creating the “generation gap.”

Do you spend much time focusing on your own needs, instead of those of others?

Ego and Despair

In old age, by letting go of the ego, we accept both our successes and failures, and thus have a healthy perspective on life. However, we may also look back at our own past experiences and the world in general with disdain and regret, and thus we become despaired and unhappy.

Do you think you already have a fulfilled life?

If you wish to be a happier individual, learn to let go of all your attachments, which are the sources of human unhappiness. Human wisdom may not be adequate to help you let go of your attachments in the physical world; you also need spiritual wisdom With the spiritual wisdom from the Bible, you may be able to overcome the reluctance to let go of your attachments. Let go to let God in order to live your life 

THE HAPPINESS WISDOM

FREEDOM with BONDAGE shows you how you can have your "freedom" and not your "bondage" in your everyday choices and decisions that give you your happiness personality.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Payback Anger

     In Houston, Texas, a man using his gun robbed diners in a taqueria restaurant. The robber was on the verge of leaving that restaurant when he was shot 9 times by a vigilante diner, who then helped diners recover their money robbed at that Houston taqueria restaurant before disappearing.

     The police later discovered that the suspect’s weapon was only a “plastic gun.” Texas police began searching for that vigilante diner, with that “you-take-my-cash-I-take-your-life” mindset out of anger.

      Anger is more than a feeling; it’s a functional emotion. Its objective is to stimulate your mental awareness and direct your physical attention to something important going on in your own psychological world. Emotions are informants. Positively experienced emotions bring gratitude in appreciation, joy in fulfillment, and pride in accomplishment. Negatively experienced emotions bring anger, anxiety, danger, fear, frustration, worry, and even violence.

     Anger is about threats and violations to your wellbeing. So, being able to feel anger and use anger to safeguard your own personal wellbeing is important. People who can’t get angry often end up accepting aggressions and violations of their wellbeing. Many victims of family abuse simply adjust to verbal threat or even physical violence and accept mistreatment as an unhappy fact of life. They learn to deny its emotional impact, to rationalize its harm, and even to avoid upsetting the abuser. Adults, who’ve learned these “survival” skills as children, often end up marrying into abusive relationships not because they want to, but because they unconsciously feel the abuse comfortably familiar and even normal.

    Angry No More: A new book on how to control and eradicate your anger.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Why "Prayers Not Answered"?

The Meaning of “Prayers Not Answered”

Prayers not answered” simply means “expectations not fulfilled.”

But what’re your “expectations”? And where do they come from?

You experience your own life experiences through your five senses (seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling) as a result of the choices of your actions, inactions, and reactions in your everyday life.

Your sensations often become your own perceptions, which then form your own assumptions and predictions; for example, a good education will lead to a successful career, and bring about a happy relationship.

All your “expectations” are only the personal and the subjective perceptions of your mind. But your “expectations” are often unreal and even self-delusive.

Even what you think you see with your own eyes may not necessarily be the reality.

To illustrate, in 1997, Richard Alexander from Indiana was convicted as a serial rapist, because one of the victims and her fiancé insisted that he was the perpetrator based on what the victim and her fiancé claimed that “they saw with their own eyes.”

But the convicted man was later exonerated and subsequently released in 2001, based on the new DNA science and other forensic evidence. Experts explained that a traumatic emotional experience, such as a rape, could “distort” the perception of an individual. That explains why the woman and her fiancé “swore” that Richard Alexander was the rapist, but evidently he wasn’t.

To illustrate “unreal expectations”: Helen Keller, celebrated author, political activist, and philanthropist, was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree; she became deaf and blind at an early age of less than two.

Imagine you were Helen’s parents: would you have “darkened expectations” of the future of Helen when she suddenly became deaf and blind?

Another illustration of “unreal expectations”: Shon Robert Hopwood, a young American convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to prison, became well-known as a jailhouse lawyer. While serving time in prison, Shon started spending time in the law library, became a jailhouse lawyer for the inmates, and ultimately a very accomplished United States Supreme Court practitioner by the time he left prison in 2009. Then, he became the professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.

If you were the parents of Shon, would your own expectations of your son have fallen short after his conviction of 12 years of imprisonment?

The truth of the matter

Your perceptions—whether true or untrue—become your realities, and are then stored in your subconscious mind as your memories.

Whenever you want to make a choice or decision, it’s your subconscious mind that provides your conscious mind with your many attitudes, beliefs, and predictions—all based on your memories of your past experiences. Your thinking mind then begins to process and project them into the future as your “expectations to be fulfilled.”

Points to Remember

Perceptions may easily become distorted and unreal. So, don’t let your own perceptions become your assumptive predictions.

Expectations are in the future, and their timeline is indefinite. So, don’t jump to any conclusion yet.

The past was gone; the future is yet to come; only the present is real. So, don’t use the past to predict the future as “expectations to be fulfilled.”

Click here to get Why Prayers Are Seldom Answered.

FREEDOM with BONDAGE shows you how you can have "freedom" and not "bondage" in your everyday choices and decisions. 

Stephen Lau

Copyright © Stephen Lau

Control and Out of Control

 CONTROL AND OUT OF CONTROL

 

Letting go is difficult because there is one thing that most of us have overlooked: the wisdom of letting go to let God.

Life is all about living—it comes with some hard work, simple integrity, and, above all, the wisdom in living. If life is all about living—not just about making and spending money—then it is not about regrets and dreams.

Regrets look back at the past; dreams look forward to the future. Unfortunately, both are not within our control. If the value of money is solely based on accumulation of wealth, or the acquisition of material things, then living indeed becomes a labyrinth of regrets and dreams—regrets over the wrong investment decisions in the past, and dreams of the great fortune yet to come in the future.

A life journey is forever paved with many challenges and losses, many of which are beyond human control because they are often sudden and unpredictable.

Physical loss, including loss of vision and mobility, both of which may affect the quality of life with respect to independent living, may make living beyond control.

Material loss may include loss of property from natural disaster, such as flooding, tornado, and wildfire, loss of place and space, such as moving from a house to an apartment or to a nursing home. Downsizing also means the loss or forced disposal of treasured possessions that many are reluctant to let go of.

Memory loss may result in a severe loss of organizational ability and the ability to plan and function, resulting in loss of independence, which is a major setback for the elderly.

Loss of loved ones due to accidents or natural causes are devastating. Spousal loss is often the most devastating in that the oneness in marriage is forever broken, resulting in isolation and loneliness.

Losses that come in many different forms often become sources of unhappiness, but losses are no more than life challenges that are beyond human control.

But living, to many, is about controlling self and others; more specifically, purposely controlling the destiny of self, as well as directly or indirectly controlling the destinies of others around. The truth of the matter is that we are only humans, and we cannot control what is controlled by God. Being finite, with only limited intelligence, we are limited in our capability to control what is beyond human control. God, who is infinite, is in absolute control of everything. Our constant desire to control is displeasing to God—an expression of our lack of trust, and our disobedience.

Humans are always given a choice: continuing to control one’s destiny or letting go to let God control. 

God has given each one of us a unique life and destiny that only we can complete it.

“Your eyes saw my unformed body;

all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” (Psalm 139: 16)

However, the completion of that life and destiny in our life journey is according to His way and time, and not according to ours. In other words, it is all about what He wants for us, and not what we want for ourselves.

THE TAOOF LIVING FOR LIFE

 

FREEDOM with BONDAGE shows you how you can have your "freedom" and not your "bondage" in your everyday choices and decisions to control or let go your control.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau