A colleague recently told me a story about an article she read about a woman who had been through a terrible divorce.  The woman talked about how difficult her divorce was but, also, how grateful she was to have had the good times in the relationship.  She said something like, “Just because it ended badly doesn’t mean there wasn’t love and delight in the earlier years and I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.”  I was struck by this woman’s ability to embrace the fact that she had, indeed, encountered pain and grief, but that there had also been happiness and satisfaction within the whole scope of her experience with her ex-husband.

This conversation with my colleague got me to thinking about how loss and grief sometimes lead us to erase all that came before and focus our attention only on endings.  The divorced woman’s comments speak to the resource we can have when, after we have moved through the immediacy of grief and loss about whatever has moved out of our lives, we can then remember and reclaim a sense of the gifts that were with us earlier in the relationship, job, situation, or whatever it is we have lost.

When we imagine moving through a loss with all the feelings and thoughts that come with it, and then moving into recalling the good things that preceded the loss, we get a glimpse into a natural process of resilience.  We’re hard-wired to “bounce back”, to grieve and then rediscover our enthusiasm for life.  We can also support this natural process by allowing ourselves to fully embrace grief and pain, and then to be curious about the gifts that were part of the experience, person, or situation we have lost.  This is particularly important when things have ended badly, as we tend to focus on the negatives when we’ve had a difficult time with a person or situation.

For this week’s experiment, I invite you to be curious about what you might experience if you were to focus your awareness on the positive things you had *before* a loss that ended badly.  The emotions, states of mind, and physical experience you had of yourself when things were good are still part of your history and repertoire, and are there to draw and savor on in your imagination.  They are also present as part of the “color and texture” of your being – aspects of yourself that you may draw on without realizing it consciously.

The purpose of this experiment isn’t to invite you back into a painful situation, or to force yourself to feel good about something bad.  Instead, it’s an invitation to be curious about what you experience when you reflect on the good things that were real about the whole journey you took with that person or situation.  As the woman in the article mentioned, it’s an opportunity to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

If you find yourself becoming mired in struggle or pain about what happened, then let the experiment go and notice that you may well still be in the process of grieving or anger about what happened.  Or, you may discover that you have tended to focus on the negatives only, and have overlooked the gifts the experience brought you at the time it was good.  As with all the experiments, the purpose here is simply to bring greater conscious awareness to how you move through experience.  There is no right or wrong answer or way to do it.  There’s just a chance to know yourself better.