Project 5 of 12 for high-nurturance families and relationships
	Worksheet - a Tangible-loss Inventory What Prized Physical Things are Gone From Your Life? By Peter K. Gerlach, MSW

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The Web address of this article is http://sfhelp.org/05/physical-loss-wks.htm

        Clicking links below will open a full window or an informational pop-up, so please turn off your browser's popup blocker or allow popups from this nonprofit site.

         This is one of over 150 articles focused on building high-nurturance family relationships and preventing divorce. This introduction describes the Web site's purpose and the best ways to use its resources. Each article is part of a mosaic of ideas, so the more you read, the more sense they'll all make. These articles augment, vs. replace, other qualified professional help.

        Before continuing, reflect: why are you reading this - what do you need?

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        All healthy kids and adults form bonds with selected living and other things. These bonds break by choice or chance, causing losses. Nature provides us with the automatic healing response of grief or mourning to help us accept our losses and their impacts, and move on.  This non-profit Web site proposes that a common personal, marital, and family stressor is incomplete grief.

        Family Project 5 in this site provides information, options, and resources to help adults and older kids (a) evaluate their values and policies on mourning, and help each other (b) identify and facilitate any incomplete or blocked grief, and (c) evolve pro-grief families and relationships.

  Purposes - This Project-5 worksheet aims to help adults and older children:

• Identify the specific tangible (physical) things they've each lost,

• Identify how the losses occurred, and...

• Judge whether these losses have been, or are being, well mourned.

Here a loss is a broken psychological bond with (attachment to) something of value - i.e. a loss is a mental, psychological, and perhaps spiritual reaction to some precious thing, person, or situation that will never be experienced in the same way again.

       This physical-loss inventory complements another one which identifies significant intangible losses and whether they're well-mourned or not.

  Preparation:

• Decide if your true Self is directing your personality. If not...

  • expect skewed results from these two loss inventories, and...

  • evaluate whether you want to use Project 1 options to free your Self to guide your other talented subselves.

• Print one or more copies of this inventory, and have extra paper and a pen on hand

• Get in a quiet, undistracted place, and allot plenty of time to meditate as you fill this worksheet out, and...

• Expect to learn something useful from doing this.

Options

Make notes or symbols, and add items to fit your unique situation as you go. Note comments or feelings, and hi-light with colored markers. Make these inventories work for you!

When you're done, go back and rank-order the most impactful losses (e.g. "1" = most impactful, "2" = next, etc.). Alternatively, asterisk or circle the most significant losses without ranking.

      One value of these two inventories is in becoming aware of how many things you or another person has lost. Another is becoming more aware of how you or they have reacted to those losses. So - get quiet, take your time, and note your significant physical losses.

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 Directions

         Pick a starting point - e.g. early childhood or a key change in your lifestyle. 

        In the "Lost How?" column, use a symbol for what caused your loss - e.g. "Ch" for childhood trauma, "D" = from divorce, "L" for leaving home, "M" for marriage, "R" for stepfamily re/marriage, "Co" for cohabiting, "B" for child-conception and birth, and "O" for other reasons. 

        Get clear on your criteria for judging if grief is "done" or not. One way to judge this is whether the person demonstrates (vs. says) they have genuinely accepted a loss on mental, emotional, and spiritual levels. Incomplete acceptance causes behavioral clues like these.

        Then use your criteria to decide if you have (or someone else has) grieved each loss "well enough," and put "Y(es)," "No," or "?" for each tangible loss.   

        Option - use a copy of this inventory to guess what precious physical things another person (like a child, mate, or parent) has lost.       

        If appropriate, fill out copies of this inventory for each major life event that caused physical losses for you or another person

        Note that major life changes don't necessarily cause losses (broken bonds) - and all losses result from major life changes.

        Be flexible and creative - amend this inventory to better fit your unique needs.

  Tangible (Physical) Things I've Lost

        Recall: the purpose of these two inventories is to...

• raise your adults' awareness of family-members' major losses (broken bonds), and...

• help your adults decide whether grieving each loss is "complete enough," and if not...

• motivate you to review and update your family grieving permissions, values, and policies, and to...

• negotiate who should do what for whom, to facilitate healthy mourning as needed.

Doing these things together is part of family Project 5 - intentionally (a) evolve a pro-grief family, (b) model and teach your kids healthy grieving concepts and principles, and (c) help each other learn to do "good grief."

 
Options 

• Print and inventory your (or someone's) grief status on significant intangible losses

• Review (a) this summary of five widespread personal and family stressors and (b) the toxic [wounds + unawareness] cycle that causes them

• Take this "good grief" quiz to see what you (need to) know about healthy mourning

• Review these useful Q&A items about bonding, losses, and healthy grieving. 

• Study these slides or equivalent text article overviewing healthy bonding and grieving basics;

• Thoughtfully fill out a printed copy of the grief values-clarification worksheet;
  

• Review this introduction to personal and family grieving policies, then meditate and write a short paragraph describing the grieving "policy" of each of your main prior homes;

• Scan these other Project-5 articles and select any that interest you.

• Review these useful books about grieving, and/or search the Web for grieving resources.

• Have all your family adults and older kids fill out copies of these two inventories separately, then discuss them together. Note that some things may have been lost more than once 

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        Pause, breathe, and reflect: why did you read or fill out this inventory - what did you need? If you got what you needed, what do you need to do now? If you didn't, what do you need?  Who's answering these questions - your wise resident true Self, or "someone else"?

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Continue with inventorying your invisible losses, if you haven'/t yet..


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Updated  June 24, 2008