Dumping the bucket

In my previous blog, I shared that Dora informed me she believes she has unloaded about “half” of her sadness, anger and deep feelings. While I concurred that she had, indeed, offloaded some of her negative feelings, I asked her how she quantified the amount? How did she decide it was “half”? She really didn’t have an answer for me, as I expected. I then provided her with this analogy …

I said her grief and loss were like a bucket of water, but not a bucket that was only filled one time and then emptied. I said it was a bucket that was filled at different times and in different amounts. When it became too full, some water spilled out, or when it was knocked, jostled, or “challenged”, some additional water was added and possibly also spilled out.

I used Beth as an example. I pointed out how many times in the past two weeks Dora has seen Beth offload some of her internal pain. I suggested to Dora that if the bucket was a one-time deal that once emptied was never full again, Beth would not have any water in her bucket after all these years. But she obviously does. I told Dora that grief and loss never completely empties from your system, but that different life events and stressors put a little water back in the bucket. The trick was to recognize when the bucket was too full and make sure you emptied it as needed.

Today we had another dual meltdown event (both Beth and Dora). I’ll write more about it tomorrow, as well as address how does one know when a child is “purging” or just “tantruming.” But suffice it to say that Dora had a pretty good offloading session, and when she caught her breath at the end, she said, “That was a pretty big bucket!” I guess she was listening a couple of days ago!

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