Coping Mechanisms
 

I recently heard this strange story about a friend-of-a-friend: so she's a middle-aged wife, very happily married, 3 children. The day before they're scheduled to go on a vacation to the Bahamas, the husband--who is by all accounts a genuinely fantastic guy, involved in several charities and coaches his kid's sports teams, blah blah blah--suddenly dies of a massive coronary. He was quite healthy and fit, so this came completely out of the blue, and was obviously terribly devastating for everyone.

A day or two after he dies, the widow has a vivid dream, in which the husband comes to her and says that he had to die, because their youngest son was going to drown on this trip to the Bahamas, and it was the only way to stop them from going. So the woman takes this dream as true. And from that point on, she is totally serene about the tragedy, and acts like a woman who is three years out from the untimely death of her loving husband, not three days.

My friend doesn't know whether this woman has burdened the youngest son with this dream she had, though I hope not. But she says that this all happened several months ago, and if the facade is going to crack, it hasn't yet. It has apparently been a wholly successful coping mechanism for a woman who was a non-functioning wreck before the dream. I'm really fascinated by the brain's ability to come up with what it needs to heal.

She's a time bomb though. :(

Maybe not. The a big part of grief is trying to answer the 'why?'.

well, the tricks our mind can play on us are truly amazing, that's true.

I get the sense that you're suggesting it's all a sham--that somewhere down the line she's going to realize her comfort was "just a dream" and she'll collapse anew in grief; that her coping mechanism is false. I'm not sure that's a valid judgment, but like you, I'm uneasy because it seems like she hasn't allowed herself to grieve at all. Even if she believes the dream, that doesn't mean she still shouldn't grieve for her husband, right?

Studies have shown that the ability to cope with tragedy well is one indicator of a long life, so maybe this is good for her. If it were me, I might believe the apparition. But I'd still be devastated.

Yeah, I'm a little dubious at the level of comfort it has seemingly provided her. Imagine a real-life version of her scenario--say they had gone on the trip, and the boy had been drowning, but the father jumped in and saved him, getting pulled under and unfortunately drowning himself in the process. The father would still have 'died to save the son,' but I bet she'd be a lot more wracked with grief in that case.

Yeah. But the difference being that in the dream, she has someone telling her how it makes sense. Being able to say, "this is awful, but I understand why it had to happen" is (in my experience) a lot easier to take than "this is awful, unnecessary, and without reason."

It's a coping mechanism, yeah, but I think what's being coped with is less the death, but more the chaos of life. A parallel coping mechanism would be, "my husband died because it was God's will."

Is it a time bomb, or an unhealthy way of delaying grief? Maybe. That depends on her conviction. People all over believe all kinds of things to help them make sense of the world. The cynic in me says that the metric to measure a successful coping mechanism is: does it satisfy all the doubts, sadness, anger, etc, without causing more? does it negatively affect anyone else? can you maintain it until you die?

But if a year or three from now, she suddenly realizes the dream was not valid and freaks out, those around her may not be prepared to give her the needed support. They are now, because the incident is fresh, but they will be blindsided down the road, not comprehending what's going on.

or, maybe they'll be better able to help her cope, because they'll have already worked through their own grief

And maybe her mind won't let that happen until she's more ready to grieve.

Why would the passage of time erode this belief for her? It isn't logical thought or analysis (that would take time to process) that will undo the belief. And as she goes on with her life, and builds from this point, she invests more and more in this new way of seeing the world. When people are invested in something, they don't want to change it...I've seen people illogically invested in the most trivial things simply because it "works" for them--are bigger things easier or harder to overturn? She would have to have a motivation to want to change this belief. What would be the motivation? If anything, it could only be her own subconscious mind, cracking the facade of her serenity and letting an anxious feeling creep in which would lead to a desire to self-analyze. Whether what she has done is "right" or "wrong" I can see a scenario where she never has this desire to "overturn" the decision. And, I could see that working for her, from now until the end of her life, no matter what other people think about it.

Maybe when she's 90 she'll laugh about what she did, and understand it, and be past it making any difference to her equilibrium at that point.

it's just as sensible an explanation as saying "god took him to heaven" and no one freaks out when people believe that and use that as a coping mechanism.

and maybe her husband really did come to her in a dream.

Why is that so hard to believe.

Most parents I know would give their lives for their children. The only difference here is that different spirits than usual were involved.

When life throws curve-balls at us it's common, after attending to immediate damage control, to sit back and reflect on our lives. How did I get here, what did I do right or wrong, what choices/decisions did I make? It's those moments that denial dissolves and reality suddenly comes into focus.

It may not happen to her, kinda hope it doesn't. I hope she keeps the investment you spoke of. But the possibility makes it a time bomb.

(shrugs) everyone has memories that can ambush us down the road. Lots of folks cope by self-medicating or engaging in other destructive behavior. Even if you believe this is a delusion, it's a fairly innocuous one.

Sure, but any excuse to engage in destructive behavior. :lol: