NLP Techniques To Cope With Grief, Loss & Death

One of my NLP training clients recently lost his mother and he asked me about how I have used Neuro-Linguistic Programming to cope with grief, loss, and death.

A few years ago I had to cope with the loss of my youngest brother which put my inner resources to the test and I personally had to apply my tools with myself and in my life.

In this article I will share with you techniques I used and that you can apply with yourself and your clients when facing loss, grief and death.

A Dispassionate Fact: Everybody Dies

An interesting fact about life is that eventually we all are going to die. Our present mind-body system will not last forever.

On top of that if we live long enough, it is inevitable that in the long run many of our loved ones and people we care about and know are going to pass away. In the end everyone dies.

As an inevitable fact, this makes it really important for us as human beings to develop healthy coping strategies at the very least to be accepting of death.

Beyond acceptance, a higher aim would be to begin to appreciate and see the sacredness in the whole life-death cycle.

NLP Techniques to Cope with Grief, Loss and Death

Now to the techniques. I have personally used all of these techniques with myself and I still continue to use them on a regular basis.

1) The Power of Permission

If you ever find yourself feeling sad/loss/grief it is okay. Give yourself permission to feel sadness, grief, loss, etc.

You are a human being and it is your right to feel emotions.

When we bring negative emotions to our sadness, reject it, or prohibit it rather than resolving our feelings we can repress them, create ‘psychological problems’ that are of a higher level than our loss in the physical realm, and ultimately we create more suffering.

Giving ourselves permission to experience our sadness will allow the emotions to flow freely and come and go as they naturally do.

I found that over time, after my loss, I needed less and less time to feel sadness and grief and that the grief began to occur less and less often.

2) Texturing Your Sadness with ‘Meta-States’

Once you have given yourself permission to feel the grief/sadness you can now temper/texture that sadness with other emotions to make it even more resourceful.

It doesn’t have to be an out of control sadness… it can be a ‘calm’ sadness.

It doesn’t have to be self-denigrating… it can be a self-affirming sadness.

We can ‘texture’ our sadness with various resources such as:

• Calmness
• Peace
• Respect
• Compassion/Self-Compassion
• Grace
• Love

Now not only do you have permission to experience the natural human emotion of grief, but it can be bearable and resourceful experience.

3) Edit Your Memories/Imaginations

When we have lost a loved one lots of memories and future imaginations are bound to emerge in our minds, some of which probably don’t serve us well.

• Memories of guilt e.g. things I could have/should have done
• Mental movies of the funeral/the death, etc.
• Imaginations of how ‘horrible’ the future will be.
• Etc.

When you find yourself experiencing one of these troubling ‘mental movies’ first explore if you are stepped into them or stepped out.

As a general rule you will want to ‘step out’ of them if you find yourself in them so that you don’t need to re-experience any past negative emotions.

Give yourself some psychological distance from your mental-movies e.g. play them on an imaginary TV screen across the room, or as far away as necessary, so you can look at them from a meta-state of calmness and curiosity to learn.

Learn what you need to learn from those mental-movies so that you put those movies away and let them go because you don’t need them anymore.

These ‘mental-movies’ are presenting themselves to you so that you/your soul can learn and grow for your next stage of your journey, and this is part of seeing the blessing/sacredness of the death/loss.

4) Alter Your Internal Representations of Your Loved One

How we ‘encode’ our loved ones in our mind-body system will have a great impact on how we feel and how resourceful we are able to remain in spite of our loss.

For example, rather than keeping them up above, far away, and glowing, etc. bring your internal representations of them close to you so that you can hug them, hold their hand, smell them, talk to them, have conversations with them, get advice from them, etc.

Look at them through the resourceful lens of all of the blessings you had and all of the learnings that you’ve had because they are still here and they are still with you, inside of you, and as long as you encode them in resourceful ways.

I imagine that that would be one of the more respectful things you could do for them, and it’s probably what they would want you to do (the higher version of themselves).

They would probably want you to get up, get on with your life, and to be the most resourceful and self-actualized version of yourself that you can.

In Closing

I hope you are able to pull at least one thing of value from this article, if not more, that you can practically apply with yourself, loved ones, clients etc. to help us as human beings better deal with the fact of life which is ‘loss’.

Of course this list is not totally comprehensive so if you have any other practical techniques that you would like to share to help us to better cope with loss and death feel free to share them here.

If you have any questions about how to apply the techniques mentioned in this article feel free to leave a comment or to reach out to me personally.

I trust that you can apply what you know so that you can better cope with loss and death and even to thrive in life and to see the sacredness in it.

Depending on your present state of being you may want to consider my Emotional Mastery Toolbox program as a great step to mastering your emotional states.