Another meeting about finding and bringing new people into our lives as we go forward in our grief journeys. This meeting’s topic is about some things I’ve been thinking about that I’ve chosen to call illusions. It’s another one of the things I’ve found that may play a surprising role in our grief and in our healing journeys and that may interact, in ways we maybe haven’t thought about before, with other components of our grief to shape how we interact with other people. 

Illusions: Things that are or are likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted. A deceptive appearance or impression. Afalse idea or belief. 

A related and sometimes synonymous word is fantasy: A fanciful mental image, typically one on which a person dwells at length or repeatedly (loops) and which reflects their conscious or unconscious wishes or desires. An idea with no basis in reality. 

In grief, illusions and fantasies can often be thoughts of futures we create about people and situations that we have no real way of knowing if they are real or true but we think about them anyway for a number of different reasons that we will talk about later.

Dreams: A cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal. An unrealistic or self-deluding fantasy. Contemplate the possibility of doing something or that something might be the case.

Dreams in grief can just be illusions or they can be futures we consciously create in our minds that are about positive things we might want to do and that we might want to actualize. In grief, creating “dreams” of the future may give us a target to focus on and may become pathways or tracks that we can follow to actualize or manifest them in our life and perhaps turn them into plans we can use for going forward. 

Since in the end they are all pretty much the same, I tend to use the word illusion in this discussion to cover most of these possibilities.

Some things we may do in our grieving minds:

Most of us create illusions and/or fantasies of some sort throughout our lives, whether we are grieving or not. Many illusions and fantasies and the fears or desires they may contain can come into existence in our minds each day, some of which we may never even notice or be aware of. In our grief however, we may find that we are not only creating more illusions and fantasies but perhaps partially because we are more emotionally fragile and uncertain, we may come to not only create more illusions but also come to believe our illusions are real more easily and more often. 

It’s important to remember though, that we can never actually see the future! 

No matter what we imagine in our minds, if it’s about the future, at some level it’s an illusion because we can never really know what the future will contain. If you pay attention to how it goes for awhile, you will quickly see I think, that things never turn out exactly the way you thought they would in your illusions. Sometimes it’s not even close!

So, illusions, in the context of our grief and in this discussion, are things that can come into our minds, into our thoughts and perhaps even into our emotions, that we “make up,” mostly about the future or sometimes about the past.

Illusions (and fantasies) are often thoughts we build about things that we would like to have occur but we really have no way of knowing how or even if they will happen or not. Perhaps they are things that, in our grief, we wish could or would happen. We may not have any real reason to expect them to happen the way we imagine they would, except perhaps for our desire to see things turn out in a certain way or for someone to act in a certain way or out of our fear of things that we think might happen in the (unknowable) future. 

In our grief, there are so many things we would like to have be different that we may be prone to creating illusions that seem to make those things change in some way. If we find ourselves creating imaginary solutions to problems we are facing in our grief, we may also allow those things to become realities in our minds, especially if they seem to solve some of the problems or emotional issues we are struggling with. With some of the illusions we create, we can also project those illusions into images of realities that we then come to expect to happen. 

Something to think about that illusions may do:

Once we build illusions, particularly in our grief, we may repeatedly think about them, loop about them and sometimes, over time, those thoughts can start to seem so real that we begin to believe them to actually be images of reality. If we come to believe them, then we can also come to expect the future to happen just as we imagined it would. 

We can thus become attached to our illusions, to the point that we begin to believe that they are true visions of reality, of the future and what it contains and what someone will be like or do or say. And again, we can come to expect it to be that way. 

But how can we really ever know any of that?

Some examples of what illusions might lead us to do:

So how does creating and believing in our illusions effect what we do or say as we begin to build the next part of our lives and especially as we begin to interact with other people in our grief journeys?

If we become attached to and believe our illusions and they don’t turn out to really represent what actually happens, we can easily become disappointed, possibly sad and sometimes angry when what we expected, what our illusions contained, is not how it turns out. 

Especially as we start to bring people into our lives, when someone we meet isn’t who or what we imagined them to be, since they don’t know what illusions we have created in our minds about them anyway, we need to understand that they really can’t behave as our illusions told us they would. If or when the illusions and expectations we’ve come to believe about people aren’t met, we can become annoyed or angry with those people or possibly become deeply disappointed that they are not what our illusions told us they were going to be. In response, we can blame them for not being or saying what we imagined they would or should be or say in our illusions. 

Or, maybe more importantly for this and future discussions, if we liked the illusions we created about someone, we can clutch onto our illusions of who and what they are to keep the illusions alive, no matter what really happens or what is actually going on or who they really turn out to be. We can think and do sometimes unreasonable things trying to make those illusions be true and be real. We may also forgive people for a wide range of sometimes intense and unpleasant things, just to keep hold of our illusions that they are who and what we want them to be.

We can also create illusions about the future that cause us to become afraid of and begin to worry about the things that live in those illusions and then make us afraid of things we create in our minds that we fear might happen. We can alter our behavior to avoid those things or to keep them from happening. We can worry excessively about them, even if we had no real reason to expect them to happen in the first place, even if they never end up happening at all. We can fear that those futures we create in our illusions are real and need to be avoided or dealt with or protected against and again, we can react to the illusions we create as if they were indeed visions of the future and of reality.

I’ve heard it said that it’s our old “genetic” fear of lions or tigers hiding in the grass that now has us creating fear illusions about the unknown that we then react to in some way. Tom Petty had a line in one of his songs that said something like: “Most of the things I worry about never happen anyway.” Since we can never know the future, however,  it’s all unknown!

Finally, in our grief and the loneliness it can contain, we may also build “desire illusions”. We may want so badly for something to happen in our lives, for someone to be or do something, that our desire for that to happen has us creating illusions about a future where it indeed does happen. 

We can perhaps find ourselves having imaginary conversations with someone we desire to have a conversation with, even when they aren’t aware of it and we can then build illusions about the outcome of those imaginary conversations, all of which are not real…. And in our desire for an outcome with another person to happen, here too, we can often react to the illusions we create, instead of to the reality of who or what they are and what is really happening.

Hope and healing:

We all create illusions at times. In our grief though, sometimes those illusions can come to seem very real and we can come to believe them to be true representations of reality and of what the future may bring. The illusions we may create in our grieving can sometimes become almost more important and more real to us then the actual and often unpleasant realities that live in our sadness and grief. Going forward, when we find ourselves creating illusions in our grief, it might be good to find ways to work on recognizing them as illusions and learning to see them for what they really are. 

Stopping our illusions from leading us into worry or disappointment by learning to live more in the moment, in many ways is what mindfulness is all about. If we see things in our lives to be illusions and we don’t want to let them lead us astray, it is possible that we can find and learn some techniques, much like we do in mindfulness exercises, to help us live more in the moment and only deal with the things that actually appear in our lives when they actually do. That might also be helpful in keeping us from following our illusions into places we might not otherwise go. 

Here are some things that myself and others have considered that we might create illusions about for you to look at and perhaps read and think about later. As usual, these are just ideas that may or may not happen to you. There are probably many more that you might come up with that I haven’t considered that we can add to the list.

*** Fear is one of the most powerful illusions and interestingly, for most people, especially in our grief, it seems to be much more common to build fear illusions than expecting and building illusions of joy or happiness for our futures:

Things we might create fear illusions about:

• Future pain
• In our grief, fear of what a special shared day from our lives with our loved ones will feel like alone.
• Fear of navigating our grief journey and of being able to successfully live on our own.
• Fear of something negative from our past repeating itself.
• Fear of becoming or having to become a caregiver again
• Fear of failure
• Fear of success
• Fear of rejection
• Fear of judgements and being judged
• Fear of being wrong
• Fear of being right
• Fear of responsibilities
• Fear of relationships
• Fear of not knowing
• Fear of the unknown
• Fear of differences
• Fear of expectations
• Fear of negative outcomes of situations, expectations, encounters or other grief fears.
• Remembering events from our past, like the passing of our loved ones or the illnesses they may have gone through and creating illusions that those things are going to happen again when any hint of similarity occurs in a situation we encounter.

Other illusions:

• Judgements
• Creating illusions about encounters or outcomes in advance
• Insecurities
• Worrying about anything we imagine might happen that we generally can’t do anything about.
• Comparing ourselves to others.
• Needs we don’t really have.
• Thinking I can’t.
• That we have to have someone in our lives to fill the place our loved one used to fill for us to be happy or to go forward.
• Believing we are young and invulnerable.
• The grass is somehow greener!!
• Having expectations of the actions of others.
• Expecting someone to do, say, or be something that you don’t really know they might do or be and expectations of their actions that you create that they don’t know they are expected to do or be.
• Becoming attached to expectations, things or outcomes.
• Fear of those things.
• Being disappointed or hurt or angry when outcomes don’t go the way you expect them to based on your illusions when your expectations are not met by people or situations.
• Others?

Dreams really may come true:

If dreams are futures we intentionally create to give us pathways to follow into the future, then maybe as a positive part of illusions and creating our futures, we can also learn how to make our dreams come true. (“You gotta have a dream. If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna make your dreams come true?”)  

Maybe all illusions are not the same and maybe some can be guides to where we want to go and how we want to get there. Then we have to learn to recognize which ones we want to follow to create positive outcomes and which ones we need to learn to ignore. Again, this is not an easy thing to do!

In our next meeting or three, I want us to discuss how illusions, fantasies or desires may sometimes interact with our grief and the loneliness and sadness it may contain, to lead us into things and situations with people that maybe we wouldn’t be doing or who we wouldn’t be interacting with otherwise and sometimes, into things that might actually be dangerous for us to pursue. Illusions may also lead us into new relationships of various depths, qualities and intensities. I’d like to discuss ways to recognize and realize when things that our illusions and loneliness might cause us to do are or are not in our best interest.

Along the way, I’d like us to consider how and when relationships of any type might be fine and healing for us to pursue. We will also take a look at affection and sexuality and then take a longer look at who, how and why we might want to bring new people into our lives and the types of relationships we might create with those new people and what we want those new relationships to look like going forward.

Questions:

Do you recognize illusions in your thinking?

What things do you build illusions about?

How do illusions play a role in the decisions that you make about what you do or who you interact with in your grieving if they do?

What can you think of to do to help you see through your illusions?

How can you learn to recognize illusions in your thinking or emotions?

How can you keep from being blinded by illusions?

Do you think it can’t happen to you?