How Defining Your Values Helps with Your Grief, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

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I'm a certified bereavement facilitator and also the author of "Moving Through Grief," which is a book featuring proven techniques for finding your way after any loss. It's a book that is based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is called ACT for short. And in a couple of earlier videos I've explained the first step, which is, actually there are all kinds of things that go in a circle, but contact with the present moment or being present with where you're at. So if you're curious about that, check out the previous video. But for now what I want to focus on is your values. A really important part of ACT is defining your values. And by values I mean the guiding principles in your life. So those tend to fall into sort of broad domains. They might be things like health, spirituality, family life, professional accomplishment, education, creative achievement, so on and so forth.

And, in this book, what we do is walk you through some exercises where you are guided through the process of examining the things that you've held as values in your life previously. And then looking after the loss, whatever your loss may have been, or is currently feeling like, cause some losses don't just end sharply and quickly, sometimes they go on for a long time, like when you're losing someone to Alzheimer's for example, or when there is another sort of illness that's involved. Or maybe it's something where your company is shrinking and downsizing and you see a lay off ahead - there's many, many series and steps to the loss. So that is something where your values might be changing as you go through time. **You might find that your values change because you have found a romantic partner, gotten married, start a family, that all of a sudden becomes much more important or something happened with your health where you had a miraculous healing and all of a sudden your spirituality feels like something that is more important to you than what it used to be and so on and so forth.

So identifying your values is important to getting through your grief and working with your grief because if you don't have some guideposts, you're just going to be flailing around. You're going to be going through mindless actions and saying, "I, I don't know why I'm doing this. Somebody told me to do it. It sounded good. I guess I should do whatever, right?" Going to a support group meeting or reading a book or something, but action without a plan behind it, a support and a structure and idea and a goal is not going to be very helpful. So I walk you through the process of creating a list of your personal values, not anybody else's values. So not the church, not your parents, not your spouse, not your kids, not your friends, not your neighbors - your values. And from there. I also walk you through preparing some goals that we break down into really simple steps that you can do and you keep repeating them and you keep repeating them and you know they're valuable because they're tied to your values, not somebody else's values.