grief & healing

On boredom

Dec 6th, 2012

Untitled, originally uploaded by Danny McShane

Back when I was completing my psychotherapy training, I was working as a grief counsellor in order to accrue my clinical hours to graduate.

The work between one particular client and I had becoming stilted, disconnected and boring.

I could intuit that both of us felt like we were holding back and instead we were just going through the motions.

I decided to brave talking about this with my supervision group. Gasps went up from my peers when I admitted to being bored but my supervisor’s ears pricked up. Warming to the topic he invited me to share more of my experience of being in the room with my client.

“It’s just…boring” I said.

“Boring in what way?” he pushed.

“I’m bored of hearing the same story over and over again. I’m bored because nothing seems to be changing and I don’t feel like I’m helping in any meaningful way. I’m bored because everything seems to have gone into this “nice” and “polite” kind of a place and it doesn’t feel real, engaged or authentic” I shared.
Then he said something so game changing that I’ve never forgotten it.

“What is your boredom defending?”

I paused, realised I hadn’t quite grasped what he was going for and asked for more clarification.

“There is something about your client’s story which triggers you and your boredom is a psychic defence against having to go there and feel those feelings. What do you think your boredom is defending?”

Urgh. Sucker punched right in the gut.

I knew, immediately, what my boredom was defending. I experienced a full-body, visceral response to his words.

Tears welled up into my eyes and splashed down my cheeks as I told him and the rest of the group.

“I am SO jealous of my client. She has everything I never had. She’s grieving the loss of her mother who died in her 80’s and my client is in her 50’s. My mum died when she was 41 and I was 11. She’s got me, a grief counsellor who’ll work with her for up to a year…free of charge!…until the acute feelings of grief have become much easier to bear. I never had that…there was no safe container for my grief and literally months after my mother died, I moved countries leaving behind everyone and everything I knew. Two huge losses at very young age in a short space of time.” I raged through the sobbing.

“It’s not fair” I finally whimpered.

I worked through all of this, diving much deeper with the support of my skilled supervisor and my peers to own my stuff and give it a space where it could be expressed safely.

The next session with my client I was a different counsellor and in turn she was a different client. That was a definitive turning point in our work together.

Sometimes, boredom is just boredom. But sometimes it’s signalling something much more interesting.

Where and with whom are you bored? What might your boredom be a defence against?

If you’re bored at work is it a defence against having to face up to the fact that in order for things to change you’re going to have to have some tough talks?

If you’re bored in the bedroom is it a defence against having to face up to the fact that there’s been a disconnect in your relationship for a while?

What might shift if you courageously admitted you were bored? What might you discover your boredom was keeping you from experiencing?

How much richer could life get if you went beyond “I’m bored”?

On loss

Oct 17th, 2012

by Tamarisk Saunders-Davies.

5 comments

Untitled, originally uploaded by Annija Muižule

I have a friend who is grieving the loss of her husband. Diagnosed with bowel cancer in his early twenties, he appeared to have put it behind him when he got a well-paid job doing something he loved and he asked his love to marry him.

All was not as it seemed. The cancer fought back and his health started to fail when he was just in his early thirties.

They scaled back the wedding. No longer the typical exuberate affair you’d expect when two Irish families celebrate a major life event in Spain surrounded by family and friends. It was hastily re-arranged to be a small gathering in London.

About eight months later, just shy of their first wedding anniversary, we buried him in the church they’d wed in.

It was standing room only.

We gathered to honour a life cut brutally short. Collectively we shared our memories of him, we hugged, we squeezed hands, and we felt held in the container of the ritual of the funeral.

On that day a child was mourned, a husband was mourned and a friend was mourned.

We had permission; the funeral ritual gave us all permission to grieve and to feel the loss. To notice the ‘him’ shaped hole that was now in the world.

You’ve been to a funeral, yes? You’ve experienced the significance of huge loss. Perhaps you haven’t and the thought of one day having to bear it feels frightening.

Whatever your relationship to losses on the grand scale, what I want, what I so profoundly want is for us all to have a space in our lives to honour the losses on the small scale.

We don’t have a ritual for the end of a relationship…however short. We don’t have a ritual for the job we didn’t get…and so longed for. We don’t have a ritual for the loss of our dreams…even the ones we never dared to share.

I often work with clients who cannot for the life of them understand why they feel the way they do. Everything looks SO GOOD on paper. Good job, nice house, awesome holidays, no major family drama, happy with their relationship status…whatever it happens to be.

But in real life, their hearts ache. They bemoan the fact that they should have ‘it’ figured out by now. They’re completely confused about the fact that if everything looks so good, why do I feel so blah?

They aren’t fun to be with and they know it.

But it’s not long before we uncover small loss after small loss. Losses they never felt they had permission to take the time over. Because, well, they’re no big deal, right?

The first thing to know about loss is that it causes grief. And grief, when not expressed and witnessed, is hurdle we just can’t leap over.

We get stuck in a negativity loop, burdened by the accumulated weight of loss upon loss.

But grief isn’t just about death. It’s about any loss that’s significant to you.

It’s about the relationships that turned sour, the dream job that turned out to be a nightmare, the grand plans that got waylaid last minute.

Our culture has a deep taboo on grief. We’re allowed to grieve the loss of a loved one. We’re allowed to grieve the loss of a beloved pet…just about.

But for everything else we believe the myth that we’re just not allowed. We have all these small losses stored up, ungrieved, waiting for the beam of our loving awareness to be shone on them so they can melt away.

Without some witnessing and without some allowing, grief cannot move. It’s waiting to give you its gift and it will wait and wait until you receive it.

The sadness that comes with grief isn’t bad and it won’t overwhelm you. It’s there to invite you to acknowledge and allow that all these things that didn’t happen, that didn’t go the way you wanted them to can be noticed and blessed and sent on their way.

Perhaps the losses can be held in gratitude and let go with a prayer: “Thank you dream job that didn’t materialise, you taught me about my true desires. Thank you to the holiday that didn’t come together, you created the space for me to really look at where and how I’m spending my money”.

Rituals create punctuation in our lives. They are the commas, the semi-colons, and the full stops that let us know we need to pause.

They clearly let us know that change has happened and they create a psychological container for the process of transition.

When can you carve out some time to unpack your little losses? What rituals would you like to play with in honouring them? Share in the comments.

Unbroken

Oct 10th, 2012

by C. Delia Mulrooney.

14 comments

Put your ear to my chest and listen. You’ll hear a roaring echo like an empty nautilus shell—chambers of my heart constricted up and over themselves with every breaking and attempt at regeneration. Layers. Growth. What it feels like to love and to lose is my heart’s current story.

Sometimes, I feel like I have no protective ribcage to shield me. No insulation. I feel everything. A struggle with work or finances and it aches with anxiety. A man who matters ignoring the old for the new and it burns like blood is battery acid, constricting with pain and corrosion. A worry over a family member and it tightens up like a wilted bloom, contracting and darkening with apprehension.

My heart could tell other stories too – of love, of triumph, and of elation. But they say joy doesn’t leave a scar. And sometimes, the heart needs to remember the wound to renew itself. To begin again.

This is just the heart story I am telling you today. The one of the last heart I saw. It belonged to my mother – flickering in black and murky gray on an ultrasound screen. The overhead lights were off and the room was cold. I perched awkwardly on a stool in the corner in high heels, stockings, and a blue patterned dress. My teacher-clothes. Teacher.

Though in that moment, I knew nothing. The depth of that ignorance shatters me now. My mom wore baggy, dark pants and a sweater the technician had raised up. Bra unhooked, the pure white skin of her draped gently with a thin blanket. She was nervous, my mother. Making conversation with the pretty redheaded technician to fill the vast, clinical space.

Now, I think to myself: why didn’t you go to her? Why didn’t you touch her leg and sit close-by and hold on? Why didn’t you cling and claw and keep her here with you? All the things I didn’t know. But, beyond my ignorance at what was coming, there was also a deep hushed reverence that kept me, immobile and alert, staring intently into that monitor.

I was a daughter, looking right into her mother’s infinite heart. It felt sacred. Like a rite of passage, and I recognized it immediately.

My mother’s heart fluttered on the screen, white flashes of blood streaming through the ventricles. This heart was the one I listened to en utero. Its rhythm is the one I know instinctively, is the one that kept time while I dreamed and stretched and grew between her hipbones. I was the baby doctors told her not to conceive. The one born after two stillborn brothers. I came to life trailed by the ghosts who tried to pass through before me. But, I lived.

These dead babies broke my mother’s heart, so did losing her parents and other family upheavals, so did life with an alcoholic spouse, then the agony of my nineteen-year-old brother dying, my father becoming increasingly erratic and violent, then his infidelity and the divorce that followed, the years of financial struggle – all of these breaking and breaking and breaking her.

But, her heart kept beating. I know. I saw it for myself. I studied it closely that day, but none of the cracks or the scars were visible on the screen. Her heart was still intact and I felt myself go dizzy with awe, the deep sound of her pulse echoing through the speakers and filling me with a reverberated vertigo.

I took it all in, watching the filaments and muscles beating so strong and vibrantly. And I just knew we were okay. Nothing would be wrong with her. I felt sure of it. I kissed her goodbye in the waiting room where she and my sister lingered for her second test. My lips to her soft cheek, her perfume of vanilla and sugar. I told her to call me later. I went to teach my next class, inspired and moved by what I’d seen. I was smiling. I believed. I told her on the phone that night that I’d write about the experience of seeing her heart one day and she laughed and said, “I know you will.”

The next time the phone rang, it was just before dawn and my sister was on the other end screaming and keening that she’d just found my mother dead when she went to wake her for their tea and morning routines with our kids. My mother. Gone.

I dropped the phone, fell onto the floor, and curled up in a knot of grief. My sister was still screaming through the phone nearby and it echoed through me like my mother’s pulse a day earlier. I couldn’t move. I knew my life was over. Whatever existence would come once I got up and untangled myself would no longer be mine to claim, but a stranger’s.

I wrote about the experience of seeing my mother’s heart for the eulogy I gave for her a few days later. It was not the piece I wanted to write. It was not the story I wanted tell for an active, lively woman in her sixties who loved me more than anyone else ever could. She knew I’d write it, just like she knew that the heart is far less fragile than it seems.

This story here, my current heart-story of losing, of being misplaced, of being defeated is a temporary one. I saw my mother’s heart and how flawless it was, even for its failing and its fracture – and I know my own will keep beating in spite of bad breaks. There are still so many stories of wonder, of bliss, and of healing my heart has yet to tell.

I feel my pulse stirring and I think of my mother and the pure love she gave to me, and I know I will honor the blood of hers flowing through my veins by keeping her stories – and mine – alive.

What heart-stories are you still carrying inside of you? Give them a voice. Name your heart’s scars on the page. Count each blessing and each loss. Then, let them go.

This is a victory

Oct 9th, 2012

by Jenn Gibson.

15 comments

Untitled, originally uploaded by …cati…

We’ve all been there, right? Experienced life-altering changes that have left us floundering, feeling lost and helpless.

Maybe you’re unexpectedly unemployed or a tree falls on your house, a loved one is in the hospital or has died, maybe your relationship is ending or a cherished friendship is unraveling, maybe you’re facing a health crisis or your child is ill, your partner cheated on you – whatever it is, you feel like your world is falling apart.

It’s the moment where time slows down and in the space of a heartbeat you know that your life is about to change.

How do you move forward from that? How do you even start to heal when your heart feels jagged and raw and broken?

Sit with it

Whatever your loss is, give yourself space to grieve and mourn and say goodbye. Sit with your feelings.

Digging in a little deeper to that, though? Don’t let it define you, don’t let it become your identity.

Feel it

Don’t deny it or ignore it, feel it, let yourself feel it. Don’t shove it down, discount it, write it off, bat your eyelashes at it then bat it away. Allow yourself to really feel everything that’s inside of your heart – anger, frustration, sadness, grief, confusion.

it will bring up a lot of shit, all of the self-doubt and fears, all of the lies.

Let it go

This experience will change you, for good or for ill, it will change you. These are the moments where you get to actively choose who you want to be, who you want to become, how you want to live.

Yes, this very bad thing happened – don’t let it define you, don’t let it become the eyes with which you view yourself. You are so much more than any of this.

Yes, it sucks, yes it’s hard, yes, it’s heartbreaking – but you are getting through it, one breath at a time, one heartbeat at a time, moment by moment.

This is a victory, so celebrate it.

You are not a victim – you are powerful beyond measure and I believe in you.

I believe in you.

With heart,

A burgeoning intimacy: Meet C. Delia Mulrooney and sink into connection with your brave heart

Sep 26th, 2012

by C. Delia Mulrooney.

31 comments

Hi there! First of all, thank you so much for reading these words of introduction about me. But really, thanks for reading all of the words offered here in this amazing community!

I’ve always believed that when a group of women come together to share the truth of their lives, selves, and histories, it opens the way for personal and collective shifts.

Staying silent or invisible as women slows the evolution of all women. So, I am very honored to have the opportunity to share a few of my stories with you here this autumn and to maybe even encourage you to connect to your own.

I’ve been a writer and story-collector my entire life, and now, I am a college writing instructor, working to help my students hone their skills and find inspiration within the academic sphere. I also teach a course, Writing the Body, which I created to connect women to the stories of their physical journeys and body experiences.

The sessions have been truly transformative and I’ll be teaching Writing the Body at several retreats and workshops in 2013 as well as mentoring a limited number of women individually (online and via phone) each month, starting this fall.

I’m currently crafting Writing the Body into a book full of dynamic writing exercises and prompts, while simultaneously completing a novel manuscript as I work to finish my MFA degree.

I am also a creative-wanderer, unusual-mama, book-enthusiast, loyal-friend, bathtub-devotee, friendly-introvert, curious-adventurer, and fiery-romantic who just can’t wait to share stories of connection and body/life experience with you.

Please consider yourself officially invited to comment and link your own reflections on any writing prompts I offer here this season so that I can read along with your story-explorations of self. xo

Connect: Website | Writing the Body Individual Mentoring | Facebook

(This beautiful photograph of Delia was taken by Jenica McKenzie.)

With the Tide: a Tribute to Tears

I imagined my tears held molecules of grief and took on an uncommon energy, that they drew the moon across the ocean so it could be seen and felt at this moment by every girl…
-
Ilie Ruby

The first time I can remember my tears causing me trouble I was six years old and away from my mother for the first time – a knobby-kneed, scrawny girl in a plaid Catholic school jumper – completely hysterical by the time the growling yellow bus dragged me away from home, spewing smoke behind us and imposing a sudden, terrifying distance from the one who loved me best.

Trouble, because my tears made the other kids laugh and regard me strangely, like I was some perplexing spineless creature washed ashore, awkward and exposed in my grief. Trouble, because it was the first time I understood that crying brought with it a fierce and insistent shame.

My tears that day landed me in the principal’s office, the epitome of trouble. But, the stern, dour nun who ran our elementary school, Sister Helena, took one look at my red, bleary face and gestured for me to sit in a massive black leather chair across from her desk, where she proceeded to offer me butterscotch hard candies from a lustrous cut glass bowl and tell me about how when she left her mother for the convent she’d wept for four months straight. I nodded like I understood the depth and scope of her separation when all I really knew was that we were two people who’d cried over wanting our mothers. The butterscotch coated my tongue with honeyed sweetness and her words comforted me enough to get me to class. I landed back in her office day after day, our candy and talk of our mothers a mysterious ritual – a secret sisterhood of tears.

I cried every day though it deeply shamed me, though I promised myself I wouldn’t, though I knew the teachers called me hypersensitive and the other kids called me crybaby.

Tears rose through me in waves, unbidden, as predictable as the tides. Hypersensitive, crybaby, sissy, wimp, whiner, pushover, weakling, coward, and of course, girl. All of these words and then some have been lobbed against my thin-skinned heart. Along with, grow up, get over it, deal, shut up, knock it off, keep it down, tone it down, control yourself, and of course, man up.

The fact is, crying has implications related to gender – boys don’t, big girls don’t – the message being that if we are mature enough and strong enough and good enough, we won’t need to. Tears become the currency of the weak, and they breed self-doubt and critical judgments.

There have been a few situations in my life where I forced myself to hold back from crying – to keep it down, to control myself, to toughen up, but I know it didn’t improve or enrich me. One intense example of this came about because I was raised by not just the mother I so fiercely clung to, but also by a dysfunctional, alcoholic father as well. My father’s scorn for our tears was so severe that he routinely staged what my younger brother and I would learn to call “freak outs.”

In this exercise, my drunk father would force my brother and I to physically fight each other until the loser cried and was then hit with his belt. Even now, thinking of this, I can taste the metallic traces of rage, fear, and sorrow in the back of my mouth. I remember the way it felt to hit and kick my brother—to pull his hair. I remember his nails digging into my skin, leaving trails of bleeding scratches down my arms while my father sat with his whiskey and waited.

In these moments, I never, ever cried first.

Time has passed, and my father has been sober, though largely out of my life, for the better part of twenty years. But, my relationship to crying is still incredibly complicated and packed with intense emotion and humiliation.

I cry easily and often – and I apologize and am infuriated with myself every single time.

Beyond the mistreatment in my own past, there is an undeniable gender bias in society deeming our tears feminine and, therefore, in some way worthless or shameful.

Women are made to feel irrational, senseless, and ridiculous for crying. Men are made to feel as if their tears will leave them emasculated and powerless. This imposed rationing of our reactions and moods does a disservice to all of us.

Over the past year, I’ve battled a severe thyroid and metabolic disorder that crippled me physically and emotionally. I’ve had radical shifts in my connections with the people closest to me, some disappointments in relationships that ran onto shaky ground, and some heartbreak thrown in for good measure.

When my sickness and imbalance was at its height, I plunged down into the depths of self-loathing, inferiority-complex, envy, paralysis, fear, and self-destruction. I almost lost my life and then, suddenly and unexpectedly – I lost my mother. We buried her on a cold day last December, frost crystalizing the blades of cemetery grass and a part of me that I can never again get back.

Oceans of tears with their sharp undertow – I’ve cried so much my body’s terrain has eroded to drought, dry and bleached-bone, shadows under my eyes from the constant presence of salt water on skin. Though I am still submerged in the depths of this mourning and the unfamiliar landscape of my heart, there have been unexpected gifts here in this saturated, tear-strewn place. One gift is empathy for others who are desolate and grieving—especially other women who have been told that their tears are a sign of their weakness and fragility.

Another gift is a deep awareness of inhabiting my body for the first time – of watching, without judgment, how my sorrow ebbs and flows through my blood to my eyes, with that bittersweet sting just before tears fall. I am learning not to fight it, not to shame it, just to let myself drift into the currents of what I’m really feeling – awash with the ache and the possibility of redemption.

I do not want my year of tears for you, but I do want a burgeoning intimacy with other women in your life and a deeper kindness for sorrow.

I want you to be able to sit with a crying friend or lover and not try to fix it or escape it, but to just let it wash over you and be present. I want you to do this for yourself. I want you to feel how distress or regret floods your body, letting it course right through you and move on. I want you to allow the rising sentiments to claim you and trust that crying is a valid and acceptable part of the process of healing. I want you to find the words to express what your tears signify and how they connect you with others experiencing that same sentiment in that same moment.

Take to the notebook page, to your blog, to these comments, and tell of the way it feels to cry—the way it feels to release your suffering—the way it feels to greet your own personal high-tide times with bravery and swim on.