Category: inter-generational trauma

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The importance of grief work in our trauma processing

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you. ~John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

I’ve been thinking a lot about grief.  How grief can be present at the same time as excitement and anticipation.  How in our culture we don’t have ways of grieving that are helpful.  How we try to put a time limit on our grief. How we, in my profession, often don’t include grief work in our trauma work with clients.

Here’s some things.  There are no time limits on our grief.  Ever.  And grief work is a vital part of our trauma work.

A vital part.  An essential part.  A necessary part.  A required part.

Those of us living with trauma in our bodies have had horrible things happen to us, done to us.  For those of us who experienced trauma in our childhood, those events literally shaped our brains and the ways we are able to see and be in the world.  These childhood experiences also impacted our physical health, specifically our nervous systems and autoimmune systems.  Those events have life long impacts.

It is hard for me to imagine who I would be if all the trauma I experienced as a child hadn’t occurred. If I have been raised in a household where the ACEs score was under 4.  If I had never been touched inappropriately.  I would be a totally different person, of that I am sure.  

It is heartbreaking to know all the damage that was done, and to know that we have survived (and some of us are learning to thrive) DESPITE all those experiences.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could simply be thriving?  If we didn’t have to learn how to do that.  

Yes. Yes it would.

What happened to us as children is not our fault.  Those events took so much away from us.  Some of which will never be recovered, and some of which may be.  Because of those childhood events, we have, as part of the trauma, experienced great loss.  Loss of innocence.  Loss of trust.  Loss of resilience.  Loss of “normal” neuropathways. Loss of an ability to relate and connect to others in a healthy way.  Loss of feeling comfortable in our own skin.   Loss of a sense of safeness. Sometimes even loss of hope.

We have experienced a lot of loss.

When we experience loss, grieving is a natural process.  Yet we don’t talk about the losses we experienced because of the trauma events in our lives.  We don’t acknowledge all those losses, let alone grieve them.  And this I believe is a disservice to ourselves, and our greater culture. 

How do we grieve these things we (perhaps) never had?  How do we grieve these losses that feel totally theoretical?

We slow down.  We acknowledge the losses.  The things we never had.  The things we wanted so desperately.  The things that will never be.  

We acknowledge the struggles.  The difficulties being in intimate relationships.  The challenges being present in our bodies.  The extra work we’ve had to do to try to break (generations old) cycles and patterns.

We allow the tears.  The anger.  The deep sadness.  

We allow ourselves to acknowledge and feel the unfairness and injustice of it all. 

We grieve.  In community. In ritual. In our own hearts and bodies.

I believe when grief is not a part of our trauma work, that we are missing a huge piece of the work.  Grieving what we have lost, what never was, and perhaps what never will be, is vital to our ability to move the trauma out of our bodies and systems and to learn to shift from simply surviving into a place of actually thriving.  

We need to acknowledge these losses and create space for our own grief process along with our trauma work.  This is part of building our own self-compassion.  This is truly part of our life long healing work.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weekly(ish) newsletter on June 4, 2018. It has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

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Relating with Complex Trauma & Resisting Group Think

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. ~Bell Hooks

I get so god damn lonely and sad and filled with regrets some days, but I’m learning to breathe deep through it and keep walking. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. Slowly building myself a home with things I like. Colors that calm me down, a plan to follow when things get dark, a few people I try to treat right. I don’t sometimes, but it’s my intent to do so. I’m learning.I’m learning to make things nice for myself. I’m learning to save myself.
I’m trying, as I always will. ~Charlotte Eriksson

Wildflower; pick up your pretty little head,
It will get easier, your dreams are not dead. ~Nikki Rowe

This year, and honestly for the past several years, I’ve been looking at the ways we all relate with each other. The ways I relate in my relationships. In my intimate, sexual relationships. In my intimate, non-sexual relationships. My relationships with my children. Family. The grocery store clerk. And of course with my Self.

I’ve been looking at the ways We relate to each other online too. The ways oppression and authoritarian behavior seeps out in social justice spaces. The ways we bully. the ways we disregard the humanity of the people on the other side of our screens. As well as the ways we support each other, the ways we come together in solidarity, the ways we show love and appreciation for others, their work in the world, and their general Being in the world.

I am fascinated, horrified, and inspired by the ways we all interact and relate with each other. There are moments of beauty and there are moments of pure ugliness. There are times when it seems we all rise above our own wounding and find ways to connect. There are times when our wounding and trauma gets the best of us and we cause more harm.

We are all human. We all cause harm to each other, intentionally and unintentionally. We all feel harmed at times, whether harm was actually inflicted or not.

This is what it is to relate with other people. It is messy and complex and painful and gorgeous and amazing.

For those of us who have complex trauma coursing through our being (and let me be clear, I really believe that is the majority of us humans), it can be even more tricky and complicated. We have all these personal wounds that are exacerbated by our culture. We don’t have role models for how to relate with people in loving and harmless ways.

And even the most self-aware of us have our moments of unawareness. We all have places where our wounding seeps out, especially if we don’t process it, if we don’t have a place of support to do that extra work we need to do to unravel the harm caused us, so that we don’t continue to perpetuate harm. If we don’t have people who don’t have their own agenda and Opinions about what our lives should look like.

It can be all too easy to succumb to Group Think.

I do believe that we have a collective Consciousness as well as a collective Unconscious that we all draw upon. A deep collective knowing and memory. That is not what I’m talking about when I say Group Think.

Group Think can go against our own individual deeper knowing. It often stems from each individual’s own wounding and the tools we each developed to protect ourselves from that wounding. This can show up when a group of friends gives us advice that goes against what we know to be true for ourselves. Or when a group of people online, who don’t have all the information, decide to make judgments and attacks on an individual.

Group Think is relatively mindless, generally each person feels a sense of righteousness, and causes harm.

Resisting Group Think can sometimes be incredibly challenging. When everyone around you is telling you that your own perspective, your own experience, your own inner knowing, is all wrong we can start to doubt ourselves. We can start to question ourselves.

This isn’t wholly bad. Part of being self-aware and conscious is to question ourselves, to look deep and see if the comments, critiques, or advice of others do resonate with us, if there is some (or a lot of) truth in what they are saying. It is good to be reflective, to sit in the pause, to be curious.

And.

It is not good when others influence us in a way that causes us to go against what we know to be true of and for ourselves. It is not good when we start to think that what we experienced didn’t happen or didn’t matter, that our perspective is invalid, or that what we actually want isn’t what we (should) want.

We all lose our way in Group Think sometimes. We all are influenced by others in ways that cause us to forget who we are and want to be for a moment. This is part of being human and having a basic need for a sense of belonging.

And.

We can all do the work we need to break these cycles and patterns of losing our Self on the one side and of projecting our own wounding onto others on the other.

It is a practice to break these cycles. We’ll each fuck up. Hopefully when we do, we can make amends and repair. Which is a whole other practice in and of itself.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weekly(ish) newsletter on November 10, 2019. It has been edited and revised for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

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Adult Relationships & Priorities

Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us. ~David Richo

Most people think of love as a feeling but love is not so much a feeling as a way of being present. ~David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

The older we get, the more difficult it is to find other people who can give us the love our parents denied us. But the body’s expectations do not slacken with age—quite the contrary! They are merely direct at others … The only way out of this dilemma is to become aware of these mechanisms and to identify the reality of our own childhood by counteracting the processes of repression and denial. In this way we can create in our own selves a person who can satisfy at least some of the needs that have been waiting for fulfillment since birth, if not earlier. Then we can give ourselves the attention, the respect, the understanding for our emotions, to sorely needed protection, and the unconditional love that our parents withheld from us. ~Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting

Never expect.
Never assume.
Never demand.
Just let it be.
If it’s meant to be,
It will happen.
~unknown

In the northern hemisphere more than mid way through fall. Fall is my favorite time of year for many reasons, and one of them is it is my birthday season. This is both my season of New Year and the kick off to the traditional Holiday Season.

This time of year has me thinking about a lot of things. Reflecting back on my past year, and years. Considering what has been working for me and what hasn’t. Connecting to the person I want to be and seeing the work I need to do to grow into her.

I’ve been exploring my wants and examining if they are realistic and mature, or if they are problematic and will ultimately cause me harm.

I’ve been tending to what I call my black holes, my attachment wounds. Finding ways to fill them myself, ways to find connection within to my own love, compassion, and acceptance.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about adult relationships, both platonic and otherwise. I’ve been thinking about the ways I’ve looked towards others to fill these black holes of mine. I’ve been thinking about the way we are socialized about romantic relationships and how we are supposed to be the other person’s number one priority and they are supposed to be ours. I’ve been thinking about Hallmark and happily every after and til death do us part and fairy tales in general.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to love someone unconditionally. And how that unconditional love doesn’t automatically give them a permanent place in our lives. I’ve been thinking about unbreakable love and how some people will always have a home in hearts whether or not they have a home in lives.

I’ve been thinking about loving someone and not expecting anything in return. What it means to be in a relationship without expectations or demands or assumptions and still getting (reasonable) needs and wants met.

And just what is a reasonable want or need?

Alice Miller has written that we can never expect unconditional love from anyone who isn’t our parents. That if we didn’t receive that unconditional love from our parents, that we need to do the work of unconditionally loving ourselves. That it is no one else’s job to fill those needs within us. And also, these needs don’t just go away.

We really do need to do the work of filling our own black holes.

We need to acknowledge them first. My guess is most of us have attachment wounds from childhood. Whether we experienced abuse or neglect or if our parents simply didn’t see us or love us in the ways we needed when we were young.

These wounds affect the ways we interact with others, our friends, our lovers, our children. Unchecked these wounds create expectations within us of how others should treat us, how they should know things about us without us sharing them, how they should make us and our relationship with them A, or The, priority. Always.

When we have these expectations, we will inevitably be disappointed. Because we can’t ever be another person’s number one, primary priority 24/7. And I’ve come to believe, not only we can’t be, we absolutely shouldn’t be.

I follow a lot of poetry and relationships accounts on my secret/personal IG profile. I see post after post about how if a person doesn’t make you their number one in all cases every moment of every day then they aren’t worth your time. How if we aren’t showered with attention and promises to stick around no matter what then they aren’t worthy of us. How we need to be treated like queens and kings, put on pedestals, worshiped like gods and goddesses.

These are all such unrealistic expectations. Especially as we grow older and have more and more responsibilities. Kids. Work. Aging parents. Our own mental health.

It is true that we should be respected within all our relationships, both platonic and sexual relationships. We should be appreciated. We should never be abused, physically, psychologically, or emotionally (and we should never do any of that to another). Effort within each relationship should relatively equal, or at least over time effort is equal-ish.

And, we aren’t goddesses or gods or kings or queens. We are each beautifully flawed human beings who are seeking connection. We each have our own wounding that we try to navigate the world with. We each have our own trauma lens that we view our relationships and ourselves through.

We can never expect or rely on another person to make us feel whole. It is not anyone else’s job to help us process our traumas or heal our wounds. This is our job.

And we don’t have to do it alone. Having good friends who can hold space for us helps. Having lovers or romantic partners who are doing their own work and can be supportive while we do our own. But ultimately the work is our own to do with the help of a therapist, coach, priest/pastor, or other person who is actually knowledgeable about how to guide a person through this work.

We can’t be the center of another person’s world. I’ve come to the place of deciding I actually want to be my friends’ and lover’s third priority. First priority is themselves. Second priority is any children they have, and in the case of my platonic relationships, their partner(s)/spouse comes in here too. I want to be a relatively solid third, with the understanding that sometimes in life I can’t even be that – parents age, other friends need attention because they are in crisis, work/careers need to be prioritized for a while, life happens.

I can however expect that I am my number one priority. My mental and physical health. My happiness. My safeness. My own trauma processing and healing of my own attachment wounds.

This doesn’t mean that I am suddenly all cool and collected when it comes to my relationships. It means I am a work in progress. It means I am doing my work to be more aware of the ways my black holes show up in my relationships. It means that when a friend or lover disappoints me or doesn’t meet an expectation I have, that I slow down, allow space for the sadness, and dig deeper into what that disappointment is really triggering in me.

Being an adult in relationships can be challenging. It means being brutally honest with ourselves. It means being mindful of boundaries, our own and those of others. It means checking in with how the behaviors of others are affecting us and deciding moment to moment if we are triggered if it’s because of our own stuff or because the other person is being abusive in some way.

To be clear, abuse isn’t okay. Ever.

And not being another person’s number one priority is part of being in adult relationships. It is an opportunity for us to look within and start making ourselves our own first priority.

/../

This essay was originally published in my newsletter on September 29, 2019. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent writing you can subscribe here.

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The stages & tasks of grief

Every broken heart has screamed at one time or another: Why can’t you see who I truly am? ~Shannon L. Alder

When you experience loss, people say you’ll move through the 5 stages of grief … Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance … What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day. ~Ranata Suzuki

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me. ~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Most of us have heard of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). It is a standard way of looking at grief and how we as humans process it. Sometimes folks think it is a linear progression, that once we finish one stage we’re done with it and move onto the next. And grief doesn’t actually work that way. We may feel each of the stages at different times or we may feel them all at once or we may have both experiences at different times.

During my clinical internship we utilized Worden’s Tasks of Grief, which are a bit less known, and I feel more powerful and representative of how we actually process grief, whereas I see the stages of grief as the emotions we cycle through when grieving.

The tasks of grief are:
Task 1 :: To accept the reality of the loss
Task 2 :: To work through the pain of grief
Task 3 :: To adjust to an environment in which the deceased are missing
Task 4 :: To find an enduring connection to the deceased while embarking on a new life

As I’ve said before, we don’t only grieve the deceased though. We grieve relationships that have come to an end. We grieve our children growing up and leaving home (which we also simultaneously celebrate their achievement). We grieve paths not taken and choices not made.

We have the opportunity to grieve what was taken from us when we were young, either through abuse or neglect.

And we can utilize the information of the stages and tasks of grief to do this work.

When I look at my own abuse, I think about the little girl who existed before it and then who essentially died because of what was done to her. That may sound dramatic to some. And it is true that the abuse any of experienced changed the course of our lives, irrevocably. The young, innocent, trusting person who existed prior to the chronic abuse and or neglect ceased to exist and grew into the people we are today.

We will never know what our lives would have been without the abuse and neglect we experienced. We will never know who those innocent children would have grown up to be.

When we are able to begin to consider all that was lost, we can then start to feel the emotions that come with that loss. The denial (which can also show up as it wasn’t that bad). The anger (or rage of what was done to us). The bargaining. The depression. The acceptance (which isn’t about it being okay, but about understanding these things happened and they deeply impact us).

We will cycle through all these emotions, often having more than one at the same time. This is part of grieving what was lost, yes. It is also part of processing the trauma itself. Of allowing ourselves to come into our bodies and actually feel the sadness of what was done.

And while feeling the emotions and sensations is vital, we also need to find ways to process them, to allow them to flow and move out of our bodies, minds, beings. We need to feel yes, and also to not get stuck in the feelings.

Emotions want to flow. They want to move. They want to come and go.

And since many of us have lived our lives at least partially dissociated and suppressing our feelings (emotions and the physiological sensations that go with them) we need to learn how to process them.

Worden’s tasks give us a way to do that. They give us a framework. One where we can acknowledge and accept the losses we experienced because of our trauma. Once we have acknowledged them we can then work through those emotions and sensations, feeling them, allowing them, and knowing they are valid and real. To accept the impacts of the abuse and how it has influenced our choices and lives and to create the space to ask all the what if questions we want. And to find ways to connect to those younger parts of us, to let them know they are safe now, and that you will keep them safe.

It is intense work. It is non-linear. Each individual comes at this work in the ways that are right for them. Often we move back and forth between tasks or are working through more than one task at a time. There is no one right way to process our trauma or our grief associated with it. We each come to this work in our time and work through it at our own pace.

And it is important work, I believe. Vital. So that we don’t perpetuate harm. So we don’t continue cycles and patterns that hurt us and can hurt others. So we can begin to live our lives on our own terms, becoming more and more self-aware and learning to shift and change the ways we respond to others and ourselves.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly(ish) newsletter on September 8, 2019. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays (and more) you can subscribe here.

We will be utilizing both the stages and tasks of grief in the seven week writing program Embodied Writing :: Unspoken Grief. To learn more and register you can go here. We begin on September 16, 2019.

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Seasonal Grief

So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love. ~E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone. ~Fred Rogers

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. ~Anne Lamott 

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike the month of August.  Historically it is month filled with death anniversaries (of long-time important pets, people, and a couple long term relationships).  I feel extra anxious throughout the month as my body re-experiences the losses of years past and my mind going through another round of processing.  August has a heaviness to it for me.  It feels oppressive and generally speaking all my “stuff” is really up, front and center, leaving me exhausted at the least and feeling like my life is spinning out of control at the worst.

This past month was no exception to any of this.  And to say I am thrilled to be in September is the understatement of the century.

It is also true that this August has also been filled with new found appreciation of this season.  Of the heat.  The sun.  Of those little in-between spaces where I can breathe.  Those joyful moments of watching my kids enjoy the sun and water and sand and driftwood; as well as those happy moments of retreating to the shade, eating popsicles or painting on our deck, and cuddling on the couch watching shows together.  

This August, the first August in my memory, was filled with both ands.

Truth is all my Augusts were likely filled with lots of both ands.  Lots of dark and lots of light.  And because of where I was in my life I couldn’t see it all.  This is what it is.  And it is true several Augusts I was deep in the raw and traumatic grief of recent losses, and so seeing any light in those dark times simply wasn’t possible.

Both experiences, past and most recently last August(s), are true.  Both are valid.

It is also true that now we are in September I feel like I breathe better.  Like a weight has been lifted.  Like all my stuff that has been stirred and swirled up for the past 31 days is settling down and I can get back to being the person I want to be in the world instead in a constant struggle with my own automatic trauma responses and focusing on little else than slowing them down so I don’t damage fragile relationships or even the more stable ones.

I believe we all have times of the year that do this to us, that are filled with anniversaries and or stir up all our “stuff”, our deep woundings, our painful losses.  For many this time of year is the holiday season.  For some it is summer.  For others we have a specific month that just feels like Hell Month.  Some experience multiple times during the year that are like this.

In all this stirring, there is grief.  Old grief.  New layers of old grief.  New grief.  

Grief is a part of life.  Learning to feel, to process, to be in, and to allow it flow… this is our work.  

Acknowledging how that grief shows up for us – in our bodies, in my minds, in our moods, in our emotions, the ways we interact with others.  Learning to slow down and recognize what is happening, how grief is affecting us and our lives, that is not a simple or easy process.  And it can be done.  

This is the work of our own unraveling and rebuilding.  The work of falling apart and putting ourselves back together.  The work of dismantling and creating something new.  The work of deep love, and the heartache that we open ourselves up to because of it.

We all have much to grieve.  Death, any type of death, is a transition.  This is true as much for the person or thing that has died as it is for those of us still left standing.  We each experience death within our own lives, within our Self, differently, and still we all experience it.  Change, even good change, means the end of something.  Every beginning is preceded by an ending.  

And.

There is a beauty in grief.  It means we loved.  We loved deeply.  

As we begin our grief work of what could have been, that What If grief I’ve written about before, we find the deep love we have for our Self, our past selves, our current Self, and the Self we are becoming.  There can be no grief without love.  And that is what makes grief work beautiful, all the love that is a necessary part of the work is revealed.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly(ish) newsletter on September 1, 2019. It has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays (and more) you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

In Embodied Writing :: Unspoken Grief, we will spent some time unearthing and embracing all the love we have for our younger Selves, our present self, and our future Selves. If you would like to learn more you can go here.  Partial scholarships (of 50%) are available for those who are called to this work but cannot afford it.