personal trauma

The stages & tasks of grief

September 11, 2019 By gwynn

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.

Seasonal Grief

September 5, 2019 By gwynn

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.

Breaking cycles & grief

September 2, 2019 By gwynn

Be fearless. Have the courage to take risks. Go where there are no guarantees. Get out of your comfort zone even if it means being uncomfortable. The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades bumps and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested And have the courage to accept that you’re not perfect nothing is and no one is — and that’s OK. ~Katie Couric

You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in. ~Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass

A thing about doing our own personal trauma work is that we are doing the work of breaking long standing cycles and patterns, many that have been passed down through generations and generations. We are also helping stop the cycles being passed forward through future generations. It is intense work and the ripples move in all directions.

And.

When we decide to do this work, that is the very first cycle we are breaking. We are going against the status quo of our families of origin and our culture. We are calling out the dysfunction that we were raised within and stating it isn’t okay. We stop keeping secrets. We stop keeping up appearances.

And sometimes, those around us, don’t particularly like it.

Going against the grain is rarely comfortable. And when we begin to break these patterns and cycles those around us become uncomfortable too.

This can show up in a number of ways. From subtle to overt attempts at gaslighting, sabotaging our work, desperate attempts to keep the status quo, including saying what we know happened never did.

Or.

Those around us can actually begin to do their own work.

Or.

There is a combination of all of the above.

When we begin and continue on the path of our own trauma processing, we can lose people. Friends and or family. This looks different for everyone of course, and isn’t always true; and I’ve seen it happen often enough, that I it is something I always talk with my clients about.

As we do this work, our relationship with our Self shifts and changes and so our relationships with others also shift and morph. The relationships can either grow stronger or they can disintegrate, and often we are surprised by which relationships do what.

These losses, of friendships, of family, are not easy or simple losses. There is intense grief involved. There may be times when we think doing this work isn’t worth the losses. And that is okay. We are where we are in our process, and it is true that sometimes holding on to a relationship, even if ultimately harmful to us, is what we want and need at that time. And so, we stop our work in many ways and perhaps continue it others. Or we stop for a while and then come back to it. Or we work on strengthening the relationship so that it can tolerate our own growth (and the growth of the other person) and then come back to the work.

And. In that last option, the other person has to be willing and able to do some of their own work too. This is something we can’t control or dictate.

I believe there is incredible power in doing our trauma processing work. Breaking the patterns and cycles of inter-generational trauma is no easy feat. And it is also so freeing. Liberating. We learn how to develop deep and vulnerable relationships with ourselves and others. We learn how to feel our emotions and their sensations without going into total overwhelm. We learn resilience. We learn peace. We learn to be generally at home in our bodies.

And often there are losses that come with these incredible gains. Those losses can cut deep. They can be horribly painful. And you are the only one who can ever judge if they are worth it or not.

I will say though, that while I have experienced intense loss because of my own work on setting boundaries and calling out harmful or hurtful behaviors of others, and while I miss some of those people daily, I am so much happier in my life and body now.

We can miss people and also not want them in our lives.

We can heavily grieve these losses and know there is a freedom in the loss too.

The more we are able to embrace this, the more of our own work we are able to do.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly(ish) newsletter on August 27, 2019 and 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 exploring the loss of relationship that comes with our trauma processing and the grief that comes with it. We begin on Monday September 16 and will journey through this process for seven weeks (ending on November 1). If you would like to learn more you can go here. Partial scholarships are available for those who are called to this work but cannot afford it.

Grief & Complex Trauma

August 22, 2019 By gwynn

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

The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.’ ~Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

Grief. It is so complex, with its ebbs and flows and intricacies and nuances. When we grieve a death, be that the end of a life, or the end of a relationship, or the end of a phase in life, we can understand what it is we are grieving. There is a concrete thing that has been lost. We can wrap our brains around it, allow for the grief because it “makes sense.”

And there is more in our lives for us to grieve than the endings of people or relationships or phases of life.

There is the grief in beginnings (because every beginning exists hand in hand with an ending).

There is the grief in the paths not taken, either intentionally or unconsciously.

There is the grief in who could, who would, we have been if we hadn’t experienced that one thing or that series of things. What I call the “what if” grief.

What if grief is one of the kinds of grief we experience when we are processing our complex trauma. What if my parents hadn’t been alcoholics? What if he had never touched me? What if they had been paying attention and stopped what was happening? What if they had loved me in the ways I needed?

When we experience childhood trauma we lose a lot. We lose choices. We lose options. We lose our childhood. We lose our innocence.

There is a whole lot of grief in all that is lost. Especially when we wonder who we might have been, what our life might have been like if these things hadn’t been done to us.Would we have dated those people? Would we have made this career choice? What would I feel like in my own body? What would food taste like? Sex feel like? How would my relationships, all of them, look different?

Of course there are no answers to those questions, or rather no known answers. We can imagine the answers, but we’ll never know, because that is not our life or the laws of physics work.

Even so, we can grieve that unknown, because the one thing we do know, is we would not be who we are. We, in all likelihood, would not have the same daily emotional, psychological, or physical experiences that we have now. We would be different people because the events that shaped who we are would have been different.

Part of my work with my individual clients is this grief work. It is never forced, and in time, it comes up. Within this grief is anger, sadness, frustration, bitterness, loneliness, despair, anxiety, overwhelm, apathy… and a whole host of other emotions. Learning to feel each of these emotions as separate, learning to articulate them, learning to be in them without keeping ourselves stuck in them… this is all part of the work.

This grief appears naturally, in its own time. It can’t be forced. We can’t make emotions happen. They happen, in their own time. We can learn to recognize them, to feel them, to allow them, to process them, to let them flow in and out in their time without feeling flooded. Time, practice, and intention. All those are needed.

This grief is real. It’s not being “self-pitying.” It is part of exploring the full range of the impact of our experiences and seeing the ways we carry that trauma in our life. Allowing space for this grief allows that much more space for us to know ourselves more fully, more wholly. It gives more space to our own processing, shifting, and growth.

Grief is not one of the funnest or easiest emotions for most of us. And it is an important part of our human experience. It has been said that we only grieve that which we loved, that which meant something to us. How beautiful is it then, for us to grieve the parts of our Self that were lost; how beautiful is it that we have come to love our Self so deeply that we can grief for all that we lost, all that was taken from us, all that we may never have for ourselves?

/../

This essay was originally published to my newsletter on August 18, 2019 and has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

In Embodied Writing :: Unspoken Grief we will spend seven weeks exploring the grief that goes with having experienced childhood trauma. To learn more about the program, click here. We begin on September 2. Partial scholarships are available.

The difference between being triggered and feeling our feelings

May 20, 2019 By gwynn

You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget. ~Daisy Whitney, The Rivals

I’ve written about how I view healing compared to processing trauma. It is an important differentiation to make, I believe, and the quote above pretty much sums it up for me.

The reality is that the traumatic events we have each experienced did happen. And they did change us. Molecularly, yes. And more importantly, fundamentally those events in so many ways inform who we have been, who we are currently, and will continue to inform the people we continue to evolve into.

The events happened. There is no changing that. The conscious memories we do have, we will not forget. They are imprinted now in our explicit memory.

And.

The body remembers too. That remembering shows up as anxiety and or depression. It shows up as a low tolerance for sudden and loud sounds. It shows up, for me, in my own yelly-ness.

However, the implicit memory of the body is something that can actually be reset. While the mind will remember forever the things that it does (barring any dementia in the future), the body can release the memories of trauma that lives within it.

This is true for all of us.

This resetting is not done quickly. It usually involves a lot of discomfort and moving out of our own norms and ways of doing and being. Often times things may feel like they are getting worse before they get better. And sometimes we reach a point of wishing we’d never started down this journey of processing the trauma that lives in our bodies and being.

Life can be challenging, even hard. Often there are discussions out in the greater world, as well as in our private lives, that are uncomfortable and even triggering. Add to this the fact that sometimes our anxiety ramps itself up without any obvious cause and well, our daily lives can be challenging at best.

There are times where we forget all we know about how to self-regulate and self-soothe. There are times that we need someone else to help us reset. There are times of lots of tears and actually feeling some pretty intense feelings.

Which is to say, that while we may have processed a lot of the trauma that lives within us, there is (always?) still more work to do. And also, life happens to all of us and sometimes we just have bad days or weeks or months.

And.

While it is true there are times that we can’t access all the things we know about self-soothing and self-regulating, with practice there will be more times that we are able to access at least some of what we know and utilize the tools we have worked so hard to ingrain in our mind and body.

Here’s an important thing to note however: there is a difference between calming our nervous systems and not feeling our feelings.

Stuffing our feelings, not allowing them to be expressed in some way, is not the same as calming, soothing, or resetting our systems.

While it is true that we may be able to calm our anxiety and bring ourselves back from our amygdala, it is also true that we are also able to cry and feel sadness.

We can both feel sad and have our nervous system regulated at the same time, is what I’m trying to say.

Sometimes I think we are sold a bill of goods on what it means to process our trauma, or to heal our brain stems, or to reset our nervous systems. Doing these things does not mean we will not feel intense sadness. It does not mean we will only ever be happy shiny people.

Having a healthy nervous system does not stop us from feeling grief. Or fear.

What it does is allow us to feel those emotions, and the sensations that go with those emotions, and still remain present in our bodies and in the present moment.

In fact, I would argue, that having a healthy nervous system, one that is not in a constant activated state of fight/flight/freeze, may mean we actually feel those emotions more intensely. Because we stay with them in the now. Because we literally are able to feel them in our bodies. Because we are no longer stuffing them down or disassociating from what is happening within us.

I believe this is an important thing to note:

At times, having a healthy nervous system may actually mean we feel worse.

BUT.

That feeling worse, is momentary. It isn’t a constant state. It will pass.

AND.

That sense of feeling “worse” is actually part of the resetting. It is part of learning to actually feel the emotions and sensations that we have been ignoring for so long. It is part of learning that we can feel our feelings and not be flooded or overwhelmed by them, even if they feel overwhelming in the moment.

When we first start to do the work of trauma processing and coming home to our bodies, everything is new. Even the slightest sensations or emotions can feel intense. Not overwhelming, but intense. It is the newness of it all that can feel a bit “too much” even though in actuality our systems are not being activated or flooded in a trauma sense.

We can feel intense emotions and sensations and not be overwhelmed back into an activated state.

Feeling our emotions and the sensations of our body is not the same as being triggered into a trauma state.

Over the last few years there have been more and more times where I have felt all those emotions and sensations. It is not fun. I have cried a lot of tears. AND I was not in a fight/flight/freeze state. It is true at some points I was not verbal, and often being in our emotions is a non-verbal state and so we find other ways to express ourselves (crying, art, cleaning, movement, etc). It is true that when our nervous systems are activated that we can become more flooded when we feel our emotions and sensations.

It is true that being non-verbal is also part of having activated nervous systems and being in a fight/flight/freeze state. It is true that a sense of overwhelm is part of having the trauma living within us triggered and activated.

And.

It is also true that with time and processing, we learn the difference between feeling our feelings and becoming or being flooded or overwhelmed or triggered.

We learn to tolerate uncomfortable sensations and emotions without going into a fight/flight/freeze state. We learn that feeling our emotions and the sensations of our body isn’t dangerous or life threatening.We learn to hold ourselves and allow ourselves to be held.

It takes work and time. In many ways it has taken me years and in others mere months to be where I am now. To be able to feel intense sadness without becoming lost in a forever downward spiral. To be able to feel both the intensely uncomfortable and intensely pleasurable sensations of my body without going into a trauma triggered state.

I now have a sense of freedom and safeness within myself that I had not had for most of my life. And it is amazing, even when feeling some of these emotions and sensations isn’t always pleasant.

This sense of freedom is something I want for everyone. The journey to this place is not easy; it is filled with challenges and discomfort. It is also filled with rewards and peace. And I believe it is all worth it.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly newsletter in January 2018 and has been edited for publication here. To receive my most current essays you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter