Category: processing trauma

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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.

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Being (mostly) securely attached

Secure attachment
Securely attached people tend to agree with the following statements: “It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I am comfortable depending on others and having others depend on me. I don’t worry about being alone or others not accepting me.” This style of attachment usually results from a history of warm and responsive interactions with their attachments. Securely attached people tend to have positive views of themselves and their attachments. They also tend to have positive views of their relationships. Often they report greater satisfaction and adjustment in their relationships than people with other attachment styles. Securely attached people feel comfortable both with intimacy and with independence. ~Wikipedia, July 2019

If you don’t consciously choose trust and love in each moment, your subconscious policies will choose for you, and they usually choose fear.~Kimberly Giles, Choosing Clarity: The Path to Fearlessness

You can’t go back and change the past or remove the impressions of painful experiences; they’re part of your journey and through them you’ve become who you are. But you can activate different vibrational seeds by shifting your perspective and creating new mental habits that result in conscious actions. ~Yol Swan, The Indigo Journals: Spiritual Healing For Indigo Adults & Other Feminine Souls

The other week I was going through a thing, as one does. I was feeling panicked, worried, anxious. And while I was feeling all those things they weren’t totally consuming me. I could see what was happening; I noticed my responses; I noticed that while I was anxious it wasn’t nearly as bad as my reactions to similar situations have been in the past. 

Which got me curious about my own attachment style (which has always been insecure – anxious preoccupied) and how that has shifted in recent years. Of course I went to google to find an online quiz, took it, and then was pretty surprised by the results.

That I now apparently have a “mostly secure” attachment style.

I know that things have been shifting for me over the years. I know that especially over the last five years my reactions to triggers has become less and less. But I still was identifying myself as anxiously attached, I was still being triggered in some important relationships, I would still get anxious and start to panic. But what I realized the real difference was, is that I wasn’t reacting to the other person like I may have in the past.

I found the pause. I allowed myself to feel the anxiety, to examine it, to see what it was coming from, and then would respond to the person (if it was appropriate to do so). I wasn’t stuck in my back brain in panic mode. I could both feel the panic and logically and compassionately think through it.

I’m sharing all this to say that it is possible to change your attachment style. It is possible to move an insecure attachment style to a more secure way of being in the world. That doesn’t mean the feelings of those attachment styles totally disappear (at least that hasn’t been my experience), and we can learn to hold those uncomfortable feelings, slow down, and instead of instantly reacting, we can take the time to examine what is going on and then respond as it is appropriate to do so.

This has required a lot of embodiment/body-centered mindfulness work. It has required a lot of self compassion. It has required an intention and determination to be in relationships differently than in the past. It has required my own curiosity and willingness to be vulnerable with another (with others) who could potentially cause me a lot of pain.

And it has required letting go. Letting go of old narratives. Letting go of looking for validation outside myself (something I’m still working on). Letting go of trying to “make” another person be or act a certain way.

It has required acceptance. Accepting these wounds of mine and the grief that goes with them. Accepting others as they are and then deciding how or if I want to be with them. 

It has required exploring the idea of freedom within relationship – both with another and with myself. Because truly, don’t we all want to feel free within our most intimate relationships? And don’t we want those we are in relationship with us to be freely choosing us too, without games or manipulation or needing to have huge explosions (and calling it passion)?

I know I do.

No matter how severe our childhood traumas, we have the capacity for growth and change. Our brains are capable of rewiring. We are able to move from a state of constant fear and survival into a state of thriving and truly enjoying our lives. 

When we have partners who want to shift and grow too, who are ready to be pushed outside their own comfort zones just as we are ready to be pushed outside our own, amazing things can happen. Amazing, beautiful things.

It can be terrifying. It means doing things we’ve never done before and it will feel weird, scary, uncomfortable. But when you find someone you know you can trust, even though you have trust issues stemming back to childhood, you can actually learn what it means to truly trust, to have compassion for our own and another’s humanity, and to explore this wild life, expanding together. 

/../

This essay was originally published in my newsletter on July 22,,2019 and has been edited for publication here. To receive my weekly(ish) newsletter with my most recent essays and offerings, go right here.

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Introducing Embodied Writing :: Unspoken Grief

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

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

They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite. ~Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

Grief is a complex emotion. We usually associate grief with the lost of a person through death. And there is so much more in our lives that are losses that deserve, and require, the time for us to grieve.

Ends of relationships, be they intimate or platonic. Loss of a job. Loss of a home.

The things we often don’t think of as associated with grief, because they represent beginnings. And in truth every beginning also represents an ending of some other aspect of our lives. Birth of a child, marriage, moving to a new home, starting a new job.

Then there are the losses that we can’t really quantify or qualify in many ways. The loss of possibilities. The loss of potential. The losses of what could have been, if only…

These losses, the losses of the roads not taken, the possibilities, the potentials… those are losses associated with many of our life experiences. And they are most prevalent in the losses we suffer because of childhood abuse and neglect.

When we experience abuse and neglect at an early age, it shapes us. It determines the ways our brains develop. It dictates, in many ways, who and how we are in the world.

There is always a question for many of us, Who would, who could, I have been if these things hadn’t happened to me?How would I be able to interact with the world differently than I do now? How would my life be different? How would my choices in friends, lovers, careers have been different?

It’s not that this alternate reality would have been “better” than our lives now. But it would have been different. And perhaps, in some ways, we believe it would have been better. If only those things that were done to us hadn’t happened. If only the people who were our caretakers had loved us the way we needed. If only those people who harmed us so deeply hadn’t been deeply wounded themselves. If only they hadn’t hurt us in all the ways they did.

There is a grief in pondering these thoughts. There is also anger. Frustration. Sadness. And a full range of other emotions and sensations.

This kind of grief, the grief of the possibilities we never had, isn’t spoken of. It’s not talked about. We talk about trauma. We talk about the impacts, including chronic illness, anxiety, depression. We talk about how we feel unsafe in the world, in our own bodies. We talk about the horrors of the things that were done to us, done to too many people. 

But we don’t talk about the grief associated with all of that.

In Embodied Writing :: Unspoken Grief, we will step into this work. We will acknowledge the deep sadness, resentment, rage, and grief that comes with the possibilities that were lost. The futures we were never able to have because of what happened to us. The sadness of how we live our lives, in pain, loneliness, constantly needing to do the work of processing the trauma that is in our bodies, in our minds, and fighting to find our ways to happiness, to move from a constant state of survival to one of thriving.

We’ll spend seven weeks in this work, focusing on different aspects of the grief we can process. We will acknowledge the pain of this grief, find ways to sit in the discomfort of it, and then find ways to reclaiming parts of ourselves that we believed were lost, and yet have been with us, hidden beneath our trauma, all along.

I would be over the moon if you decided to join us. We will begin in just under a month on Monday, September 2, 2019. You will receive three emails a week, each with an essay, an embodiment and/or self-regulation exercise, and writing prompts. This time I am opening the program to all humans and will not have an online group space. As this work is so private, so complex, that it is best done in our own private spaces, and if we want to share any of the work we can turn to our therapists, close friends, and or family for the support we want and need.

If you’d like to learn more you can click right here.

/../

If you’d like to subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter, you can do so here.

If you are interested in working with me individually, you can learn more about that here.

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On being an adult in relationship

Our work, then, is not to abolish our connection to the past but to take it into account without being at its mercy.  The question is how much the past interferes with our chances at healthy relating and living in accord with our deepest needs, values, and wishes. ~David Richo, How To Be An Adult In Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

David Richo states in How To Be An Adult In Relationships, that in order to be an adult, we need to be self-aware and mindful in our actions. 

 In other words, self-awareness is vital on it’s own, but until it is coupled with mindful and intentional action (or inaction), we still aren’t fully acting in our frontal lobe, or “adult” brain.

Those of us who experienced chronic trauma in childhood have a lot to be angry about.  We have a lot to be sad about.  We have a lot to rage and scream and wail about.  I don’t believe anyone would deny that.  The atrocities that were done to too many of us as children are horrifying and all of it is held in our body and mind memory. 

The trauma doesn’t want to stay trapped within us however, it wants to get out.  This is great news if we are in therapy and doing a combination of talk and somatic therapies to help move that trauma on out of our systems and being.  It’s not so great news if we aren’t and so we try to stuff it down and eventually it bubbles up and out and we spew it all over an unsuspecting passer-by.

That passer-by could be our children, our intimate partner(s), our friends, other family members.  It could even be ourselves.

It is understandable that we have so much hurt and torment living within us.  I makes sense that it all needs to get out.  It is not okay for us to lash out at others.

Even when they cause us harm.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Even when  a person causes us harm, it is not acceptable for us to lash out and cause them harm.

The whole “two wrongs doesn’t make a right” thing.

Here’s a thing, though.  For most of us, I don’t think our “eruptions” or “lashing out” are intentional.  I know for me it mostly certainly isn’t mindful.  It comes from a primal place within that only cares about our survival. And so when we are already wounded, like any animal, if we get poked or prodded we go into fight/flight/freeze because we see any hurt as an attack and we need to protect and defend ourselves.

Rollo May wrote: “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.“

The work of self-awareness is to be able to grow that capacity to pause and allow space for us to mindfully choose the response we want to to actually have.

This is not to say there isn’t a part of us that wants our response to be screaming at the top of our lungs and stomping our feet.

It is to say however, that we need to take the moment to consider the longer term impacts of us screaming and stomping our feet.  And if the longer term impacts actually cause us and other (more) harm, then perhaps we could consider a different response.

Shifting from a space of automatic, mindless, response to one where there has been space created between being activated and actually responding, is no simple task.  We cannot undo the habit of a lifetime of automatic, mindless responding simply because we decide we want to do so.

It takes time.

AND.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, learning to regulate our systems: calm our sympathetic nervous system, activate our parasympathetic nervous system, move the stored up cortisol out of our system.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, connecting to our boundaries and coming into our bodies.  Learning to truly understand, on a very visceral level, where we end and another begins, physically, psychically, emotionally.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, finding our ways to ground and our own center, being able to find our way to not only be in but stay in, the present moment, despite any and all the discomfort we may be feeling.

And after all of that, it takes practice, a LOT of practice, to break the patterns and cycles that we have become so accustomed to.  To actually not engage in an argument even though we may be being provoked, to walk away, to calm ourselves in the moment, to bite our tongues, to actually feel empathy for the person causing harm.

None of this comes easy.  Or at least, none of it has come easy to me.

Changing life long, if not generations old, patterns and cycles takes effort.  It requires compassion.  And we will all screw it up along the way, slipping back into old ways of being because that is what is known.  

And.

It can be done.  With practice.  

What is interesting about changing these patterns and cycles is that as we begin to do so on our end, the person(s) on the other side may try to up their game. When this happens it can be so tempting to engage.  Believe me, I know!  And, it is all the more important for us to continue practicing our own work, to continue growing that “pause”, to continue our own work of breaking harmful patterns and cycles.

Eventually those who try to engage us will change too.  Either they will simply go out of our lives because they aren’t getting the emotional charge from us anymore, or they too will begin to create space, to cultivate and grown that pause, to break their own patterns and cycles.

We can’t do any of that for them though.  We can only do our own work.  Even in those moments when, right then, we really just want to scream and stomp, and perhaps, especially in those moments.

In rebellious solidarity, always.

/../

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

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