Category: 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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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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On insecure avoidant (dismissive & fearful) attachment styles

Dismissive-avoidant
A dismissive-avoidant attachment style is demonstrated by those possessing a positive view of self and a negative view of others.

People with a dismissive style of avoidant attachment tend to agree with these statements: “I am comfortable without close emotional relationships”, “It is important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient”, and “I prefer not to depend on others or have others depend on me.” People with this attachment style desire a high level of independence. The desire for independence often appears as an attempt to avoid attachment altogether. They view themselves as self-sufficient and invulnerable to feelings associated with being closely attached to others. They often deny needing close relationships. Some may even view close relationships as relatively unimportant. Not surprisingly, they seek less intimacy with attachments, whom they often view less positively than they view themselves. Investigators commonly note the defensive character of this attachment style. People with a dismissive-avoidant attachment style tend to suppress and hide their feelings, and they tend to deal with rejection by distancing themselves from the sources of rejection (e.g. their attachments or relationships).

Fearful-avoidant
A fearful-avoidant attachment style is demonstrated by those possessing an unstable fluctuating/confused view of self and others.

People with losses or other trauma, such as sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence may often develop this type of attachment and tend to agree with the following statements: “I am somewhat uncomfortable getting close to others. I want emotionally close relationships, but I find it difficult to completely trust others, or to depend on them. I sometimes worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to other people.” They tend to feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness, and the mixed feelings are combined with sometimes unconscious, negative views about themselves and their attachments. They commonly view themselves as unworthy of responsiveness from their attachments, and they don’t trust the intentions of their attachments. Similar to the dismissive-avoidant attachment style, people with a fearful-avoidant attachment style seek less intimacy from attachments and frequently suppress and deny their feelings. Because of this, they are much less comfortable expressing affection.

~Wikipedia, August 2019

While the avoidant attachment styles are not my dominant styles, I have been in relationships (both intimate and platonic) where the other person has an avoidant style. Some of the ways I have witnessed these styles show up in others (note I have broken it down to three lists: characteristics they share; dismissive only; fearful only)

Both avoidant styles ::

  • Struggle with emotional intimacy
  • Unable to share their own thoughts or feelings with others in a constructive way
  • “Logics” their way out of emotional conflict

Avoidant Dismissive style ::

  • Become uncomfortable when relationships get too emotionally intimate; may perceive their partners as “wanting too much” or being clinging when the partner expresses a desire to be more emotionally intimate
  • Appear fiercely independent – act as though they don’t need others; they can take care of everything themselves
  • When faced with separation or loss, they shift their focus and attention to other (non relationship) issues and goals
  • Tend to withdraw and isolate, attempting to cope with loss and other emotions on their own
  • Deny their vulnerability; use repression to manage emotions that are aroused in situations that activate their attachment needs
  • When seeking support from a partner are likely to use indirect strategies such as hinting, complaining, and sulking
  • Overly focused on themselves and their own comforts; largely disregard the feelings and interests of other people
  • Typical response to conflict, and stressful situations is to become distant and aloof

Avoidant Fearful :: 

  • Afraid of being both too close to or too distant from others; attempt to keep their feelings at bay but are unable to
  • Overwhelmed by their emotional reactions and often experience emotional storms
  • Unpredictable moods; unable to self-regulate or suppress feelings
  • Often in rocky or dramatic relationships, with many highs and lows
  • Fear of being abandoned and also struggle with being intimate
  • Cling to their partner when they feel rejected, then feel trapped when they are close
  • Timing seems to be off between them and their partner

What these styles can look like in the modern world:

  • Ghosting or semi-ghosting
  • Refusing to talk about emotional personal topics
  • Avoiding or ignoring conflicts by ignoring phone calls, texts, emails; when they do reply make no mention of the conflict

Ghosting is a very modern day way that those with avoidant, and particularly dismissive-avoidant, attachment styles cope with their feelings. They may tell themselves all kinds of things about why they are ghosting the person, but it does boil down to not wanting to face and feel with their emotions. Note that their partner may or may not even be aware of a conflict, as avoidant styles struggle to state when something is an issue for them.

As with the insecure-anxious attachment style, the avoidant styles grow from neglect from their primary caregivers during their developmentally sensitive years. This may be due to the caregivers having addiction issues, having avoidant attachment styles themselves, or could be from a life event in the adult’s life that has them withdraw into themselves, like grief over the death of a loved one or needing to work outside the home suddenly due to divorce. 

Those with fearful avoidant styles tend to have grown up in homes when sometimes a caregiver was available and sometimes not; creating a sense of confusion and not knowing if the adult will be available to meet their needs.

Generally speaking anxiously attached and avoidant attached people are attracted to each other. Their relationships tend to look a bit like a cat and mouse game where the anxiously attached person reaches out for connection, then the avoidantly attached person withdraws, so the anxiously attached reaches out more and the avoidant withdraws more, each upping the ante so to speak with each turn of the cycle with neither ever getting their attachment needs met. This cat and mouse game can last for decades, for a lifetime even. 

However as one or the other partner works through their own trauma history and starts to process it, learning to develop a more securely attached relationship style there are two paths the relationship could either go down: 1. The relationship ends or 2. The other partner also begins to work through their trauma history and learns how to become more securely attached in relationship.

Securely attached people can be in relationship with either avoidant or anxious attached people (and of course other securely attached people). The good news for those with the insecure attachment style, is if they are willing and able, these relationships are excellent opportunities for them to grow and begin their trauma processing work and begin to shift their styles. However, the securely attached partner is not the insecurely attached partner’s therapist, and so finding a good trauma informed therapist is vital to facilitate the shifting that can begin to happen in these types of relationships.

Of course the ways we relate to others, especially our intimate partners, is complex and varied. We all have a more dominant style that we typically utilize, however we all have bits of each of the insecure attachment styles in us, regardless of which one is more dominant for us. How our attachment styles show up in our relationships is also varied depending on our partner’s (dominant) style and the work each person has done in processing their own childhood trauma. 

My hope for sharing about each of these styles over the last couple weeks is for you to learn a bit more about yourself and to help you develop a bit more compassion for yourself in understanding some more of the hows and whys you interact in the world the way you do.

The best news in all of this, is with the right trauma informed therapist and our own dedication to practice and growth, we can all shift from insecure attachment styles to a more and more securely attached style. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it can be done. It requires us to literally rewire our neural pathways, and I highly recommend a therapist who utilizes a combination of somatic and talk therapy. This rewiring can begin to happen in a few months, and with more and more work people can begin to see significant changes in how they feel in their own bodies and within their relationships in as little as a year to eighteen months. 

That may seem like a long time (eighteen months), but consider how long, how many decades, you have lived with the attachment style you developed as a child. When we look at it from this perspective, eighteen months is a drop in the bucket.

That doesn’t mean that in a year and half you will be “healed” or “cured” or completely changed in your attachment style. I believe those of us who developed insecure styles as children will always need to manage them in certain situations and consciously and intentionally bring ourselves back into more secure ways of being. However, developing that pause, to be able to move into that secure way of being with ourselves and with others, is everything.

** I want to note that I do not believe it is the responsibility of those who have more securely attached styles to “help” those with insecure styles. None of us are responsible for another person’s growth or trauma processing when in intimate relationships or platonic friendships. However, love is complex and we may find ourselves being willing to be present during our partner’s growth. The key is being able to recognize when a partner is being abusive and to be very clear that abusive behavior is unacceptable and if repeated it is necessary, always, for us to save ourselves and leave the relationship.

/../

This essay was originally published in my newsletter on August 11, 2019 and edited for publication here. To read my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter here.

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Grief & Complex Trauma

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.