In the early to mid-eighties there was a counselor, educator, and motivational speaker named John Bradshaw. He wrote books that made claims which would later turn out to be quite controversial. I read, Healing the Shame that Binds You, when I was in my mid-twenties. To be honest, I never really got caught up in the controversy. Bradshaw’s words for me were acknowledgment that my childhood was rife with domestic violence. His words affirmed for me that I wasn’t crazy or that I was to blame for the abuses.
I will forever be grateful for his books,and in particular, that one. Later, around the same time, Melody Beattie’s books about codependency came out; Susan Forward wrote a book called, Toxic Parenting, and Ellen Bass wrote a book called, Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Sexual Abuse. I was hoppin’ mad, and I was fully armed.
In light of my newfound knowledge, I was very angry for a very long time. I was cynical and had an extremely caustic tongue. I chased potential suitors away because I was “tired of taking shit” — and “no one would ever hurt me again.” I was avenging my childhood and I was, even though I didn’t realize it until much later, in grief, and that grief would last many years; it lasted until I was ready to let go of the anger enough to move forward and away from the pain.
How is this analogous to the grief when you lose a loved one? I lost the child I was supposed to be at the time I was supposed to be her. I have gaps in my memory, especially the good ones I hear about from my siblings. “Do you remember…?” is a painfully difficult question to answer, because the answer is almost always, “No.”
I remember the abuse, but I don’t remember the laughter, the tender moments, the adventures, bonding in a healthy way with my parents. I never got to be a child, and as a result, the joy of “acting like a kid again” is not a finely tuned social skill I developed.
How do you grieve an apparition? I am a strong proponent of therapy. As a psychology major and person who has spent a significant number of years in therapy, I am hyper-aware of its benefits.
Spirituality, not religion, has helped guide me through my grief process. There’s a still small voice in each of us that has only our best interests at heart. Listen to it. Call it God or Spirit, or whatever name summons the Sacred in your life. Give it the opportunity to help you heal. I have vacillated all 56 years of my life about God/No God/Maybe a God. I have a fair amount of agnosticism, but I do believe there is something holy that animates each of us. Is it the need to survive? I wouldn’t argue against that point.
Walter Bradford Cannon brilliantly named the process of survival modes during stress: fight, flight, or freeze. I am working toward my B.S. degree, and I have one class left before it will be conferred upon me, so what I’ve learned is rudimentary, at best, and I learned it in undergraduate psych classes and from books for which I have a voracious appetite. The best insight I have is into myself , borne of the various and painful experiences that have brought me to this very moment.
My current hypothesis is this: Although with each advance we make in the behavioral sciences, change is certainly a given, but perhaps grief is the freeze part of the triad that keeps us safe until we are able to deal with the loss of a loved one, even if the loved one is you. The freeze mode is a time when we are unable to move because of deep emotional distress. We are in stasis until such a time as we find our way back to life again. In essence, we are lost to ourselves, to others, and to life.
There are all kinds of ways to be lost, however, lost in a marriage, lost in motherhood, lost in your work, losing a part of your body. When I had my hysterectomy years ago, I couldn’t even look at dolls in department stores afterward, because the loss of being able to have another baby was difficult to adapt to in my utter grief.
Grief is not specific to one type of loss, and whether it is because you lost a loved one, or a very important part of your life, grief is there, in my opinion, and in my experience, to hold you in a safe place until you can move forward. Losing a person, an ideal, one’s reputation, a body part, ad infinitum makes it difficult to move forward. You have lost an aspect of yourself you believe was what gave you your identity, and how do you go on without that person or thing that you believe made you who you are?
When the convulsive sobs subside, when the social isolation is no longer necessary, you can choose to plunge into life, find interests that help you to rebuild your identity, to enhance your former self, and to embrace the new one.
I don’t adhere to the “fake it ’til you make it” approach. I think you do what scares you even if it hurts. Life waits for no one, and in between the willful need to hold on to your anger, pain, grief, and your inevitable wild transformation, is stagnation. Stagnating is not how I want to spend the rest of my life.
I am 56 years old and I spent the first 39 years of my life enraged about the abuse, about the loss of my childhood, about all of the ways I had allowed myself to remain a victim. I walked out of that calloused shell of a human being and allowed my radiant light to shine in me, through me, and toward others.
To sum up this post, there is no answer for why shit happens or to whom it happens. In my experience, it is just the luck of the draw. I was not and am not a victim. I was not at the whim of a punitive god. None of us is. We live in a rough and tumble world, and bad things happen, and once you are fortunate enough to have that epiphany, you get tired of every little thing being a trigger that holds you prisoner to the past. It is we who control our thoughts; they don’t control us. Once I discovered that I am the only one who can change me, I softened a bit. My mind opened up and I have been filling it with edifying things ever since.
I have learned to love my little girl self. She kept me safe and locked herself away until I got healthy enough to bring her into the sunlight. I love the angry teenager and woman who kept me safe as I learned to allow transformation to take place. Anger at life, and not taking shit from anyone is not equal to courage; it serves only to mummify our spirits as they rot in the layers of hypervigilance.
I want to live. I want to thrive. I want to work though the stages of transformation, even when it hurts. I want to get to the other side of my grief, and be the kind of person who loves with my whole heart and helps others find his or her purpose — just as I have found mine.
Grief to Gratitude 