Grief to Gratitude

By Sherrie Cassel

I want to share resources I find beneficial with my readers, and with those who accidentally find my page. I’m taking a little time off before I hit the academic trajectory toward a doctorate. I’m taking time for self-reflection and relaxation; it’s been a long four years! This book, which I’ve shared a picture of, is proving to be one of the most amazing and helpful books I’ve ever read. As a mental health professional, I’m good at what I do. My clients love me. I love them. We have excellent rapport, and they teach me about myself as they share their truths vulnerably and courageously.

With whom do I share my deepest feelings, tears, psychological and emotional challenges, and spiritual confusion? I have my husband who has seen me afraid, my most vulnerable emotional state. Oh, sure, I can puff out my chest and try to appear larger than I am, like a wildcat, or a kitten, which one depends on my self-perception of the day.

We are emotional beings and depending on our emotional stability and healed traumas, we navigate life with oozing, gaping wounds, or with peace and liberation from maladaptive behavioral patterns. Copley says that until we courageously unpack our trauma, we will continue to repeat toxic and maladaptive behaviors in every relationship and in every experience.

There is also disadvantageous behavior in which a person processes his/her/their emotions from a position of emotional scarcity. What this means is that, for example, someone who is unable to be happy for someone else’s joy, there simply are not enough emotional resources to rise above our more base emotions, jealousy, for example; it serves no adaptive purposes, and as a matter of fact, it generally serves only to hurt our relationships.

The reasons I begin with trauma and emotional resources are because scarcity in the latter only perpetuates the effects of the former in our lives. But how does that affect the grief process? Give me a page or two to share from my own grief journey, and to share how my fountain overflows with plenty of resources, unless I’m in a funk, like stuck in a victim mentality. For example, I did not lose my son because I’m a bad person. My son died because of addiction, and there is nothing either fair or unfair about his death.

As a process of natural selection, our time here is temporary, with very few of us knowing when or how it will end. I get it. I understand and I even accept the transitional nature of life into the existential dissolution of human reality, another otherworldly launching pad into perhaps eternity, or perhaps, the sweet oblivion that comes from no more human strife.

I don’t, as often as I used to, ask questions that don’t serve the world or me in any beneficial way. I no longer choose to torture myself with unanswerable questions. I no longer choose frustration over freedom. How did this happen? Losing a child or someone else with whom you have had an intense and close relationship with is grounding.

Prior to my son’s descent into the darkness of addiction, I was an idealist. I ALWAYS looked on the bright side of life to the exclusion of reality. Life can be shitty as well as marvelous. Emotions can cause us to ache or to soar to great heights toward optimism and mad possibilities. I anthropomorphize emotions here because we know emotions don’t cause us to behave one way as opposed to another; it is our reaction elicited by healthy coping skills or poor coping skills. My reaction to the loss of my son was from the stance of a pure victim. Why did God do this to me? Why do I have to suffer like this? When will the pain stop?

If I had been navigating life from a healed and self-aware emotional position, my grief, while still intense, would not have been extended. Again, for my regular readers, four and a half years of emotional paralysis and physical immobility were choices I made for myself out of deep-seated unhealed wounds. I ached from the dissolution of my perfect, Pollyanna world. I always wanted to be a cynic, but I just don’t have it in me.

I guess I still look on the bright side of life.

When Rikki died, I did not have a surplus of emotional resources to handle anyone else’s pain, even my fellow grievers – at first. I looked at the date I started After the Storm and Rikki had been gone only nine months when I reached out and asked for help from others who were on the same path as I found myself; it matters. I gained the emotional strength to move forward with my life, despite the darkest days of it.

Learning about oneself is scary, but it is healing, and self-awareness will be your reward. Many people live their lives knowing not what they do. I remember when I was younger and everything was freak out worthy, and I was frequently in a panic. I couldn’t form close relationships because I was caught up in a victim mentality. I’m older and more healed now. I’m able to breathe through intense moments rationally and calmly…even overwhelms of grief.

For example, yesterday, I had such an overwhelm. After reading Copley’s book and remembering what I encourage my loved ones who are freaking out to do, I pause, take a deep breath, ask  myself if there is anything I can do about the situation, breathe again, analyze my emotional resources and regulate my emotional status so I can think clearly enough to find solutions to problems in a way that is only beneficial – to me, certainly, but to others as well.

If you’ve never read The Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, I highly recommend it. The Rabbi lost his fourteen year old son to progeria when the young boy was only fourteen years old. The Rabbi, of course, was wounded to the core, but he did not blame an impersonal, uncaring god. He said the loss of his son and the initial affliction were not God’s fault; they simply were the luck of the draw. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

When the internal pain is unbearable, we reach for externalities to help assuage that pain: alcohol, drugs, food, sex, relationship drama, ad nauseam. There was a playwright, Harold Pinter, who is credited with what is called the Pinter Pause, i.e., a perfectly placed pause pregnant with possibilities. I don’t know about you, but when I’m in a state of nervous energy, there is nothing logical in my frenzied brain, and it is never a good idea to make decisions when you’re frantic.

Take the Pinter Pause; stop for a half-second and consider all the possibilities available to you when you’re of a sound and quiet mind.

I did ask all the questions about how a loving god could have so violently yanked my son from my life, from the world, from his son, from all the people who loved him. I blamed a misperception of god for killing, yes, killing my son. Why did my son not survive and have a victory story? See? Unanswerable questions. Rationally I know why my son died and I know how, but when one is in the throes of acute grief, reason is non-existent.

I wish I had been more healed when I lost my son. Memories from the early days of grief are a giant mass of pain, despair, and hopelessness. Sure, I bartered with the god and the devil from my youth to bring my son back to life. No Pinter Pause, just plain ol’ hysteria and unreality from losing a part of myself.

How do we shake the victim mentality when someone dies who is as close to us as one can possibly be? I know this sounds too simple, but the way you shake suffering is to choose to not engage with it. I miss my son. I have grieved for him and will continue to grieve all the ways he should still be here with us; grief is a natural process. When we lose someone we love, it shakes up the natural order of things. We can’t conceive of their eternal absence. How will the world run without this person? Will I ever stop hurting?

When you’re in the moment, again, dependent upon your emotional reserve, you pick yourself up by the bootstraps and dust yourself off and keep on going, forever changed, forever changing. Or … you collapse under the weight of the loss, and it takes you years to claw your way out of despair. I was in the latter rung of hell for much longer than I needed to be … because I hadn’t healed from other traumas and didn’t have the emotional resources to focus on the powerful force of grief, and it is powerful; it’s physical and it’s profound – and the duration we must stay under before resurfacing from the depths of grief depends on our emotional health; it just does.

I can see this now that I’m no longer in acute grief and I wonder … if I’d worked through some of my other shit, I wonder if the acute pain would have decreased in intensity sooner than four and a half years, four and a half years during which I sat frozen in pain. I couldn’t see past my pain and again, I can see it now; there was an iceberg of Freudian pain upon which my most immediate pain writhed. Grief was just the tip of the iceberg, however, and after nine and a half years of grieving my son, my childhood, my idealism, my … and I started allowing healing from a cleared and healing consciousness. I’m not a victim of a punishing god, or of circumstance, and I didn’t lose my son because the Fates called for it; shit happens and when it happens to us, we have two choices, to bail or to buck up. Certainly, take the Pinter Pause; it is in that silence where we grieve deeply, and it is in that space where we are aware of our vulnerability, and it is in that space where we find the courage to move forward with our lives – .

I’ve spent many years in and out of therapy trying to make sense of my wretched childhood, speckled with a few smiles and seasoned with some fine people who tried to rescue me. I’ve spent time in therapy because I had a horrid first marriage and I wanted to know why I stayed when the marriage offered no joy or promise of shared dreams or nurturing one another’s dreams – or dreams! I spent time in therapy when I lost my son. I have no issues touching base with a therapist when things come up, and the book Loving You is Hurting Me, provides ample triggers and opportunities for posttraumatic growth (PTG). See, I can allow myself the delay of freaking out, but that means I’d lose valuable healing time. So, I do what I can to stay in the present moment of a life challenge, grief or a different challenge. If I allow myself to give in to the panic or the paralyzing grief then I can’t move forward in my life, in my relationships, and in my spiritual connection to the Divine.

When we’re stuck in the mire of our grief or other past experiences, sometimes we struggle and fight to get out, and other times we surrender in despair. The thing is, we have choices. Get the therapy so you can handle even the worst possible pain, physical or emotional.

If you have time, read this book; it’s phenomenal. If you experienced trauma at a very young age, if the trauma was repeated, or if you experienced a monumental trauma as an adult, a rape, witnessing a murder, domestic violence, the loss of a child, etc., heal the wounds preceding the current wound; it matters. We have the ability to dress our wounds with love and to expose their depths. We have the ability to recognize our wounds; from all the places they originate. We have the responsibility to ourselves if we want lives of quality, in spite of the many things that have wounded us, to heal ourselves through prosocial and adaptive means, hard, hard work.

Healing continues in my life. My heart no longer races when I think about the past, or the loss of my son, or the state of my country. I just breathe and focus on what is right in front of me. I no longer need to carry all the shit from the past into the present. I can let it go – a little, or a lot – at a time.

Please allow healing to take place in your life. Don’t fight it. Start from the beginning … see where it takes you.