(I type this as I go so please excuse my mistakes.)
I am attending Adam Young's monthly Saturday conference. This month the topic is "The Role of Grief and Sorrow in Healing From Trauma." The first session is:
Session #1: What Grief Is and How to Respond to it in a Way that Brings Healing
Our world is one where grief and sorrow are unwelcome. Most of us do not feel that the people around us can bear the depth of our sorrow and grief. We do not feel welcome or that people around us are willing to be in it with us. As a result, we take our sorrows and sadness and try to push them out of awareness. In this way, we are declaring to our sorrow You are not welcome in my life.
Because belonging is so important to us, we can't risk it by sharing our grief with others. We are afraid that if we bring our sorrow to our friends and loved ones, those sorrows would cause relational distance between us.
Francis Weller: The Wild Edge of Sorrow is a book he's recommending and going to talk about a lot. We keep our sadness hidden so we are not "kicked out" of our groups. Sorrow or grief is defined as: "feeling of distress, pain, caused by losing something or by disappointment." If you lose your spouse, a job, the ability to do an activity that you love ... any of these things can cause grief and sorrow.
Let's look at the word DISAPPOINTMENT. You will feel sorrow when you are disappointed. You don't only feel sorrow when you lose something. Disappointment can be one of the most painful feelings to tolerate. Disappointment causes us to feel the painful ache of sorrow.
Dis -- appointment is a broken appointment. Do you let yourself feel sorrow about your disappointment? Most people will feel anger when they didn't get to do something with their spouse that they wanted to but they won't feel sorrow or disappointment. Your body's natural response is to hurt and ache and feel sorrow and grief. You cannot be an alive person without experiencing losses and disappointments in this world frequently.
If you allow yourself to WANT, you will feel DISAPPOINTMENT often.
Weller identifies several types of grief:
1. The loss of someone or something we love. This is the type of sorrow that most people are familiar with and this is the only type of sorrow that most of us are allowed to feel in this world. However, there are many other types of sorrow and grief.
2. Maybe you need to feel loved in a particular moment and you were not. That is grief too! That is a loss. That is a type of grief, an ache, a sorrow. We carry grief in our bodies about those moments that we needed to be loved and we weren't. There are moments in your life in which you needed to be seen, soothed, cared for, and you weren't. That is a profound loss that needs to be grieved.
3. Sorrow of not being welcome. This means the sorrow of not belonging anywhere. Not being able to find a community that welcomes you in the fullness of who you are.
“When we are born, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome
and engagement. In short, we expect what our ancestors experienced as their
birthright, namely, the container of the village.”
God made you to be welcomed into a village. People who say "you belong here." You need people who are wiser than you, stronger than you, and deeply committed to your freedom and flourishing. This is what the elders of the village are supposed to be. And most American culture is lacking elders. The lack of the village is a deep source of our sorrow. At the core of our grief is our longing to belong. We are not sure how we will be received if we feel our feelings in public or with another.
Many of us have a vague sense that we are lacking something ... something is missing in our lives. “We are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows. At the
core of this grief is our longing to belong.”
The sorrow of not being welcomed. The sorrow of not belonging anywhere. Not having a
community that welcomes you and says “you belong here.”
“When we are born, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome
and engagement. In short, we expect what our ancestors experienced as their
birthright, namely, the container of the village.” Francis Weller
You were not designed for the individualism that plagues modern American culture.
You were designed to need the container of the village.
“We are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows. At the
core of this grief is our longing to belong.” Francis Weller
“Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of a personal failure, but
the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect."
GRIEF is not a problem to be solved. If you feel sorrow, it doesn't mean there is something wrong with you. It means that you are paying attention because the world is filled with injustice, heartbreaks, losses. Modern American culture is devoted to
DENIAL
and
NUMBING!
Many of us are focused on GOING UP. Always. We want everything to be improving and getting better: THE ASCENT! This is so American that we don't even question this. When you are only looking at going up, it is difficult to look at emotions that cause you to DESCEND. Sorrow and grief will take you down. And since our culture is so focused on ascending, this feeling is very scary to us. And so, we DENY and we NUMB.
Connection only occurs when someone is vulnerable. When we let people into our hearts, connection occurs. The cost to always ascending is ISOLATION and LONELINESS.
Time does NOT heal all things. Those things will remain in the basement of your heart, waiting to be taken seriously and for care and support. Most of us do not welcome our sorrow and grief since we fear that others won't welcome or make a place for our sorrow and grief, you push them down and make them unwelcome.
Sorrow and grief will FLOW and new things will emerge if you sit with the sorrow and grief.
What are the conditions needed to allow our sorrow and grief to heal?
# 1 We need to own that our sorrows and griefs matter and should be taken
seriously. Grief knows where to take us. It will take us where we need to go if we let it.
# 2 We need to gradually move from a posture of contempt toward our sorrow and grief to a posture of compassion and kindness and welcome. Be kind to yourself. I should be past this by now. I shouldn't feel this way anymore. If you feel this way, you have some measure of self-contempt for your wounds. When you are ashamed that you are still hurt about something from you past, you won't risk sharing it. You feel shame.
# 3 We need to find a few people who can be the village for us… this will allow us
to risk sharing our sorrow and grief with other people. You need a few people like this in your life. For many of us, our greatest sorrow was that we were left behind in our pain. It wasn't the loss of your dream. It was that we were alone in the wake of that betrayal or hard thing. Our body is designed to heal. However, when something bad happens to you, you need the attunement of other people in your community to heal from that wound. We are not designed to heal by ourselves. You need withness and comfort from other people pulses. Do you believe your sorrow is worth of care from others? If you have pain from your past (developmental trauma), it is almost for sure there is trauma stuck in your body that will need to come out. This is because you didn't feel safe to get that trauma out when you were growing up.
YOU HAVE TO FEEL IT, TO HEAL IT NOT FAKE IT TO MAKE IT!
# 4 We need to move our bodies in a way that allows for the integration and
release of our sorrow and grief. In other words, rituals. We need rituals to work
through our sorrow and grief. A ritual is a sequence of bodily movements and symbolic actions performed with emotion and intention for the purpose of healing and transformation. A funeral. An event that allows people to wail and get grief out. These are symbolic gestures. You have to be emotionally connected to do these. You can't just go through the motions. Many of us still feel a need to be held. That is not an abnormality. That doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means your body has a very valid need. Sometimes we need to be held. Rituals are necessary to provide: (1) containment and (2) release. The witnesses create a container for the sorrowful person to feel their pain all the way down. They provide our bodies with the opportunity to express things that are deeper than words.
There are things in our bodies that are too deep for words. The sorrows go down so deep -- even before we had words. We may need to release and engage these emotions bodily.
God made human beings to heal through rituals with others.
“I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that. When I stopped trying to block my sadness and let it move me instead, it led me to a bridge with people on the other side.” Barbara Brown Taylor
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