It is IMPERATIVE that we have a team helping us when we are in the vortex (i.e. "the pit" or depression or anxiety or any other grief-filled event in our life.)
I personally think everyone needs at least THREE people. They need to rotate because they have lives and they get tired. But it is crucial that we have this!
Do you have a team? If you don't: FIND ONE!
(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 second session is with J.S. Park.
Session #2: Unraveling Myths About Grief
MYTH #1: Grief looks somber, solemn, single tear, controlled.
MYTH #1.5: You can only grieve certain kinds of loss (like death).
MYTH #2: Grief is letting go, moving on, from negative to positive.
J.S. Park is a chaplain, and he is sharing how he helps with grief. He says that whatever he says IS the grief. It may be screaming and crying or laugh or shut-down. It is ALL grief. You will need to allow your body to go through whatever your body goes through.
And while this is happening, life keeps going. Someone may come in the room where grief is being dealt with and tell you that you have to move your car because you are double-parked.
EMERGENT GRIEF: The moment the grief happens. Your body will do whatever it voluntarily wants to do in this grief.
INTENTIONAL GRIEF / CONSCIOUS GRIEF: This is more intentional and purposeful grief with cultural elements. Woven with tradition practices.
Many of us have COMPARATIVE SUFFERING "I haven't had it as bad so I shouldn't be grieving."
All change involves loss and all loss involves grief.
A break-up can lead to pain as much as a death. Losing a job can cause very difficult pain as well. You can lose a dream, faith, or world-view.
What are some non-death losses that you have experienced? We have permission to grieve these things.
Grief is NOT linear. Grief isn't about eventually letting go. "It's okay that you are not okay."
Grief is not moving on. It is moving with. It is letting in.
****
A passage from Toni Morrison's book Home.
The protagonist Cee realizes she can no longer have children.
“Come on, girl. Don’t cry,” whispered Frank.
“Why not? I can be miserable if I want to. You don’t need to try and make it go away. It
shouldn’t go away. It’s just as sad as it ought to be and I’m not going to hide from what’s
true just because it hurts.” —Toni Morrison, Home (p. 178)
*****
The grief will always be with us but the color will change.
Why are we so indoctrinated in the thought that we need to "Let go of grief."
Our society does not give us bereavement time. There are often 3-4 days provided for grief. Grief is often considered negative and bad because it stops us from being productive.
Grief is shrunken into a forced timeline because:
1) it was considered the one emotion that could lead the oppressed to revolt in anger at injustice,
2) it was considered an inconvenience to the oppressor, and
3) grief is a remembrance of what was lost, it is in itself a memory that we carry.
We are going to carry those who have died. We can carry them in our memories, the way they loved us, all the difficult and hard things. We can make room for that inside of us.
What are some of the phrases and ideas we have been taught about grief? Things that didn't help. Maybe in the midst of grief you can say to someone, "What was your dream? What dream died?"
(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
I recently listened to a video by Megan Fate Marshman. If you aren't familiar with her, Megan lost her husband at 38 years old to a heart-attack very unexpectedly. Here is what she writes about grief:
We don't need to grieve alone. We need to get it out with the people God sends into our life. We can:
1. Go through pain (the way we should travel)
2. Go back to the trauma (to avoid the pain -- or so we think)
3. Ignore the pain
Grief is a mess. We want to be plucked out of the pain, but God wants to to be present with us in it. If we don't grieve, we will look for relief from the pain somewhere else. Unhealthy options are an attempt to relieve the pain. (These can include: drinking, sex, drugs, busyness, etc.)
In my case, I also would turn my grief into a focus on anxiety or other "problems" in my life. This was another way to not actually sit in pain.
We can't heal what we are unwilling to feel. If we don't acknowledge God in our grief, we will live out of the stage we are stuck in!
Grief is the anecdote to trauma. Trauma leaves us stuck. Grief has the power to move us. Avoiding grief keeps us stuck. Talk about it. You are going somewhere when you talk about it.
The #1 indicator of people who grieve and move thru trauma is having a community to process pain together. It brings out good things from people who listen to it as well.
Psalms 34:18 says "The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." He isn't just near. He grieves with us.
John 11: 35 says "Jesus wept." He knew Lazarus was coming back. He didn't take a shortcut away from the tears. There is nothing wrong with grief. We need to let others grieve too.
Isaiah 53:13 says "He's the man of sorrows." Don't suppress grief. Grief is the hope that things are not supposed to be this way.
"The opposite of joy is not sadness, it's hopelessness."
Hey everyone,
Let's stop spiritually bypassing people's sadness as though it makes the power of the cross ineffective.
It's weird.
Jesus wept is the shortest verse in the Bible, yet its meaning screams so loud.
God wanted us to know that pain matters,
presence matters,
and love doesn't skip over suffering.
It sits in it.
In so many Christian spaces, we've learned to bypass sadness with scripture and slap "God's got a plan!" over the heartbreak of another as though a band aide could really care for a bullet wound.
But disconnection dressed in spirituality is not comfort.
It's not faith to pretend that you're not sad. It's not weakness to acknowledge grief, disappointment, or trauma.
And it's definitely not holy to pressure someone into suppressing what Jesus himself made space for.
Jesus didn't rush people out of pain.
He entered it.
Holy doesn't mean happy all the time.
The cross doesn't cancel human emotion.
It redeems it.
The Power of the Cross isn't diminished by tears.
It was actually born in them.
(I did not write this. Taken from Instagram)
I have written previously about my cousin Josh and his pastoral series. He is over in Brentwood, TN at New Hope Community Church. I love this series. There is so much I want to write about with his series, and I just haven't had time to take notes on them as much as I have wanted to. So I am setting up a "master" post, so as I have time, I can go ahead and take notes on each sermon in this series.
#1 GOD WANTS OUR HONESTY: More to come
#2 ANXIETY TO PEACE: More to come
#3 DEPRESSION TO JOY: More to come
Comfort happens in the midst of grief. Can you just SIT with someone in their grief? Romans 12: 9-21 is where Paul writes about the marks of a true Christian, and he encourages us to "let love be genuine." Romans 12:15 tells us to "rejoice with those that rejoice and weep with those that weep." You notice it doesn't say "fix the situation." LEAN INTO THAT. I lvoe that statement. Grief doesn't go according to plan. It is all over the map.
Grief doesn't have to be the loss of a loved one. It can be the loss of a dream. It can be the loss of time. There is grief in that. It can be the loss of a friendship.
Psalm 147:3 " He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." But remember. If your wound needed a bandage, it probably has a scar.
Remember when Jesus goes to the tomb of Lazarus? If the Messiah who came into this world is able to weep with us? And show us how it is done? Then there are just times that we need to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn. Let them get it out.
John 14: 1 "Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you .... that where I am, you may be also."
1. Don't be afraid to cry; don't apologize for your grief
2. Share your grief; tell people about it! Tell them about your dreams don't come true. Don't bury it. Share it!
3. If it is still in your heart and it is in your mind, it needs to come out!
Rejection hurts. And the negative thoughts swim in our minds. People may reassure us by offering these words. However, rejection is your worst fear becoming reality. All the things that were swimming in your head, are real at least in that moment. Scientists have discovered that the pain we feel physically is from the same region of our brain that processes emotional pain.
And in that rejection, you look to the future and predict future pain. Your brain is protecting you. It doesn't want you to feel that again. It's the same as touching a stove. You know the pain and you won't go near it again. Your body knows the pain of rejection, and it wants to protect you from that ever happening again. Our mind is confirming what we "knew" all along: I am not good enough.
This is the lie that the Devil is throwing at us. You are inadequate.
Rejection is a rite of passage in life. When you feel rejection, however, you are in the greatest Biblical company you can imagine. Jesus knew what it would be like to be rejected. He knows what the burning stove feels like so he would be able to know what you would feel like.
When you feel rejected, try thinking: "Jesus has never been closer." He knows what it feels like. When you open your heart to Jesus and step out of the bondage of thinking no one knows, you step into a relationship with Jesus where he says, "Let me just hold you because I know what this feels like."
YOU MATTER TO JESUS!
This healing journey is:
H
A
R
D
I want it to be over. I want it to be done. I am so tired of the stretching and the pain and the growth that is required of me.
Why did I have to do this? Why did it have to be me? I wish sometimes I could go back into the naivety I lived in before all of this had to be dissected and pulled apart.
Kim describes the grief inside me like a big ball of yarn. And I'm unraveling it. And sometimes, the unraveling is not that challenging. But sometimes I come to a point that I need to really work at unraveling again. I can’t figure out which was to go to detangle the yarn. So many knots!
I'm at that spot again.
The last week has been hard for me. I'm so angry with myself. How hard is it for me to just trust that those who love me ... love me? How can I doubt so much? How can I get so afraid? Why can't I let the people in my life do and be what they need to be without it making me feel like the discomfort might cause me to DIE.
In the end, I make their struggles all about me. They are pulling back because they need rest or time, and my nervous system says, "Wendi this is about you. They are hurting you. You caused this. You are part of this. This is your fault."
The anxiety (pain?) is sitting in my chest.
The truth is, however, that I know it will dissipate. In the past, I feared that pain. Thought it might never go away and that I'd have to sit in it forever. This time I am able to see that this is a moment of grief. I am having to grieve things that have hurt me in the past and the miswiring of ny brain and accept that I had learned some improper ways of dealing with things. I have to figure out ways to handle things better in the future.
I remember when I was in college, I had a former friend write me a letter and basically chew me out. My people-pleasing had clobbered me again and she called me on it. She told me she was so tired of me operating with a fear of someone being mad at me.
She was totally right.
Only I had no idea why I did that and how to stop it from happening again.
Basically what happens in me is that I feel the people "thing" and my body goes, "This feels awful. Alert. Alert!" My brain says, "You are in danger! This could hurt really bad! Fix it! Fix it!" And then I go into overdrive to try and fix it.
I realize that in these moments, I’d rather the friend just walk away and leave me completely then me have to sit in the discomfort and fear.
The overdrive has slowed down considerably. I know what is happening now. I can feel it. So I try to stop it. I can outsmart it. The pain isn't as intense. I've healed a lot. But I still feel it and my "bossy amy" (aka amygdalia) is still trying to alert me to the danger I fear.
I know I am healing and getting better but this week I'm mad that I have to deal with this. It's not my fault! I would have stopped this had I understood it or known it! I don't want to live this way. I fear people being upset with me or abandoning me the way others might fear a bear in the woods. I truly feel that the fear may kill me. And I’ll do anything to stop it.
But, as I remind myself often, I won't let this monster eat my daughters (or sons.) And so I am throwing myself inbetween the yuckyness and them. I would die for them. So I am feeling this pain for them.
It's just SO exhausting. And it hurts SO bad.
But this is the "U" that I have learned so much about. I’m reminded again that this whole journey is a big U.
The pit, the hardness, is the death on Good Friday. But I know Sunday is coming! In the meantime, I am in the Saturday. I'm not there all the time now. There's lot of happiness in things now as I feel like I'm starting to make the climb to Sunday.
But sometimes I slip down. And I have to peel back another layer of the onion.
This is another layer.
And it's painful.
It's:
H
A
R
D
!
I won’t keep it all inside me. I will share it. I will allow others to grow with me. There is joy in the morning!
