Healing Handcrafting

Tag Archives: support


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Thoughts On Grief

I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about grief. It’s part of my job as a therapist. I co-wrote a book about it. And I incorporate working through grief into certain of my weaving classes, both with groups and individuals. It’s a subject that is always relevant because all of us, at some point in our lives, barring few exceptions, lose loved ones or experience losses of other kinds, like endings of relationships, job loss, or significant life changes due to chronic illness, bankruptcy, natural disaster, war. The list is long. The news of late has been devastating and heart crushing when viewing what is happening in the Palestinian Territories and Israel. So many of us are grieving locally as well as globally. So many of us have been doing this for a long time.

There’s nothing to say about it that can take away the reality of the pain, anguish, trauma, and truth of the matter, which is that human beings can be so utterly monstrous to each other. It’s shocking, and then we must think on the reality that we have choices to make every day about how we are going to be in the world. And sometimes even the most peaceful of us disappoint ourselves. I guess that’s where the truth is, too. It’s always a choice, and always it is true that how we are to others impacts our experience of our lives and our relationships.

I’ve noticed a few things lately that might seem obvious, but that have been moving me and making me look above and beyond the chatter. These observations help me connect with my choices in a way that mitigates feelings of helplessness and despair. I’ll share them with you here.

~ There’s a lot of dialogue about how much our culture gets grief wrong and how there is this pressure on people to “get over” grief quickly. I don’t disagree with that, but I have been noticing how many individuals and organizations are out there, all over the world, talking about how grief really is, and how much it changes a person and a life. As I’ve looked more deeply into remembrance and awareness days to do with grief, I’ve seen a lot of realistic information about what grief is really like as well as how we can support others when they are struggling. I’ll write soon about an upcoming awareness day to do with grieving children. I wonder what is getting in the way of the honest messages to do with grief from landing and changing the experiences people have when they are suffering. How can we release the pressure we put on ourselves to stay the same, no matter what?

~ Giving people the space and respect they deserve and are entitled to when processing life events and grief is a wonderful thing to do. When we can get out of the mindset of having to make someone “feel better” and instead hold space for them to simply be where they are, a sort of alchemy takes place. A bridge of trust grows, and often it looks like recognition. Almost like a version of namaste, it is as though the spirit says, the grief in me sees the grief in you.

~ As I talk with and listen to people, something is becoming crystal clear: long-term grief is not always solely about the loved one lost, but sometimes is a result of the anguish of trying to get back to normal too fast, whether this is a self-imposed pressure or felt as pressure from others. As a result of that anguish, there are multiple layers of complexity piled on and on and on. As people try to find their balance and figure out a new normal after any kind of grief, part of that often entails facing the pain of how their grief was received and responded to. This is tough stuff, but it seems important to me.

~ There is something incredible that happens when people let themselves process life events through the practice of making. We do so much thinking about so many things. And I’m a fan of thinking! Thinking helps us make choices that are less reactive, more informed, and ideally lead to better outcomes than when we fly by the seat of our emotions. But… sometimes we get lost in the weeds of words and self-analyzing. Creating spaces where people can translate lived experience into artistic form works, and what we get from that is insight and healing from angles that might not have been approached if the senses weren’t involved.

~ Listening… the most wonderful kind of listening… is medicine. The kind where you’re not waiting to say the next thing, or thinking about your words as the other person is still talking. Slowing down and absorbing what someone is saying and letting it affect you or work on you in some way- this is true relating. And it doesn’t require hours, or even many minutes. It just requires deciding that the person you are engaged with is worth your time and attention. Can you imagine if we all treated everyone like that? And were treated like that all the time?

What helps us meet the people around us where they are, not where we want them to be? How do we maintain compassion, patience, love, and curiosity? The first thing that comes to mind and is the only one I want to focus on at the moment is self-compassion. Sometimes it’s just the truth that our cups will not be full before we give to others, and we can sustain that for a while. Sometimes we are tired and grieving ourselves, when we are at the same time showing up for others. And sometimes, we can’t give in the ways others want us to give or we wish we could, and we need to pull back and refocus that energy. That’s okay. It helps to remember and keep remembering that it’s not anyone’s job to take grief away from others or somehow fix the pain of it. And sometimes energy needs to go back into the self for a while before it can go out again. It’s just the way it is, and there’s nothing selfish about it. It’s okay to think about how you can show up for people at any given time, and be honest about.

How do you tend to yourself and nourish yourself as you go about life and relationships? Do you have ways you tune in and respond to your heart and body? Do you take the importance of this as seriously as you do your love for and support of others? And, when you can’t be there in the way you always have and feel worried about that, or stressed or resentful, do you have ideas about alternatives? Can you imagine communicating them?

Until next time,

Bradie


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Letting Go of Normal

“I just want things to go back to normal.”

How often have you heard this refrain, or uttered it yourself when you’ve just wanted to put a pause on having new information or issues to respond to? I’ve been thinking about our relationship with normal. It’s like a thick, strong, orienting rope that runs through a life and culture, and where we are in relation to it is always up for evaluation. We talk about physical health in terms of normal. Behavior, psychological functioning, intelligence, too. And then there’s the social norms that dictate so much of how our school years and work and social lives go. Oh, and then there’s what many pay attention to as parents when kids are going through developmental milestones. Music, weather, animal behavior, family functioning are all up for grabs in the context of normal comparisons. Really, is there any part of life that is not subject to an almost immediate assessment of how it does or does not relate to normal?

Such a bland word that elicits a broad range of reactions from people packs quite a punch and I think it’s worth looking into a little bit.

From Merriam-Webster, normal means: “conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern : characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine; according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule, procedure, or principle; approximating the statistical average or norm occurring naturally; generally free from physical or mental impairment or dysfunction : exhibiting or marked by healthy or sound functioning; not exhibiting defect or irregularity; within a range considered safe, healthy, or optimal.”

Like any concept, it’s the case that normal is not all one thing. It is not all good, and it’s not all bad. What’s good about normal? Why do we need it and rely on it so much? Seems to me like the opposite of normal is chaos, and chaos is, taken in extreme form, the primordial ooze from which all things began. It’s unpredictable, unstable, volatile and confused. It’s the seat of creation and true creativity. It erupts and changes things. It can be exciting. It can be terrifying. It’s necessary and feared.

Chaos knocks things into a new trajectory, but then guess what? An ordering principal takes over and helps the effects of chaos fall into a pattern. Patterns are stable and predictable. They can be known and understood, unlike their birth mother, Chaos. This must happen. I suppose that normal lives in patterns and normal dies in chaos. Chaos and Normal dance and work together to keep things moving. They are both necessary.

In life, people can deviate from the mean of normal in either direction. Further away from this mean is when we start to experience some things that are different from what everyone hanging out in the middle are experiencing. Bowing at the altar of normal can stifle the emergence of any new or unexpected material in an evolving system. This leads to the death or oppression of anything that is novel, creative, and life giving. Yet, diving full-bore into the waters of chaos and staying there for too long can mean that nothing is able to materialize into creative expression. It takes discipline to make creative energy bear fruit, and discipline does not live in chaos.

You can see the tension here. This is some dynamic stuff.

But here’s the rub as I see it: We do a miserable job as a culture allowing ourselves and others to be changed by what happens to us. Let’s take the pandemic. Rest assured, the amount of times I’ve longed for things to go back to normal cannot be counted. But even with less restrictions and people getting back to life as it was before, it’s not “back to normal”. We are changed and we will never be, as a whole, like we were before. The pandemic was a long-term, slow motion perturbation to our system which created chaos and confusion. We are still experiencing the natural inclination of a system finding its new orbit around this new reality, yet I see more and more a distancing from viewing it this way. I am longing for a greater dialogue about how we are changed and what that means not from the point of view that we have to get back to where we were, but more that we need to understand more fully where we are.

Where are we? I’m not the same. Are you?

I think the urge to get back to normal when the landscape that existed before doesn’t exist anymore causes tremendous pain and anxiety. We can’t go back to something that doesn’t exist anymore. But we can try to more fully understand where we are.

This is true after someone we love dies.

This is true after having a baby.

This is true after falling in love or breaking up.

This true when childrens’ parents separate.

This is true after losing a job or relocating to a new place for a job.

This is true after receiving a life changing diagnosis.

This is true after war, natural disasters, or exposure to and experience of violence.

This is true after experiencing a spiritual awakening.

Can we let ourselves be changed without judging it, hiding it, or stunting it? Can we let ourselves just be with what is true and talk about it all, and let others talk without pulling the “normal” card out of our back pocket? Life systems naturally organize themselves into new, mostly stable patterns. We can trust that this will happen, so we can relax and be more gentle on ourselves and each other and not force the issue. It’s okay if your best friend seems different now and doesn’t want to do the same things they did before. Be curious about it instead of judging it. It’s okay if you look different after grief. Look at yourself and be curious and loving and notice the hard earned scars of living a life that is filled with so many things. It’s okay if something big or little shifts in your psyche and you find a new and unexpected road to walk down. Check it out and see what’s there. It became visible because something changed.

Take the pressure of “getting back to normal” off yourself because, that normal? It’s gone. There’s a new normal to explore and it’s got a whole lot of new terrain for us to get to know.

That’s interesting, isn’t it?