Coaching Grief Group

Just wanted to let you all know about a coaching grief group I was told about today!  This group combines creativity, coaching, and group support to help individuals find their way to healing.  Go here to check it out and see if it might be right for you:

Grief: Finding Our Way

Guest Post: Stories of Healing: Suzanne’s Healing Special

Began 12/16/08 @ 3:31pm

I don’t remember getting into the car to go home.  I don’t remember what the weather was like that day or the amount of traffic on the roads.  I don’t remember the conversation that occurred in the vehicle, if any happened.  I don’t remember where my partner was, my family members, or my mom driving to the house.  However, I do remember Feb. 26, 2004 very clearly.  I do remember coming home, in my maternity wear, but not being with child.  I do remember crawling into bed, pulling the covers over my head and wondering “What happened to the past 24 hours of my life?!”  I do remember her.  I do remember… every day…  I do remember her.

On Feb. 26, 2004, I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, named Jamayka Jade.  She had brown skin, like her parents and dark black hair.  She was small and detailed, like a baby doll found at a local Toys-R-Us.  However, she wasn’t alive.  She had died due to premature labor, per “Incompetent Cervix” ruling by my OBGYN physician.  She was born at 5 1/2 months, i.e. 26 weeks, too early to be fully developed and functional.  Jamayka had begun to form and I remember looking at her non-moving body, with a pink crocheted shawl and hat on her as placed by the nurses, and thinking, “How freakin’ surreal is this?!”

Healing, as defined in the encarta.com dictionary, is “a noun; the process of curing or becoming well.”  I am continuing to heal…  cure… become well.  Every morning is the dawn of redemption and growth.  Every day is a chance for me to continue my wellness and acceptance of my loss.  Throughout this process of 4 years, I have found myself dividing my life into 2 phases…  “Before I was pregnant” and “After I was pregnant.”  My life is a book, only given 2 chapters in my mind, which causes a disservice to all the other chapters or characters in my life.  Unfortunately, I’m still unable to completely rewrite my story.

Over the past 4 years, I have found multiple sources or actions that have allowed for spiritual, emotional, and mental healing.  Please be aware that healing does not equal “being okay with it.”  Healing, to me, equals unresolved acceptance and inclusion of my past into my present and future.  The sources are as follows and described impact they have brought to my life.

God:  My spiritual walk has been a huge part of my healing journey.  While I have yet to understand or fully accept what has happened, my continued faith in God and faith in His Ultimate Plan has given me reason to keep going.  In the book of Isaiah, NKJ version of the Holy Bible, chapter 55 verses 8-9, it states “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, said the Lord; For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”  I cannot, in the largest mind, comprehend the path that has been given to me through Christ.  I cannot comprehend His thought processes or “bigger picture” that He can see.  I can only see and live what I see and do every day.  Knowing that there is a bigger plan than my own personal plan gives me some type of hope that ONE DAY, I will understand and know.  All I know is that I do love God, I trust Him, and I believe in Him and His “higher ways.”  I’m thankful and blessed that I don’t know my future or reasons for my past.  I’m glad to know that I do not hold my entire destiny in the palms of my hands.  I’m blessed to have a God, a Jesus that loves me for me and accepts me for who I am… flaws and all.  Knowing that there is a God who wants the best for me, even though I am selfish and want to know why certain situations happen to me, gives me a strange and unidentified peace and hope for my continued healing.
Family:  Certain members of my family have been a substantial part of my healing.  For instance, my mother has been a big source of strength for me.  She had a miscarriage due to an ectopic pregnancy many years ago, which actually led to the international adoption of me!  Even though she and I do not discuss it on a regular basis, I do know that she remembers Jamayka just as vividly and intensely as I do.  I do know that my mother hurts for me and with me because I had to endure that struggle and continue to endure with the memory of Jamayka every day, every holiday, every anniversary of her death, and every anniversary of her due date.  My mother does know, and at times verbalizes my pain, hurt, bitterness, resentment, anger, confusion, and goal of 100% healing acceptance.  For that, I’m thankful.
Friends:  Both during the time of my loss, afterwards, and now, I am blessed to have a wonderful social network around me that loves me, cares for me, prays with and for me, and accepts me for who I am.  My friends were and are the individuals who stood by me and still hold my hand and wipe my tears as I frequently bring up Jamayka’s memory and birth.  My friends were and are the individuals who allowed me to be pissed off, vent, sulk, cry, rage, and feel jealousy about other family and friends’ pregnancies and babies.  I know that to someone randomly reading this, my jealousy and somewhat frustration is odd when referring to the birth of a child; however, when you experience a loss, anger and bargaining is part of the healing process.  Granted, I’ve never expressed these emotions openly to those individuals, but I did allow for a small grieving period for myself each time I heard the words, “I’m pregnant!”  My friends have provided stability and strength when I could not otherwise make it.  They have given me space for grieving, patience when regressing, and most importantly, a shoulder to cry on.
Time:  Time can either be your enemy or your BFF.  Enemy, in that you cannot speed it up when you want it to, stop it when you need a break, or rewind it when you feel regret.  BFF, in that you can find healing and relief through the slots of time given to you as you face each day, week, month, year, and ultimately… years (with an ‘s’).  Time doesn’t show favoritism, as it works and moves at its own pace, a somewhat deity of its own, holding no prisoners for those left behind.  Time opens up new blessings, doors, and mercies every day, as God describes, allowing for new creations, provisions and grace at every rising of the sun.  Right now, Time and I are on pretty good terms.  Not quite BFF’s yet, but not my complete nemesis anymore either.  So, to you, Time, I raise my glass and say, “Touché!”

In my eyes, I see healing as a recipe.  There are many “ingredients” to contributing to your healing.  One may be love, another anger, another peace, another family and friends, another spiritual belief systems, etc.  Each ingredient on its own cannot produce the same result or finished product.  Alone, the ingredient is just a part of a bigger whole.  However, when you add them, mix them all together; they can create a bigger and finished product that equals healing.  Some ingredients may be more utilized than others, may use more or less of each than others, may “taste” better standing alone than others, but eventually, that ingredient will need the others to continue the recipe process.

My personal recipe of “Suzanne’s Healing Special” is not quite finished.  I’m still allowing for some ingredients to simmer or bake, while others have already been thrown into the mix.  One day, I will pull the most magnificent product from my proverbial oven, after having been mixed, stirred, processed, baked, cooled and sampled…  Then, using my finished product, I’ll taste and enjoy it, remembering all the work and dedication it took to make this product.  I’ll cut it up and divide it among my family and friends to enjoy, showing appreciation and gratitude for helping me create my recipe during this process… always remembering its meaning and importance in my life.

So, to you, the reader in cyberspace, I challenge you to start your own healing recipe, mixed in with your personal ingredients, with the hopes that soon, one day, you will see your hard work come to fruition as well.

Love, peace, and hope…
Suzanne

Finished 1/6/09 @ 11:40pm

Time to Grieve

The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.  ~Henry Maudsley

How many times have you heard or said the phrase, “I don’t have time?”  I think it is becoming one of the most common statements around today.  And I find this very sad.  We tell ourselves every day, “I don’t have time to…” No time to be organized, no time to take care of our bodies, our minds, our spirits, no time to grieve.

Well, if you enjoy living from this place of not enough time, I’m about to burst your frenzied bubble.

You do have time.

You just need to decide you have time and be a little creative.

Let me give you a couple of examples for a new way of looking at having enough time:

No time to organize

In graduate school, I was a graduate assistant for a woman who worked in a frenzied, “put out the fire” way.  One of my jobs was to set up organizational systems for her office.  Every couple of months I’d come up with a new system to clear off the insane mountain of paper on her desk.  It would look great and neat for about 3 days.  Then the mountain would reappear.

Why?  Because my supervisor’s mantra was “I don’t have time to be organized.”

The systems I’d set up required her to take about 5 seconds to put the papers she was working on into the proper tray so I could file them where they belonged.  Then she would always know where to find them when she needed them.  And, because she decided she didn’t have 5 seconds now, she would end up spending 15 minutes later trying to find a particular paper or file in the mountain on her desk.

No time for self-care

I was a bit of a workaholic in college.  I took too many classes, worked too many jobs, committed myself to too many responsibilities.  Every hour of my day was basically scheduled.  This was great for getting done with college – I finished in 3 1/2 years even having transferred to a new school after my freshman year.

The problem?  I neglected to schedule in self-care and time to rest and rejuvenate.  My life took on a predictable pattern – during the semester I would work and study and go-go-go like crazy.  Then a break would come – winter break, spring break, any break more than a couple days.  And I would crash.  I’d get slammed with a massive cold and be laid out for days.

No time to grieve

I’ve experienced a lot of grief in my life – loved ones have died, life changes that altered my perception of myself, feeling a loss of security, moving, etc.  I decided somewhere a long the line when I was young, that I wasn’t going to take the time to grieve any of those experiences.  Life was too short, too busy, and too fast to take time to grieve.  So I just pushed it away and went on with my frenetic crazy life.

Eventually, just like all those times in college when I’d have a break, my body protested. Several years ago, I got horribly sick for 4 days.  Pain and pressure in my head that knocked me down, vomiting from the pain, curled up on the bathroom floor for days because it hurt too much to move.  Once that passed, the pain and pressure remained for almost another 3 years.  This forced me to slow down, to reassess and to begin to deal with all the griefs I’d been avoiding.

The common thread…

This is what I’ve learned through these experiences (and many more).  When I say I don’t have time for do _________ and I don’t make time to take care of myself (because that’s what each of these come down to), life and my body will take the time whether I want it or not.  And my life and my body will take that time whether it’s convenient for me at that time or not.

This idea of taking time to care for myself, to grieve what needs grieving, to nurture myself regularly is something I’ve been working on building into my daily life for the last couple years.  This process was terrifying and, I thought, impossible.  What I’ve discovered is that taking little bits of time – to organize, to grieve, to nurture myself – in my day to day life seriously cut down on the amount of time I need to heal in the long term when I finally broke down anyway.  Long term I  end up with more time because I take a little time now.

So, here’s the question I want to pose to you – if you don’t have 15 minutes today to organize, to grieve, to nurture yourself, do you have days, weeks or months down the road when your body or organizational system breaks down?

Permission to Grieve Part 2

I’ll start the long overdue writing of Part Two of Permission to Grieve by giving myself permission to be kind to myself for taking so long to write this!!  Onto the writing….

As mentioned in Part One, Part Two has 3 parts – a new look at selfishness, challenges and a couple surprises that may come when one gives oneself permission to grieve.

That phrase we all fear hearing…

“You are so selfish.”

I find it curious (and a bit amusing) when I think about how often I feared being told or having someone think of me as selfish and, yet, miraculously, I have never ever been told I was selfish.  Perhaps some people have thought it, but overall, the ratio of my fear to the reality of anyone saying or thinking I am selfish is more than a bit lopsided.

I think it is fairly safe to say that most people, particularly women, have internalized society’s messages about not being selfish to mean they need to be self-less.  As in – don’t consider personal needs or desires or care until every last family member, friend and stranger is happy, healthy, and rich.  Which, of course, means we never get to our personal needs, desires, or care because we’ll never be done helping everyone else.  (Ok, perhaps not quite that extreme, but fairly close!)

This has never made sense to me.

I could do this I suppose.  I think I’ve tried a few times.  When I’m truly honest, however, I like being selfish.  I like having my needs met.  I like being nurtured and rested and loved and healthy.  AND when I am rested, nurtured, loved, and healthy, I do a much better job caring for, supporting, and helping those I love and the strangers on the street.  When I’m being all self-less and am tired, crabby, and stressed, not only do I not want to care for others but I do a crappy job of it.  It’s an odd little paradox but being selfish allows me to be selfless I am much better able to help those around me in their grief when I’ve taken care of myself in my grief.

Play with selfishness a bit – I’m curious to hear what you discover.

Challenges to make it interesting

Here’s the tricky thing about giving yourself permission to grieve – it’s not other people who get in your way.

It’s you.

We are the ones who tell ourselves we can’t take care of ourselves, we’re the ones who say this and that and the other thing have to be done first, we’re the ones who tell ourselves we’re not worth it.  We are the ones who chose believe what other people tell us – that we should be done grieving or that what happened isn’t important enough to experience grief over or that it’s time to “get over it.”  We put other people’s opinions about our grief process and our experience rather than listening to our own knowledge and wisdom.

We are the biggest blocks to allowing ourselves to truly grieve.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned (and learned the hard way) – it doesn’t matter what anyone else says.  People can tell us to “get over it” or “move on” or tell us to just keep busy and not think about it.  People cay say thing such as “well, you’re young yet, you’ll have another baby” or “at least you had so many good years together” or a million other things that dismiss our pain.  In the end, when it matters, only we can decide to dismiss our pain and our experience.  Only we can decide if our health and our growth and our love for ourselves is important enough to go through and experience our grief.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is easy (that’s why it’s in the challenge section!).    It is, however, our choice.  Only our choice.  Whatever the people around us or the critical voices in our head say, we choose whether or not to allow ourselves to grieve.

Some surprises I discovered

What surprised me the most after I finally gave myself permission to grieve was that most people in my life were extremely supportive.  I had all these critical voices in my head telling me that people would think I was crazy or that they wouldn’t understand and on and on.  What I found in reality was that most of the people closest to me were extremely supportive and understanding.  A couple actually told me “it’s was about time!”

Where there a few people who thought I was “just feeling sorry for myself” or “stuck in the past” and all those other things I feared?  Sure.  And they were far outnumbered by the number of people who supported me.

The other thing that surprised me?  Many people didn’t even notice that I was going back and dealing with all this old grief.  I think I had this idea that everyone would notice or have to know and it would be this huge thing.  It really wasn’t.  I grieved, I cried, I had some friends who sat with me through the tougher times, I learned to take naps.  I also went to work and went to classes and bought groceries and got my oil changed.  The whole world didn’t need to know and the world didn’t stop AND I could still grieve and heal.

Valentine’s for One

Whatever the original meaning behind Valentine’s Day was, today it has come to be associated with romantic love and couples.  This can be an especially painful holiday for people who are no longer part of a pair – whether due to the death of a partner or the break-up of a relationship.  Everywhere a person turns in the days around February 14th, he or she runs into constant talk and pictures of couples and romantic love.  Radio talk shows, music played, movies, TV, magazine.  Unless one is a hermit who never leaves the house and has no electronic devices – it’s pretty challenging to avoid the implicit message:

You are supposed to be one of a pair.

For anyone who has recently gone from a couple to one, for whatever reason, this constant message can be like repeatedly being stabbed in the heart.  Over and over.

Since it’s probably impossible to avoid all references and signs of Valentine’s Day – at least, not without completely withdrawing from the world and life – here are a few ideas for dealing with grief through the Valentine season.

Limit your exposure to “couple talk”

Now, I’m not normally one to advocate avoidance – I believe in experiencing and expressing emotions and dealing with things.  However, excessive and needless suffering is not something I advocate either.  There is no benefit to repeatedly viewing and hearing images and talk that arouse pain and grief (pain and grief are plentiful enough with any loss without adding extra).  Turning of the TV for a week, listening to an iPod or CD’s instead of the radio, staying away from magazines and movies can be a huge help in reducing our exposure to “couple talk.”

I’d also suggest staying out of malls, greeting card stores, and gift shops for the duration – its like being bombarded in those types of places.  This can be difficult given retailers tendency to start putting Valentine’s merchandise out before Christmas these days so if nothing else, make these trips as infrequent as possible.

Redefine Valentine’s

Despite the retail world’s emphasis on Valentine’s being about couples and romantic love – it doesn’t have to be.  Valentine’s can be about whatever you decide it to be about.  I was never really a fan of Valentine’s Day until I redefined what it meant to me. My favorite view of it is to have it be about self-love – especially since the only person we are truly with forever is ourselves.  Other ways of redefining it might include focusing on the love of family, friends, nature, pets, or anything else.

Create a New Valentine’s Celebration

Create a new way to celebrate Valentine’s Day other than the traditional romantic dinner, flowers, and chocolate.  Go volunteer somewhere to express love to others – visit the elderly, help at a soup kitchen, read to kids, help deliver meals on wheels.  Gather a group of other non-paired individuals and plan a fun get together.  Have a self-love night – a night completely devoted to loving and nurturing yourself.  Take yourself and a friend on a get away vacation.

There is always the option of ignoring Valentine’s Day completely.  That’s completely valid – I did it a number of years.  However, whether its romantic love, self-love, pet love, nature love or love of life in general – love is important and special.  I believe that love is our natural state of being – and that is something to be celebrated.