Grief and fear. Many of my clients are faced with some degree of both of these. There’s a way they often entangle that isn’t always obvious. Some may be stirred up by world events. God knows there’s no shortage of those these days! And, often, some intensity of that feeling can be rooted in early experiences in life.

Many of us as children lived with some degree of not knowing if our needs would be met, from the extremes of hunger, neglect, or abuse; to the more nuanced needs of attunement and emotional support. There’s some level of fear that comes with that — “will I be okay?”

For a very young child, our society’s emphasis on individualism and self sufficiency before they may be ready is actually terrifying and confusing. I hear it in my office often. “My mom took long trips for work, and no one really prepared me before or repaired with me afterwards. I was too little to understand on my own!” “My dad was mad at me all the time. I didn’t mean to be bad!” When I ask what this client had done that was bad, the answer was, “I was making noise and running around.” You know, the things normal little kids do. Or, I’ve heard, “I had to be in the hospital for a few days and my mom couldn’t stay with me. I was frantic! I’d never been away from her before! I didn’t understand!”
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I have a number of clients who are experiencing the aftermath of the death of a parent. For some the death is recent. For some, the death was many years ago, but their grief feels unprocessed, stuck somehow. There’s a wide range of what that looks like for each of them — for a couple of them it’s excruciatingly painful, there’s a sense of betrayal, an underlying anxiety about whether they can count on anything at all in their lives. For others, there’s actually a sense of release and relief. Those deaths were protracted, and for a couple of them, the relationships with the parent were complicated and painful. Death can bring out the worst of family dynamics.

Death is a potent time. Not that different from birth, it’s a major life transition that all humans will experience. A time when we become intimately aware that there is little that we can control about… really anything. Death can come very much at random. As I’ve written about before, my mother moved here in 2012, we thought for her last years. We had no way of knowing she only had 4 months to live.

When I zoom out a bit and remember that time, I can see that there was some divine timing and rightness of how that process went. I learned so much.
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It breaks my heart when I hear a client say, “I’m broken” or “I think there’s something wrong with me”. It happens far too often.

I remember feeling the same way. The first big wave of deeper emotional work I did was back in my late 20s. Some of the patterns in my relationships became so obviously painful, I just couldn’t muscle through and pretend everything was okay anymore.

I remember saying just what I hear from my clients. “I think I’m broken. I’m too wounded.” I felt like I was dirty. (Thank you, shame). My inner critic grabbed onto the work I was doing with healers and teachers and used it against me when I didn’t change as fast as I thought I should.

It took awhile for a core truth to sink in with me, even though it was spoken to me many times. I say it to you now. See how it feels to read this —

There is nothing wrong with you. There never was.

You suffer, and that suffering needs to be met skillfully. But, the suffering is not a sign that you are broken, it’s a sign that you’ve forgotten who and what you are. You can remember that, and hold the suffering parts of you tenderly. Learning to do that is healing.

When things happen to us as children that give us the message that we don’t matter, or that we’re unworthy, we believe it. We’re children! We don’t have the capacity to rationalize someone else’s behavior and know that they didn’t have the skills to treat us, a child, with gentleness.
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We’ve all been affected by the pandemic for over a year now. That effect looks different for many of us, depending on our life situations, of course. Some have felt some concern, but have still been living fairly full, interactive lives. Some have felt angry and inconvenienced, some fearful and forced to go to jobs that puts them in consistent contact with the public. Some have stayed home almost entirely. Some of those in the last group live alone, and have barely had any physical contact with other human beings. For over a year. Some have had loved ones die of COVID-19.

It’s been hard for everyone to some degree, in whichever group you’ve found yourself. Perhaps you’ve had more than one of those experiences at different times.

Right now, I’m writing to those of you who have taken social distancing seriously, and have had little contact with people. I have a number of clients and loved ones in this group. It’s been a rough year for you.
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A client who’s been working with me for over a year has recently been able to more fully access a core piece of suffering. We’ve both known it was there, but it took time to establish enough safety for it to come clearly into awareness.

The doorway in was to look at the way her Inner Critic was attacking her. (I’ve written more about the Inner Critic here and here.)

“She has bad genes”, was one of the things her Critic said. Bad genes.

My client’s mother is a first generation immigrant, and comes from a people whose women are often beautifully dark eyed, dark haired, and voluptuous.

In order to be “good enough” to truly belong here in the US, my client learned to measure herself to a standard of “Whiteness”. Her mother’s people don’t look like Brittney Spears, one of the images she learned to emulate growing up.

These are the waters we swim in. It goes unquestioned, until the suffering in it becomes impossible to ignore. And, some of those standards play out in the larger context as violence — the threat of violence against, or the fear of violence from anyone who doesn’t conform to these images of what we have learned to view as “normal” — whether that be Whiteness, financial security, health, body shape and size, images of femininity or masculinity, etc.
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Welcome to the realities of COVID-19.

Living in times of crisis can cause a variety of reactions. What are you noticing?

If you’re in quarantine or sheltering-in-place with access to the news, anxiety is likely no stranger to you. You may be on the front lines in health care or other essential service. You may be one of the many who have suddenly lost your livelihood. We are powerless over these events that are affecting the whole world.

I was just texting with my brother — “This seems to have really cured me of any daddy complex I might have had that someone in charge would save me if ‘things got bad’.”

If you’ve read anything I’ve put out over the years, you know spirituality is my jam. What I mean by spirituality is pretty broad. My main interest is in what works for YOU. What is your edge that needs leaning into? Spiritual practices needs to be attuned to your personality.

Spirituality may sound like some lofty term that refers to something outside our everyday life. Maybe not particularly useful or accessible when there’s a damn pandemic going on! This is real life!

Can we redefine the term, please? Maybe call it “Embodied Spirituality”? “Human Spirituality”?

A life of Spirit that honors our Humanness so completely that there’s no separation between the two.

One of our tasks now, in order to remain as calm as possible and carry on, is nervous system regulation. That means calming down when we’re scared or angry. Waking up if we feel frozen or confused. Connecting if we feel lonely and sad.
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