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 can’t get things done that I really need to do, I always get distracted.”

“I seem to have two speeds, go go go, and crash and burn, complete stop.”

“I don’t really understand how to relate to people I don’t know well. I go to parties and, unless I have a task I set myself, like helping in the kitchen, I just feel awkward/anxious/overwhelmed.”

Those examples may all feel very different. All of them could lead one to believe that there’s something that needs to be fixed. While these might not be issues that lead clients to want to work with me, my ears perk up when I hear them in folks’ stories.

They’ve actually all been true for me. I remember having to talk myself through parties in my teens and 20s (and 30s), “It’s okay if you just sit quietly, you don’t have to talk to people if you don’t feel like you have something to say.”

Throughout my life I’ve occasionally had what I refer to as “meltdowns”. Sometimes it’s a bout of crying uncontrollably, with no clear reason why. Sometimes it’s just the need to take myself to bed early (or in the middle of the day), with the question hanging, am I sick? Well, no… but I can’t function. That’s the two speeds, gogogo and stop. An expression coined by my mother, so that gives you an idea of how far back those tendencies go for me.
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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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It is so understandable to feel impatient with our healing. It always tugs on my heart when a client asks me “How long will this take? When will I feel better?” When we’re suffering, we want to feel better! Of course.

When some kind of trauma is involved, whether from childhood, ancestral patterning, or societal pressures, the suffering is a pattern in your nervous system. It’s in your body. This is why we often see health challenges of various types show up when we have unresolved wounding. In my practice I see a fairly wide range of chronic conditions, often autoimmune in nature, along with unmetabolized trauma. Digestive issues are common, too.

Sometimes the suffering shows itself more in emotional patterns. Relationships that always seem to end up the same way — badly. Anxiety that comes up in predictable ways, in response to a boss asking for a meeting, or a spouse making a fairly innocuous request. Even though there’s no particular reason you should think something bad is about to happen, your heart may start to pound. You might feel like running away, or arguing. That’s flight, or fight. It’s a nervous system response. And, it’s likely a nervous system response that is a memory that has nothing to do with what’s happening in the moment.

Without going too much in depth into the mechanisms of healing, it’s important to know that for the healing of traumatic residues in the nervous system to go deeply and last, the process needs to go slowly. I’ll say that again. Healing trauma needs to go slowly, or the nervous system will be overwhelmed and we risk being retraumatized.
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