What happens to the grief we cannot express?

Just as courage impels life. fear protects it.

Leonardo Da Vinci

The answer to this question I am sure lies in our tissues. Today my therapist spoke of the process of washing clean that grief brings. We can block this process with many defences and it occurred to me strongly sitting in the chair in her light filled room how much our fear of vulnerability rules us. So often it just seems too hard for us to accept the collapse of loss and the pulling out of the rug from under us that occurs. And some of it has to do with the pace of modern life. We are all so busy, busy. busy and there may be no spaces to pause or feel anything deeply in such a frenetic schedule.

Grief and loss cannot be all about collapse but there is a certain falling apart or to pieces that can accompany it along with feelings of helplessness. Some are highly defended against such ‘mess’ or loss of control which is really all part of a natural psychic breakdown and transformation process.

I found Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart helpful with this process. It was recommended to me by an astrologer I saw after my 2005 accident. I see now at that time running overseas I was running from my grief while seeking a place of help where I could be supported to feel, express and make sense of it.

I ended up in an ashram after the accident and there I was often looked upon with eyes of love and acceptance and able to collapse among like minded souls. Many of them had gone through abuse or trauma too and were seeking a spiritual solution but this calls to my mind an expression I have often heard “the way through this world is much harder to find than the way beyond it.” We can engage in what therapist John Welwood calls ‘a spiritual bypass’ when we seek spiritual solutions before doing the grounding work of true grief or healing through our emotions which are natural expression of our spirit. Ideally the sense of deeper spiritual connection comes about ‘through’ our bodies and cells and tissues rather than in seeking escape from them and our complex early human and familial relationships which are so full of antecedent causes.

It is an insight multigenerational trauma healer Mark Wolynn came to in an ashram when he heard from deep inside him a voice telling him to go home and connect with his mother rather than seek escape or so called ‘enlightenment’ in a spiritual community. Surely through spiritual practices we can connect to our inner life but not always. Mark went back to America and found out about his mother’s own history and from there he learned and researched much about the impact of multigenerational familial trauma.

Griefs that lay unspoked have a profound effect on later generations. Losses that impacted hearts but were shelved or set aside similarly. It can however be hard to have our feelings in our family of origin but many of them probably didn’t start with us anyway. Presence process writer Michael Brown mentions in one of his video talks that our relationship with the earth will be reflected in our relationship with our mother and so will our relationship with our body and nurture. Our relationship with our father will colour our later relationship with God, authority figures and actions we take in the world. All of these early relationships have the most profound influences. And our mothers and fathers were impacted by theirs and collective experiences and influences of our evolving past.

Anyway unresolved grief and other feelings can affect our bodies so profoundly. I thought of my sister a lot during todays therapy session. Katina mentioned her difficulty with accepting her own feelings of powerlessness and grief. When my older sister died my other sister was put into hospital for depression. We spoke about that yesterday. She didn’t even know how long ago my sister died. It is a form of dissociation really and often I carry the memories and chronological time line for her. All of us who have known trauma have a form of it. Some experiences are too profound and intense for us to know as youngsters and seem to overwhelming and confusing to us even in later life without guidance.

I watched the movie Leaving Neverland which aired on Australian television on Friday and Saturday nights here. The two men at the heart of the movie who only recently have begun to truly address their own sexual abuse trauma at the hands of Michael Jackson spoke of threats from those fans who accused them of seeking money, why their accusers taunted did they deny the abuse around the time of Jackson’s trial in 2004/2005? The issue is complex and it was not a matter of repressed memory simply a fact that as children they thought that what happened was normal and a form of love, after all Michael told them so. They felt an allegiance to him also due to his star status which bewitched both boys parents and led them like young lambs to the slaughter. but it was only later in life with the birth of children that the truer reality of their trauma hit. Shame and fear also played a huge part in their denial. The truth is it was abuse and projection of Michael’s own dissociation from his own childhood trauma. Treated as an object he learned to treat children as objects, on some level they did not exist for him as individuals in their own right with feelings, nor vulnerable children. He told one of his victims that he must totally put aside his own feelings.

Such abuse is horrifying and baffling to a world that watches on, but dissociation of trauma is very very complex, especially early childhood trauma to say nothing of in utero trauma. And then there is hidden impact of multigenerational trauma stored in cells.

In therapy now I find my own grief is very close to the surface in most sessions. I will start to cry as memories come to mind that had no feelings associated with them at all before. What I learned today is that currently I am grieving an entire life time of loneliness and unresolved grief. It is a washing clean process. I am also grieving the loss of connection on some level to my true self and spirit as well. That was a loss of the fire of my spirit that got dampened down and I feel I tried to find it through alcohol and drugs too. I am closer to my spirit now, I am closer to my grief. And I am able to feel the grief of others as well as their struggles not to feel it.

My understanding is that grief never really relieves us of its internal buried pressure away until we feel it, John Bradshaw calls grief and sadness the healing feelings. They deepen us on some level into our souls and deep truth. A society at large that denies grief or runs from it becomes a terrorist society, it becomes a numbed out society, it becomes a society on the run from its own shadow. It becomes a judgemental, shame driven place.

But there is another movement rumbling from beneath at present. The movement to be real not false, the movement to express not repress and the movement to liberated trapped stagnant energy rather than have it fester or be endlessly replayed in trauma. There are a thousand ways of running and defending, but there is only one way of healing that lies in kneeling to kiss the ground of grief, rather than take flight in illusions or theories. It also lies in liberating it so we learn and grow and transform while deepening acceptance and wisdom understanding it all as part of a collective evolutionary process of consciousness.

We so badly need to be washed clean and recognise the multiple forms of grief and trauma. Feeling it through opens us once again to the possibility of hope connection and love… Denying it and defending blocks this process both individually and collectively in society at large.

When repressed feelings come to the surface they feel overwhelming and frightening. There is all this feeling and no where to go with it. I can project it in my life today or I can follow the feeling to its origin and see what it’s really all about and allow myself to re-feel of re-experience it in the safety of today.

Tian Dayton