Hearing the right words that touch our heart is so important in opening up trapped or locked in grief and yet we apologise so often if something we say triggers that person’s depth of feeling.
It happened in an interview I listened to some time last week and I felt sad, the interviewer could have met the person there in his pain over his mother, not apologised and asked them if they needed to shut the sorrow down, after all once it is freed and affirmed and recognized we may cope better, we often feel a release and an unbinding, we may even touch joy after a time
Listening to Thich Nhat Hanh’s talk after that made it clear how people turn against each other in loss and grief. The other person’s stuckness and struggle, their pain, avoidance and acting out may infuriate us, how cruel is that? I see a lot of this when I watch excerpts from the trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Why is she the one looking so visibly distressed? Her acting out is not at all mature (and despite his calm exterior I am sure the distress Johnny felt went deep too), that is clear but she is seeking attention from someone who long ago started using alcohol and drugs to self medicate and really the attention and love she possibly needed to show herself needed to come from either herself or a good therapist or friend. This kind of reactive acting out blame and even shaming to try and control another person or ourselves never ends well, all it so often ends up in is more sadness, less trust, more pain, feelings of betrayal and often hatred and anger.
What if, instead of attacking our partner we opened the door to show them some tenderness? What if, instead of getting so narcissistically wrapped up in our own, or our defenses we were brave enough to get beyond these useless and unskillful actions and reactions? That said to show tenderness to an emotionally defended person may lead to even more problems for us and that is when we do need many times, just like Johnny Depp, to walk away.
Lately I see how I avoided my own grief while struggling unskillfully with it but often distance and running was the only workable solution with those invested in not seeing me truly and allowing my emotions an out. Were they to blame? Yes, I got massively hurt but then when angry I could also do things that acted against healing. The absolute truth as i now see it is that as a young child and later an emotionally arrested adult I had no place to go with the feelings until I found the right therapist.
There can also be a fear we hold that our own or other people’s feelings will overwhelm us, or we are confused because we do not understand what the acting out is about. And as Thich says in that talk Being Love I shared on Friday night, a parent does not truly love a child he does not fully understand or even if he feels he does that love will not help the child if he cannot find a way to meet child WHERE HE OR SHE IS. It is exactly the same for us in our relationships with friends, co workers, acquaintances, parents and partners.
I also think we need to be brave at looking at why a partner may cheat, a lot of it could be about them not wanting to emotionally support a partner they say they ‘fell out of love with’, the truth is that being present actually became too hard for them and so they ran or else the other person was also making life so miserable due to inner conflicts they sought something more nurturing or real.. That said many affairs can be seen as some kind of escape.
I am beginning to understand more and more through exploring my own past and studying the lives of others with trauma, neglect, abuse, invalidation or buried loss that when our grief cannot find an out then it may be expressed in all kinds of underground ways.. As we struggle for some kind of control we end up in uncontrollable situations or else just avoid and stop taking the risk ever to open our hearts again..
That said periods of deep introversion to do inner work with our own inner child and past trauma and to explore how our own toxic inner or outer critic often derails inward and outward intimacy is a very important stage many of us are now needing to undergo in our wounding culture.
I revisited a very helpful book I got a while back last night Freedom from your Inner Critic and what is makes clear is how our inner critic works to protect and keep safe the child in us who was so often in trouble just for being themselves.. It is sad in a shame and blame and repressive culture that the rules of though shalt and though shalt not came to dominate us during Christian times.. Edward Whitmont makes clear in his book on consciousness evolution how this transition into the egoic heroic phase of consciousness in our collective culture led us to demonize the alive and vibrant child as well as our deep feeling, openly sensing and awake to magic inner child something John Bradshaw and other inner child therapist like Charles Whitfield have made a major contribution to us understanding..
The authors Jay Earley and Bonnie Weiss make it clear in that book that when a loving ego center of the Self can show up for the child then it can talk the critical super ego around. It can encourage it to know the child is safe to be itself (even when others put it down) and manage those feelings that in the past felt too scary, enormous or ‘big’ due to the parents also finding them overwhelming.. When we feel safer to be our True Selves fully we need also no longer be so hostile towards the inner child of others when it is running the show even behind massive defenses just like the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz. But that compassionate insight will only come if we have learned to understand and TRULY LOVE OURSELVES.
Instead of blaming, attacking, acting out or shaming we could turn some tender words on those in grief or being overly reactive :
I am sorry you are suffering
I care about your pain
Is there something you need to say to me
I will breathe with you while you feel this
Everything you feel is okay with me
Feelings are not right or wrong they just are
I will allow you an open space to feel and experience this
And most of all :
You are safe with me
Because I truly do care about your pain.
Emerging From The Dark Night 