The Storms of Grief

There’s no Doppler radar for this. You almost never see it coming. Sometimes it gives you a hint at its arrival—losing your keys, forgetting appointments, a sudden wish that everything would stop or everyone would shut up. But mostly, grief slams into you full force, leaving your insides shattered. Grief doesn’t pick your best day or even your worst day. It picks any day it damn well wants. It picks the very day and time it needs to.  Grief doesn’t run on your, or anyone else’s schedule. It runs according to its own inner maniacal, goddam, genius wisdom.  And it leaves you in pieces, taking one simple breath at a time wondering how you are going to get through the next hour.

Meanwhile, what is so absolutely crazy, is that everything else in the world looks normal. Completely and utterly normal. You have been hit by hurricane force winds and a massive storm surge. And no one else sees it. You are standing in the room, soaking wet and blown around and everyone else is just talking like nothing happened. It’s insane. You stare at them and try to make out their words and sentences. You try to nod and smile so no one notices your soaking clothes and your windblown hair. And for that moment you hate everyone around you for acting like it’s all okay. Acting like there isn’t this giant loss, this gaping hole where your heart usually is. And forget language. Words are entirely too small to describe your current condition. It feels pointless to try.

When it hits, like it did for me today, you have to work so hard to remember that there is something beyond the storm. This is why grief is so very hard at the beginning of any loss or any journey of healing. It is why we stay away from it. In the beginning all you know is the storm. You haven’t come through it once, or even twenty times to know what’s on the other side. And knowing it never, ever makes the storm less powerful. Knowing what’s on the other side doesn’t make the grief feel better, or less painful. It just helps you hold on long enough for the storm to pass. It keeps you from running from it. It helps you allow the grief to do its good work.

The good work never feels good. There’s no magic on the other side of a storm. But there is more. More of something.  What’s been splintered during the storm has opened up space. More space inside you where there was tightness or pain. More ground beneath your feet. It won’t protect you from the next wave of grief, but it does allow you to hold the love and grief of others in a bigger way—and eventually it allows you to hold your own. And that is good. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2014

I'll follow the sun...

I knew that the clouds blocked the sun, but in my childish brain as a kid, I pictured the clouds going all the way up to the sun. I believed that a cloudy day or a cloudy night was some sort of darkened state. I think I believed that on a cloudy day even the sun thought it was a cloudy day.

It wasn’t until I flew in a plane and had that moment when you break through the clouds of a rainy day into blinding sunlight that I realized that there is a constancy to the sun –or the stars.  A constancy that is unimaginable. From the ground, life is cloudy. But above those clouds the sun never stops.

Weather is really just that: whether. It’s this or that. It’s here and it’s gone. But that’s not how it feels. A cloudy day can bring you down and you can completely forget that above those clouds the sun always shines. Mood and weather have so much in common, both blow through and yet when you are in them—they can feel so permanent.

There is something miraculous in knowing that the light of the sky is never actually gone. Yes, it is hidden from your view, but it isn’t gone. And there are so many days I have wished for the same faith in my own light—when I have felt cloudy and dark--and I have forgotten that the light doesn’t leave, even if it is hidden from view.

That’s why you have to write yourself notes on your good days, on your sunny and starry, full moon days. You have to write notes to your cloudy day self. You have to write notes and have pictures to remind you that the light is still there and to help you have faith that the light will return. You have to make lists of things to do that work for you and put it in an easy place to find: on the fridge, or a post-it on your computer monitor. You have to put notes and quotes in places that you use all the time. You have to make it easy for you to have moments where you can take off and rise 30,000 feet and break through your clouds and catch a glimpse of your unending sun. Yes, tomorrow may rain, but you can follow the sun. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2014

Let's call community violence what it is: Trauma

“One in three black male children born in the United States is expected to go to jail or prison at some point in his lifetime…. I work in very poor communities and one of the hardest things for me to see is children who are clearly traumatized, so clearly disrupted by a level of trauma and violence that it makes it impossible for them to conform to the behavioral expectations of institutions that refuse to see that disability,” he said. While most of these children live in violent communities, go to violent schools, routinely see and experience acts of violence, “when they act violently, we call them violent offenders as if somehow they are the aberration,” he said. To change the narrative, the word “trauma” needs to be applied more frequently, he said. “If we don’t use that word, we don’t use all of these resources and skills and interventions we know and have that can help people suffering from trauma recover,” he said.”

— Public interest lawyer and Equal Justice Initiative Executive Director Bryan Stevenson, JD

Changing the conversation about trauma means naming it--calling it what it is: living in violence is trauma, community violence, school violence, domestic violence. A basic definition of trauma is that it is an experience or event that overwhelms your capacities to depend upon or protect yourself. The hallmarks of trauma are feelings of terror, horror and helplessness. Community violence is understood to include direct personal exposure (happened to you), it also includes exposure through witnessing (saw it happen to someone else) and vicarious (know it happened to someone else). Community violence has been linked to PTSD in children and adolescents. This isn’t just a research statistic—this is a serious blow to the developmental process of  thousands of our young people. Trauma and PTSD affects our memory, our self-regulation, our relationships. It affects our ability to learn, to make decisions, to calm down, to seek out support. Trauma shatters trust and social fabrics—the two things most needed for healing and growth. While most people associate community violence with cities, there are many rural communities who also struggle with community violence and domestic violence.

 We need to change the conversation—change the narrative as Stevenson says—to trauma. Living everyday in a violent community, witnessing, experiencing, fearing, violence is repeated trauma. Trauma can be healed. Trauma can be understood. There are ways back from trauma—and the responses to trauma are universally human.

 Changing the conversation isn’t semantic. It is a radical act because if you acknowledge the trauma you will need to acknowledge the context. It is the complexity of this issue that makes it so hard to slow down and call it what it is: trauma. Trauma makes us feel the responsibility that we have. Trauma reminds us that this is a problem of people—people who are getting hurt. It will require us all to see the impact of historical trauma and how it still plays out, and it will require us to see how current structures are supporting the continuation of violence and trauma. It will require us to start where we are wherever violence is present—and that can feel like a daunting task. It is a daunting task because we can’t heal the trauma simply by healing one child at a time: we have to heal our communities—and we need to see that all communities who struggle with violence and trauma are OUR communities.  Changing the conversation is brave. Healing from trauma is brave.  This week --instead of saying 'violence'-- say 'trauma.' Let's change the conversation one word at a time and honor their struggle.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2014

4000 Really Difficult Steps to Change

4000 Really Difficult Steps to Change was always my fantasy title for a book on healing from long term trauma. This would at least more accurately describe the experience of healing. Our world, especially the internet blog and the self help world , while trying to be helpful, has made it seem like the path to growth and healing is easy; everything is just 3 Easy Steps, or 7 Simple Slogans away from total cure or complete happiness. If it doesn’t work, well, that’s because you did it wrong, you didn’t try hard enough, or you don’t have enough willpower. 

First ‘3 easy steps’ model implies that the process can be done alone in the do-it-yourself model so popular nowadays. But, healing from long term trauma is not a solitary activity. No one heals alone. Trauma shatters. And much of what it shatters are the connections in our world—between people and within communities. Trauma shatters trust and trust must be healed through relationship. In fact, for most things that we need to learn to truly grow, we need supportive relationships as learning environments. I’m not entirely sure where our love affair for ‘self-help’ came from, but there is an irony in the views we have of self help for medical problems and mental health problems. If you broke your leg, refused medical care and a cast, and opted, instead, to hop around and walk on the broken leg anyway—you would get called ‘crazy.’ Your ability to make sound judgments would be questioned. You would, ironically, get hauled in for psychological help. 

    Yet when you are psychologically run over by a car—breaking multiple psychic bones, and ‘walk on the broken bones anyway’ – you will get a pat on the back and told that you have “a strong character.” Yet in most cases, this is exactly what happened. In situations of long term trauma, you were hurt badly, and not taken care of. You had to let everything heal as it was and work around it, trying to hide your limp. Now its time to go back and do the work of healing. This is difficult work. 

    This brings us to the second and most difficult part of the ‘3 easy steps’ view of healing— it’s not 3 steps and it’s not easy. Healing from long term trauma, like developmental growth, happens in cycles over time. No one likes to hear that things take a long time, it feels virtually ‘un-American’ to say that—but really, if it really was 3 easy steps—wouldn’t most people have done it already? But here’s the thing: it’s not that there’s no way forward, it’s just that it is a long way forward. But it is often made more difficult for people who are trying to heal when they are told the entire time that it should be going faster, or should be less difficult. But it is a very worthwhile journey, these 4000 steps…

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2014