Photo Credit: Shahariar Lenin/Pixabay
So, what happens when our emotional wounds won’t heal?
It’s ludicrous to suggest everyone who suffers a great loss, or some other form of intense emotional trauma, will recover with time alone (“Time heals all wounds”). Just because some toothy self-help guru pitches this claim, that doesn’t make it so.
Margaret was a case in point. Her happy marriage to the love of her life for over four decades left her utterly unprepared for his sudden demise. Untested by personal tragedy, she lacked the coping skills that come from experiences of loss, unwelcome as those are. It’s been three years, and I still can’t get up off the mat,” she told me. “I find myself just staring into space, seeing his image, feeling that pain all over again. It happens often.”
Frequently, the height of one’s joy demands a commensurate degree of sorrow. In some sense, folks like Margaret pay a steeper price for their happiness. Feeling deeply, as she does, amplifies emotions, good and ill. “Sometimes I’d just like to go numb,” she continued. “But, every day when I wake up, it’s still there. Will it always be?” she asked.
Questions of this sort present a psychotherapist (or a good friend, as well) with a vexing dilemma. Being a professional, people often assume, sometimes correctly and others not, that I am wiser in the psychological realm. So, in some instances, my opinion conveys a placebo effect, which is a treatment on its own.
If I tell Margaret she will heal, then perhaps she’ll believe that and experience increased hope. And there is no healing without hope. However, should my positive reassurance not come to fruition, that might sink her still lower into the depths of despair.
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So, I landed on a middle runway. “I don’t know, but I believe that we can find out together,” I answered.
As it turned out, that afforded Margaret a dollop of hope, which she sorely needed, while also making it clear that healing would require, in no small part, her commitment to the process. Hope provided the necessary psychic energy to get her up off the mat. Simply telling someone to try without offering support and encouragement is asking a lot. Often, way too much.
It’s said healing from a great loss is a mysterious process, one that unfolds within darkness, outside conscious awareness. Granted, we can take steps to initiate the process, but once underway, it takes on a life of its own. Unless pathological in its intensity, grief harbors a deep, ancient wisdom that guides us toward healing. When people interfere too much with the grieving process, they mess with something that works just fine on its own.
Interfere how? Self-medicating with alcohol, other drugs, food or any unhealthy habit usually backfires. The same holds true for distractions like excessive work, long hours roaming the Internet, compulsive exercise, incessant video-gaming or other activities of the “don’t look back, it’s gaining on you” variety. At the same time, relentlessly ruminating about one’s loss without direction or purpose, which Margaret did, is futile.
For most, it helps to engage with one’s grief as a partner rather than an adversary. Pursuits such as journaling, nature interaction, meditation or contemplative prayer, time with supportive family and friends and carefully designed rituals that release painful emotions, all nurture one’s spiritual “soil,” allowing the innate healing capacity of the human spirit to take root.
There is a mysterious current that drives healing, one unique to each individual. Fighting it by swimming upstream leads to emotional exhaustion and, too often, despair. By going with the flow and not pushing the river, so to speak, we discover we can steer a bit, and find a friend in grief instead of an enemy.
Margaret will never be the same.
But she will be better.
