Tag Archives: mental health

First Day Back to Sandy Hook Elementary and Grieving

Posted on by
13

blue snowflakesimages

It has been hard for so many of us during the holiday season that followed the horrific killings in Newtown, CT.  The constant mentions in the news media, and just some quiet moments alone, have sparked a lot of tears for me and for many people I know. I have heard some say that they are tired of hearing about this. I can understand how they might feel this way, but I just don’t want everyone to quickly forget, as Americans seem to be so prone to doing.

The bell-ringing name-reciting, brief ceremony was almost too painful to bear. I have a couple of connections to this school, but don’t actually know any of the families who lost loved ones.  I am praying that this horrible event will wake up Americans and that we will address the failings of our mental health system, as well as finally doing something to create needed restrictions on weapons.

I pray for these changes and, as a US citizen, I have made my opinions known about the glaring deficits in our society, and will continue to do so.  However, I don’t feel too optimistic about meaningful changes in these areas being made any time soon.  I hope I am wrong!blueimages

The faces of the victims and of their grieving families are still so fresh in our minds, but when something like this hasn’t had a direct impact on our own lives, it becomes more convenient, if not easy, to push aside the pain and unpleasantness after a time. People here also tend to want to believe that there is some sort of a predictable timetable for grieving and for healing. I know this, personally, because I am a survivor of a few tragedies in my own life.  They were different sorts of tragedies but many people quickly forgot about us, or needed to distance from us so they didn’t have to be reminded of unpleasant events and sadness on their own days of happiness and celebration. Quite a few thought I should have been “pretty well over things” and that my kids and I should have moved on with our lives by the six- month mark after my first husband had died and our home and belongings were destroyed in a fire. They actually said that to me.

When my young nephew lost his father, my brother, people told him he was “lucky to have had his father for eleven years”.  When my sister’s not-quite twenty-four year old son died suddenly and most suspected it had to do with drug use, the majority of people in her life were painfully silent and quickly pretended that all was back to normal by avoiding any discussion of her loss.  This silence was extended by most to her surviving young teenaged son, who needed to talk about his feelings and about his brother to people he knew, but few wanted to listen.

Our hearts are all hurting when we think about the lives lost just a week ago, but I ask you to please not forget about the survivors. The Town of Newtown has requested that the public stop sending teddy bears and other stuffed animals. Various memorial funds and scholarships have been set up to create legacies in the names of the victims.  I get that sending stuffed animals makes some folks feel a little better themselves, for a couple of brief moments.

Please remember, though, that the pain of the families who have lost loved ones will not be brief. While numerous professionals have come forward and offered services to help them, which is great, and some claim to have magic methods to make grief go away in 30 minutes or 30 days, grief is part of the human condition. If we mask it by shoving it down, or latch onto quick fixes, it will only come roaring up again in ways that we can’t predict, at times we can’t predict, and will, in the long run, cause more pain and suffering, for us and for those close to us.  There are some proven tools  that do help.   I have experienced loss and grief intensely.  I help others learn to transform their suffering into survival, and finally, into something that feels softer and sweeter and allows them to live a worthwhile life.   I know, though, that the grief doesn’t entirely leave and it shapes who we are and who we become in the future.

Please find honest and meaningful ways to reach out to the survivors, if you can, and to remember that their lives have been forever changed and will not go back to the old normal.  You may not know them and you may not have time or money to donate to the various funds that have been established. That’s ok, in my opinion, as long as you “pay it forward” by extending your help and compassion to others you encounter who are grieving and hurting,  and as long as you don’t grow complacent again and allow yourself to believe that this kind of thing can’t and won’t happen in your quiet little town or on your street in your city.

WHEN TRUST CRUMBLES

Posted on by
5

I was preparing some dishes for Thanksgiving Day here in the US, and was busy crumbling goat cheese for a layered Portobello mushroom casserole.  I should have been paying more attention to what I was doing, but my mind was drifting all over the place. Needless to say my little Scottish Terrier was happy when a fair amount of cheese found its way to the kitchen floor because of my distraction.   I was thinking, instead, of the crumbling of trust and not of cheese.   It can take real work to build trust in our relationships, and even much more intensive labor when it has broken down in some way.

Being a constant repository of the confidences and problems of someone we love and worry over can take a toll.  It wears people down.   We get worn down even when we very much want to be there for those we care about. When someone close to us is in crisis, the stress that we feel from being continuously bombarded with facts and emotions that are heavy and filled with pain, can drag us down to the point that our own mental and physical well-being becomes compromised.

In such cases, we must sometimes consider our self-preservation, even when we do not want to break confidences.  We must weigh the cost of guarding the secrets that were shared, with the potential for relief and release, at least temporarily, through being able to vent and confide some of the troubles to a person, or to a few people in our lives whom we deem trustworthy and willing to listen.  If we don’t let a little of what is happening out, much like venting steam, we run the risk of exploding from the pressure and the toxic build-up.  I have, frankly, never been a proponent of keeping everything in.  When we share some very private and painful things with our loyal friends, we do indeed experience some relief from our grief and stress. It might be ephemeral in nature, but it is relief that we badly need at the moment we decide to do the sharing.  We then do not feel so alone in our troubles and pain. Sometimes seeing a professional can serve the same purpose, but not everyone is able to do this, or, it may be that in a time-limited session, when an individual has multiple stressors in life, there isn’t enough opportunity to explore everything.  There are also some circumstances in which a trustworthy friend feels safer and more comfortable when there are personal or family secrets that have been piling up, and especially if there has not yet been a chance to build a level of trust with a therapist or counselor.

I have heard from coaching clients of their guilt when they ended up spilling some personal and private information about a loved one, because they were not able to handle the burden of keeping it all in any longer. This guilt tends to compound the problem, and does not bring anyone closer to finding ways to rebuild the trust that can be damaged or lost if the betrayal of confidences is somehow found out.   The reality is, that at times of intense stress, we may not always have the ability to filter what we are sharing, even when we think we do.  The information we impart may be accurate, or it may be filled with our own  exaggerated emotional responses that color the realities of the tale.  Our perceptions of the circumstances and events we are confiding could well be reactions in the moment that do not represent how we really feel about the situation, or the people involved.  The venting may be the result of pent-up anger, of grief, frustration and the helplessness that we may feel about our loved one’s circumstances.    It may be the result of complicated and ambivalent feelings that are dangerously swirling around within us.  That is why it is important to reflect on such things before we do our venting.

Again, I am not a proponent of holding things in. Cumulative stress can not only eat away at us, but can definitely cloud our judgment and can even distort our perceptions.  In my experience, holding in too much makes people sick and miserable, but in today’s world, when communications can happen in an instant, due to e-mail and other technology, and then can’t be undone, we must be careful and thoughtful before we choose to reveal certain things.

It happened then, that I shared some serious information concerning a loved one with a couple of people I trusted, who did not know, and who would be unlikely to ever encounter the person or people around whom the information centered. At the time, I felt I was disclosing things only to those who would pose no threat to me, or to anyone I love.  I didn’t divulge any of the back story, or all details, but did sometimes vent some explosive and angry things I was feeling at the time of the communications.

What occurred was that I hurt and perhaps even alienated at least one very important person in my life.  In turn, when this person learned that I had confided in others, the individual also breeched my trust by doing something I considered a grave invasion of my privacy, and then compounded the hurt and negativity, by sharing information with others, rather than coming to me and engaging in an open and honest conversation.

I have always thought of myself as a trustworthy person.  I am absolutely certain that clients who have worked with me in the adoption field, as well as all of my coaching clients, would describe me as someone they can trust and rely on. They have frequently told me this, as well as having written it in testimonials over the years.  They often bare their souls to me and entrust their most intimate secrets to me. They say that I am easy to talk to and they generally value my insights and my ability to hold and protect the information they have shared. For much of my life I have worked in fields where confidentiality is taken very seriously and I have prided myself on my ability to respect it.  Still, when it comes to people very close to us, we sometimes forget to apply our strong values and professional practices to our personal lives.

Unfortunately, my own view (and experience) that it is unhealthy to live a life of complete secrecy, to pretend that everything is fine when it really isn’t and to push down feelings, differs from the views of some people I know.  These people appear to believe that when you speak about certain things, problems grow bigger and worse than ever, and that it is perhaps even dangerous to speak of them.  This is clearly a different world-view than my own.  I believe I am open to diverse views and belief systems, but must confess that to me, a belief that speaking about things causes other bad things to happen, or causes the Universe to line up its ammunition and to fire away at us in retaliation, feels more to me like magical thinking than like anything else.

My main point is that human beings are just that. They are human and flawed, and they can and do sometimes betray another’s trust when they are stressed beyond belief, and it has been ongoing, or when they are going through a period of weakness.  They may, at that point, exhibit poor judgment, may see the facts differently than they are, and may make bad choices. It hurts the perpetrator and the victim when we betray the trust of those who are important to us. It can sometimes take only one poor decision to destroy trust we have worked for years to establish.

So what do we do about it?  Trust is a two-way street. How do we begin to rebuild it? I think we first need to define with our loved ones, exactly what each sees as trust and to make our own needs and personal boundaries clear.  Trusting is not a finite thing that happens and then we can simply forget about it. It is a process. As relationships grow and change, (and they do) we need to take the time to talk about our expectations and to re-define terms and rules that may have changed along with us. When we love people unconditionally, we must allow for times when they fall short of what we consider ideal. If we don’t talk about this, we won’t grow and learn what to do differently and better the next time around. That is what growth is about.  We can learn to view a breakdown of trust as an opportunity to strengthen a relationship that had some weak spots, even when the parties involved loved each other greatly.  If we communicate and have some patience, we can once again construct loving and trusting bonds.

Having realistic trust in our lives and relationships means developing a willingness to forgive others for their imperfections. People do let us down at times. That is, sadly, part of life.  The thing is, we can’t travel very far on the road to forgiving others if we do not have much ability to forgive ourselves. To me, that is the first step.   The next is for us to make amends in whatever way we are able. We don’t just make empty pledges to make ourselves feel better. We also don’t want to establish a habit of not trusting anyone due to a bad experience.  It may be necessary to create a conscious agreement with ourselves about how much and under what circumstances we will allow ourselves to feel secure about a person we believe violated our sacred trust. Then, with regular and completely honest communication, we can work on growing our trust, by degrees.

I would never suggest that we permit ourselves to become doormats and to forgive someone who has repeatedly violated our confidentiality and trust. If the trust-breaker is important to you, then think about the relationship not only from the narrow perspective of how this person failed you, but of how many times he or she has been there for you and has demonstrated love and support in the past. That doesn’t imply that the negative thing that happened was good.  It tells us not to forget the loving and meaningful ways this person has been a part of your life. It tells us to please not “throw out the baby with the bathwater”.

Quotes I like about the topics of trust and forgiveness:

“Because you believed I was capable of behaving decently, I did.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym

“To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

“Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch or you might simply get covered in sap and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors where it is harder to get a splinter.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

 “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, All Men are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections

Are You Shivering In the Winds of Change?

Posted on by
2
NASA Photo

Put on a sweater right now and let’s take a look and see if any of this applies to you.

Are you afraid of newness and stuck in the old?  Would you like to figure out how to face life and how to grow beyond grief and guilt?

It doesn’t really matter if you thrive on regular changes and find them motivating and inspiring, if you fear them and crouch in the corner, hoping to avoid them, or if you are somewhere in-between.  Change is
a regular part of life. Nothing stays the same.

Once we accept that we can’t control what happens outside of ourselves very much, and relax into change, allowing ourselves to be open to the future, there is a whole world of discoveries out there for us.

Do you find yourself stuck in the past, in what was, instead of what is, or what could be (the potential in you and in life)?   It is helpful to remember the past when it comes to happy feelings and events.  This just fuels your joy in the present and gives you hope for the future. The trick is to enjoy the memories, but not to compare what you had before with what you have now, or to carry with you a yardstick that causes everything new to pale in comparison to the old.

Sometimes when we are stuck in grief, though, we have difficulty tuning in to our positive memories. They may hurt too much. One day you will be able to see that the joys you experienced in the past are actually the building blocks  that teach you how to fully appreciate new happiness and gifts in life. Part of being able to move on, feel pleasure and have hope again, requires facing your grief, taming it like a lion tamer and letting it rest in a less prominent place in your life.  It will be there, sleeping in the back of the cage, or perhaps waiting quietly on its perch, ready to pounce when you are unprepared and not expecting it.  This lion is a part of you now, not always visible when you look in the mirror, but a shadow behind you.  You have a choice about whether to let it pounce on you all the time and to maim and impair your present and your future.  You have a choice about how much you allow the shadow to darken your attitude and your ability to live in the moment.

When unhappy past events or behaviors that brought us mainly guilt, sadness and turmoil are the things that we keep on revisiting and can’t let go of, this tends to create more misery and destructive behavior.  By repeatedly revisiting them we are training our brains to return to that groove and to click and spin in vain. Our minds cannot easily bypass the rut or groove, to enable us to hear the music that is beyond that rut or defect.   Dwelling on the unhappiness of the past causes us to physically revisit the pain, as well. Our bodies react with unhealthy and often painful and debilitating stress responses, depending on where we hold stress in our bodies.  We tend then to leap from one negative thought to another at that point, perpetuating or own stress.

It is true that you may at times feel that your personal suffering will never end. Your fears may grip you to the point that you are paralyzed to act and therefore, you tie yourself to the familiar, even when it makes you unhappy and does not work for you.  Your guilt over something you have or have not done in the past may eat away at you like acid.  You may not permit yourself to take any risks, whether emotional ones, business risks or any other kind.

When we experience loss, regardless of the type of loss, or guilt that takes us over,  our sense of self can become so shaky that doing new things and making different choices than we have in the past becomes a herculean task., This may actually be a time when changing some things about our lives becomes crucial and necessary, regardless of what we have lived through.  Martha Beck says,  “Any transition serious enough to alter  your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.”

Once you accept that change is inevitable and begin to work on yourself, rather than worrying about uncontrollable external forces, life will begin to take on a different shape for you. The ability to navigate your inner world helps you through your travels in the outer world. Once you open your heart and your mind to the reality that everything in life is impermanent, but that everything also renews itself in nature, relaxing into change becomes more natural.

      “Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.”-The Dalai Lama

Some Things to Remember.:

  • You are more resilient than you give yourself credit for being. You have weathered change before.

Try hard to recall the stories in your life that have shown this to be true. If you can’t do it easily, ask a trusted friend or two to help you search your memory, and to give input.

  • Stop being a victim

Claim your personal power now. Get help if you need to.  There is power in your wisdom and in your kind actions towards others.

  • Find the opportunity in every obstacle that presents itself. Do all you can to create your own opportunities, if they don’t automatically present themselves.

Life is full of opportunities and positive things, and not just trauma and tragedy.

  • Nobody can be sad, unhappy, anxious or fearful 100% of the time, no matter what has occurred in your life, or what you think looms ahead.

Pay attention to the times you feel good, no matter how infrequent. Note how your voice sounds, look in the mirror and witness your smile, as unfamiliar as it may be & stop dwelling on the times you feel miserable.

  • Don’t discount clichés. You only have to eat the elephant one bite at a time, and if you bite off more than you can handle, there are remedies for indigestion! You might feel crummy for a bit, but it will pass.

Sometmes it is true that changes happen swiftly, and with cruelty.  In those cases, you need to gather all the supports in your personal community that you can, and to employ whatever tools are available to you. There is nothing to be ashamed of in getting and using help.  When one thing doesn’t work, it’s time to try another.  

Most changes, though, involve choices and you can take baby steps, test the waters, wade out a little deeper and keep going!

 

Iris Arenson-Fuller, CPC is a Life Stage, Family, Relationship Changes Coach who helps clients going through, or anticipating big changes.  Iris helps clients navigate and fly through the winds of change. She has particular expertise in the areas of loss and grief, aging, sandwich generation/caretaking issues and in all aspects of loss, grief, growth and success related to members of the Adoption Community.

If you like this post, please re-post it and please do make a comment below.  Thank you!

Good Friends

Posted on by
7

Rose Garden by Samantha DeWitt-Public Domain Photo

“Friends are the roses of life: pick them carefully and avoid the thorns.”-Unknown

     I have no idea who said the above, but  I was thinking about this recently after the departure of some dear friends who had visited and spent the night. They live about six hours away, so we hadn’t seen them in a few years. I have known them for many years and though we don’t see each other often, when we do, I am reminded of what wonderful blossoms they are in the bouquet of terrific friendships I have been fortunate to gather.

      As far as friendships go, I have been blessed with few thorns. I have numerous friends who have been a part of my life for 25, 30, 40 and even over 50 years. They may not all be people I see frequently, but we do communicate and there is one characteristic shared by the very special ones. We are able to pick up where we left off each and every time we talk or visit, it seems as though we have never been apart.

     Sometimes people get caught up in thinking about how unfair life can be, or get stuck in anger and resentment and let themselves believe that they have somehow been targeted for heartache and troubles. The truth is, there is nobody who avoids pain and heartache altogether.  It may seem like there are those who have more than their fair share, but all human beings eventually get some thorns. It would be so sad if they let the roses in their gardens turn brown and did not ever pick any magnificent flowers to enjoy and to bring a little bit of nature’s beauty into their living space.

     Remember, though, that friendships are much like flowers, in that they require some tending if they are going to blossom and give back.   You must feed your friendships or they will wither from neglect. Care about your friends as you expect them to care about you. Make the time to listen and not only to unburden your own woes. Don’t just use your time together to complain or to one-up them when you discuss your pain and troubles.

     No relationship is always perfectly balanced. The scales can and do tip in terms of the giving and receiving. This is natural. There will be periods of stress or misfortune when your friends need a good deal of  understanding and support. You may be the needy one at other times and that is ok. Those who live in isolation and who do not have compassionate ears and occasional objective advice to help them over hurdles, normally do not do as well as those who can open themselves up  to a trusted and trustworthy support system.   In fact, this tendency to shutting out the world and living in secrecy or isolation is often a recipe that leads to overwhelm, depression and self-destructive behavior. Self-reliance is a valuable and admirable quality, but “no man is an island”.

     If you have a lot of folks you call friends, but often feel alone because few of your buddies are available to you when you need to share, unburden and seek comfort,   it is time to examine your roster of buddies.  When you have contact with certain friends, do you feel drained because they are in a state of perpetual crisis, but are rarely willing or able to listen to what you want or need to speak about?   I am not suggesting abandoning friends in their times of woe or crisis, but if this is a regular pattern that has endured for a long time and you have a hard time getting a word-in edgewise, then this is probably a toxic relationship and is one you have to consider winding down or eliminating altogether.

     Friendships, like any other relationship, are dynamic organisms and they do change over time. Our focus, interests, needs and life circumstances change. Certain commonalities that brought us together with some people may have ceased to exist. Some of our acquaintances will fall by the wayside and maintaining these relationships may not be beneficial to you or to the other parties. It’s practical to acknowledge this.

     It is possible for new friends to become close and important allies with whom we can easily share and who share with us.  Sometimes people just plain click and find an incredible sense of honesty and compatability, but it does usually take time to build a foundation of confidence on which you can both rely.

     There will be a core of individuals who have shared with you the good and bad, who have been there for you and for whom you have been a faithful support and a bedrock of help, love and wisdom over time.  These are the friends to trust, to keep, to water, tend and enjoy.

      If you find something of value in this post, please do comment and please pass it on. Thank you.

I Can’t Want It

Posted on by
10

Public Domain Photo-pdclipart.org

My  2 1/2 yr old granddaughter says, “I can’t want it” and shakes her head obstinately when you offer her something good to eat that she has no intention of tasting. She says the same when she is ill and you attempt to give her a spoonful of medicine to make her feel better.

This makes me wonder how often we all say to ourselves, “I can’t want it”.

We retain some automatic thoughts like these from our childhoods and from negative things we have endured as adults too.  Some of the thoughts have  planted themselves firmly, due to past disappointment and hurt.  Such thoughts linger in the shadows, waiting to pounce if we don’t recognize them quickly enough. When we don’t challenge them, and when we permit them to take over, they influence our adult behavior.  If they stick around for a long time, there is evidence that they actually change the chemistry of our brains.  It is important to be alert to these, but they are not always easy to overcome, especially when the words, “I can’t want it“  keep replaying in our heads like a sub-conscious invalidating incantation. We are mesmerized and trapped by the negativity of the messages we keep giving ourselves. When we revert to our inner two-year-old, we tell ourselves things like:

          ”I can’t help myself.  I can’t feel better. I can’t want my soul to awaken and with it, my hope for the future.  I can’t want to get over my loss (whatever it was).  I can’t want to be over my pain.”

     When we send ourselves such messages, it is usually because we don’t feel we deserve to be better.  We stubbornly hang on to feeling bad, somehow validating our sense of self, even when it is not a productive or mature sense of self.  We don’t always know this is what we are doing because we won’t take a good, hard look at what keeps us in hell. So we remain in a hell that may not have been self created, but that we continue to furnish with misery, demons, fire and brimstone to punish ourselves, far better than the furnishings any Satanic interior decorator could ever dream up for us.

There will be still some days when we wake up in the morning and feel a gentle swelling of unfamiliar  excitement, almost like a bud ready to open. The mind and heart begin to spin out ideas and possibilities. Excitement and hope start to form little bubbles, fragile, filled with iridescence and a bit elusive.  They float over us. We try to pin them down, to catch and turn them into something concrete that we can hold and better understand, before they break and dissolve. We are usually afraid that these bubbles will be gone before we can determine that they are truly present, and not simply figments of our wishful imaginations, longing to feel whole and happy once again . 

Girl Blowing Bubbles by Petr Kratochvil

We identify a surge of energy that we may have not have experienced for a time. We gingerly climb out of bed and with some trepidation, we contemplate the feelings of hope and possibility that have been absent if life hasn’t been going well for us lately. Hopefully we can ban the “I can’t want it” from shouting out, even if we are fearful.

 A French proverb says, “Hope is the dream of a soul awake”. If you have been sitting like moldy, stale tea leaves, steeping yourself for a very long time in a cup of despair, you may believe your soul has fogotten how it feels to be awake.  You may resist the stirring you feel as a new day dawns and as hope struggles to take shape.  If your soul has been wrapped tightly in grief, shame, fear, loneliness and even self-loathing, mummified by pain and circumstances that have befallen you, or even that you have created for yourself, it isn’t easy to wake up one day and find the soul fully present and ready to be whole again.

You try to do all the correct things. You get help. You listen to advice that sticks to your head as though it were flypaper, but the advice never penetrates or lights the way to feeling different, or to making changes.  You ask all of the questions that mankind has ever asked. You know that struggles such as yours, with conflict, guilt, desire, loss and death, are age-old ones and not yours to bear alone. Yet you suffer and you ask repeatedly why you must do so.

I can’t answer your question.  I can’t tell you how to make things better instantaneously.  I can’t demonstrate with a how-to video, the way to shake off the fitful sleep of anguish from the back of your being, flinging it into a far-away pit from which it can never again crawl out to haunt you. I truly wish I could tell you how to do that, and how to wake up your soul, finally letting the sun back into an existence that  has felt cold and rayless.  I have lived through things I believed at the time to have been “the worst that could possibly happen”.  Unfortunately, there have been multiple “worst things”, but thankfully I did not know it during the dark times when I was certain I had reached the nadir of my existence.  I have somehow found my way out of deep pits, using whatever internal and external tools and magic I could  access.  I know that within each of us exists the ability to do so.  Even if there are no guarantees that life won’t pour on us more bitter potions to try to kill our  joy and souls,  I know that in the cracks and crevices of  the most formidable and terrifying mountains, there is undiscovered joy waiting for each of us and perhaps the trickle of a fresh, clear mountain stream.

If you find yourself thinking or saying, “I can’t want it”, please keep on asking yourself why you can’t. Then write down ten things you really do want with all your heart. Don’t be afraid. Until you claim them, there is little chance of your soul awakening.  It’s time to get out of hell.  The Indian Buddhist monk, Vasubandhu, said that “the wardens of the hells merely proceed from the minds of the ones who are there suffering in torment.  They are projections, just like many other features of existence.  Hell is a kind of hallucination.”