The Wild Edge of Sorrow, page 5
I remember being in New York City less than a month after the World Trade Center towers were destroyed in 2001. My son was going to college there, and this tragedy occurred shortly after his first major time away from home. The two of us made our way into the city, and what I saw touched me deeply. Everywhere I went, there were grief shrines, flowers adorning pictures of loved ones lost. There were circles of people in parks, some silent, others singing. It was clear that the soul has an elemental requirement to do this, to gather and mourn and weep and cry out in pain in order for the healing to begin. On some level we know that this is a requirement when facing loss, but we have forgotten how to walk comfortably expressing it.
Illness is another grief we find at the first gate. Any lingering illness can activate a feeling of loss. When a prolonged sickness arises in our life, we lament the life we once knew and enjoyed, the one brimming with vitality. We feel emptied and drained, finding little joy or motivation for the day. We may feel betrayed by our body, as though we no longer have a foundation beneath us for living fully. Illness dislodges our sense of control and invulnerability. We resist, resent, argue, and protest, attempting to wrestle our lives back from this unwelcome guest.
When our health deteriorates in illness, we feel diminished, whittled away by loss after loss. Carl Jung described his experience following a heart attack as a “painful process of defoliation.” He said, “everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me.”25 When good health feels far away, we are taken into places where our faith in life can flicker. One woman attended a grief ritual following a double mastectomy. Her sorrow was poignant and deeply touching. She shed the tenderest tears for the loss of her body’s wholeness. Another woman shared that she was facing the last few months of her life and needed to address her grief over the losses she carried from having been ill so long: the loss of work, of friendships, of strength, of dreams.
Illness asks much of us. I remember one man who came to my practice following a serious heart attack. He was obviously shaken by the experience. He was a high-powered man in a position of authority, and he was anxious to return to his former status at the top the chain of command. I sat and listened to his story over several weeks and could see how desperate he was to reclaim his former strength. One day I said to him, “I’m concerned that you are going to waste a perfectly good heart attack! You are so committed to returning to how things were. Have you stopped to consider that those were the conditions that brought about the heart attack in the first place? Your work now is to hear what your heart is telling you. You have turned your back on many things—love, your friendships, and your body—and your heart is filled with grief. This heart attack is telling you something. Listen!” It was a difficult thing for him to do. Something radical was being asked of him. Radical comes from the Latin word for “root.” His heart was calling him back to deeper ground, to the roots of his life.
In the opening circle with cancer patients that I colead at Commonweal,26 I share that their illness has thrown them into a rough initiation. All initiatory events, like those still held in living cultures, take one into an unknown and unshaped world. Here, nothing is as it was; nor is it intended to be. It is a time of shedding and endings. The familiar world is left behind, and we exist at the edge of something without shape. It is a place of radical change. In other words, the identity we had known for our entire life has just been dissolved. Illness carries us into places of great uncertainty. Will we ever get better? Will we ever get back to where we were before we got sick? We can no longer lean on what we know for a feeling of stability. Things teeter and shake; we feel adrift on unfamiliar seas, and as in all true initiations, we fear that we will sink into the waters of death.
When we are in the grips of illness, a major focus in our mind is the hope of getting back to where we were before this sickness began. But we are not meant to go back. Like the man above, who resisted hearing what his heart was saying, we must recognize that we have been uprooted by our cancer, our heart attack, or our depression, and we have been set down on some new shore. Like any true ritual process, we are meant to come out of the experience deeply changed.
Illness strips away all excess, winnowing us down to the bare essentials. When the choice of denial has been stripped away, as it is in illness, we are brought face to face with our own mortal lives, our tender vulnerabilities, the old wounds that linger in our hearts, the fragility of flesh, and the immensity of soul. We are ushered into a darker night that sheds an astonishing light on our deeper and more genuine shape. The old stories, crafted in a mixture of childhood wounds and societal fictions, slowly yield to something more generous, elastic, and responsive to the life of the soul. We begin to experience a more vivid complexity that takes us out of the either/or world of adolescence and into the alchemy of our adult selves. Here, in this more ripened place, we can see how much more we can hold, tasting both the sweet and the bitter, the beautiful and the painful, all in the same moment. Everything we avoided for the sake of living in safety yields to a desire to encounter it all. We slowly recognize that no emotion is foreign to the soul, and every one of them can be welcomed as they arrive at the door. We gradually become able to embrace the full terrain of living.
Kat Duff, in The Alchemy of Illness, describes her long journey with chronic fatigue syndrome and its relationship to grief. She writes, “The Indo-European root of the word ‘cure,’ means to sorrow for something, and I have yet to meet a sick person who doesn’t sorrow deeply for something: the breakdown of a marriage, an early death in the family, or the nameless innocents slaughtered in war.”27 What she found at the bottom of her illness was a grief that, when she could fully express it, bound her to her life and the rest of the world. As Susan Griffin noted, “At the center of / all my sorrows / I have felt a presence / that was not mine alone.”28
But all too often, when grief does not bind us to life, its gravity can literally pull us into the grave. Losing someone we love is acutely painful. When death comes in the form of suicide, we encounter another, oftentimes more complicated, grief. We are bewildered, shocked, and angry. We feel betrayed, abandoned—every wild and unsettled emotion courses through our bodies as we try to make sense of the senseless. It is traumatic, ripping through our hearts like shrapnel. We are left dazed.
There is something particular to this loss that undoes us. It undermines the ground beneath us, turning it to quicksand. Aren’t we supposed to want to live? For many of us, the choice to end one’s life feels impossible to digest and yet, in our own secret chambers, many of us have wrestled with the question whether “to be, or not to be.” We are supposed to say yes to life—the Great American positivism. And yet, suicide and suicidal thoughts have touched many of us. Suicide is not a one-dimensional creature that we can get a rope around and keep corralled. It happens for many reasons, and the reasons do not settle the hearts of the ones left to struggle in the wild wake of emotions. I have sat with many people who have had someone in their lives commit suicide. One woman, in her sixties, was finally able to acknowledge and grieve the suicide of her mother. She had been only two years old at the time. All through her life, she had tried to tell herself, “That was so long ago. It doesn’t really matter.” But the effects of this great tear in her psychic foundation lingered for six decades, making her unsure of her worth and eating away at her faith in life. It dammed her tears and made it hard for her to love.
There is often a feeling of shame attached to the survivors of suicide, a hidden doubt that they might not have done enough to prevent this death. This is a doubling of the pain. Their grief is bound together with shame, making it more difficult to talk with others and get the support they need. Finding the courage to share your experience with others is an essential piece in mending this profound sorrow.
When we experience the loss of someone or something that we love, other places of grief can rise from their hiding places and ask for attention. One woman I worked with had recently suffered the death of her son. The death was sudden and unexpected. For months she sat with this grief, slowly learning how to tend it. What she began to notice during this time, however, was another tributary of grief that rose to meet the main river of tears she was experiencing. She confided that she had never been able to ask others for what she needed. She had been everybody’s caretaker, making sure that everyone was okay. Now, here she sat, in a state of absolute need, wrestling with the voices that were trying to silence her right to ask for support for herself. These two sources of grief merged over time, and she could begin to see a strange grace hidden within the loss of her son; some piece of her soul could now come home.
The Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love
There is another entrance to grief, a second gateway, different from the gate connected to losing someone or something that we love. This grief occurs in the places often untouched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives. We often hate these parts of ourselves, hold them in contempt, and refuse to allow them the light of day. We do not show these outcast brothers and sisters to anyone, and we thereby deny these parts of ourselves the healing salve of community.
These neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair. What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth. That is our predicament—we chronically sense the presence of sorrow, but we are unable to truly grieve, because we feel in our body that this piece of who we are is unworthy of grief.
For many years, I offered lectures on shame. But I remember that when I was first asked to give a talk on shame, I was confused. Why were they asking me to give this talk? I was certain no one would show up for the lecture. I was pretty certain that I was the only one who felt this level of shame. Well, maybe a dozen people will turn out. The first night, there were sixty-five people in attendance. It grew from there, with well over one hundred people showing up night after night to talk about shame. I offered these talks for many years, and they were always well attended. Clearly I was not the only one who felt the pain of shame. It was felt by many, and I came to see how we live in a society that is drenched in shame.
Shame ruptures our connection with life and with our soul. It is, indeed, a sickness of the soul. When feelings of shame arise, we pull back from the world, avoiding contact that could cause or risk exposure. The last thing we want in times of excruciating self-consciousness is to be seen. We find ourselves avoiding the gaze of others, we become silent and withdrawn, all in hopes of slipping under the radar. I remember sharing with the audience that the goal of the shame-bound person was to get from birth to death without ever being an echo on the radar of life. My tombstone was going to read “Safe at Last.”
Gershon Kaufman, one of the most important writers on shame, has said that shame leaves us feeling “unspeakably and irreparably defective.”29 It is unspeakable because we do not want anyone to know how we feel inside. We fear it is irreparable because we think it is not something we have done wrong—it is simply who we are. We cannot remove the stain from our core. We search and search for the defect, hoping that that, once found, it can be exorcised like some grotesque demon. But it lingers, remaining there our entire lives, anxious that it will be seen and simultaneously longing to be seen and touched with compassion.
No one arrives on this earth encrusted with shame. Rather, shame settles in our bones over time, accumulating during times of neglect or violation. Every one of us has encountered times when the connection between us and the one we needed for attention and love was ruptured. I remember once when my son was two years old, I was in the kitchen making him breakfast. He came running into the kitchen and joyously shouted, “Daddy! Daddy!” I turned to him abruptly and shouted, “Stop it!” He looked stunned and ran to his bedroom. I knew that my response had shamed him. I put the eggs down and went to his room, knelt down on the floor and looked him in the eyes. I said, “You wanted something from me, and I didn’t give it to you. What is it that you want to say to me?” He said, “It felt like you didn’t want to be my daddy anymore.” My heart sank, and I said, “No. No. We’re good. That was all mine. I’m so sorry I got angry at you like that. We are good, and I love you.” He brightened and smiled, hugged me, and went off to play; the bridge between us had been restored.
As I walked out of his bedroom, I wondered, What would’ve happened if I hadn’t gone in there? I remembered Kaufman saying that it is always up to the adult to restore the bridge with the child. In that moment, I understood powerfully the cost to a child who had to be the one to make the overture of repair. If I hadn’t gone in there, my son would have had to ingest his fear that I did not want to be his father any longer. The worst part of it, however, is that he would have felt it was his fault—if he hadn’t been so exuberant, so needy for my attention, I might still hold him in my heart. He would feel he had to restrain these parts of himself in the future if he was to receive my love once again.
Sometime later, reflecting upon that tender moment, I recalled an experiment making rock candy in my high school chemistry class. I’m sure many of us share this memory, but for those who don’t, the experiment involved taking a glass of water, tying a string to a pencil, and placing the string in the water. Then we slowly added sugar to the water, creating a solution. And nothing happens . . . nothing happens . . . and then, when the saturation point is reached, the sugar molecules begin to crystallize around the string. I thought, This is how it is with shame. We can endure a certain number of times when the connection is broken between us and the people we love and need. We can digest a certain volume of disappointments and criticism. But at some point, with enough repetition, the internal stories associated with those events reach their saturation point, and the fictions crystallize into things that feel like truths. There was no part of me that didn’t want to be my son’s father, and yet, with enough impatient outbursts and no offers of reparation, my son might have believed otherwise.
Herein begins the slow, insidious process of carving up the self to fit into the world of adults. We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion, even if it is provisional. We become convinced, on some basic level, that these pieces of who we are, are not good enough—that they are, in fact, shameful—and we banish them to the farther shore of our awareness in hopes of never hearing from them again. They become our outcast brothers and sisters. I remember going to therapy with the expressed interest in having my therapist help me rid myself of these unwanted pieces.
Shame closes the heart to self-compassion. We live with an internal state best characterized as self-hatred. In order to loosen shame’s grip on our lives, we need to make three moves. The first is from feeling worthless to seeing ourselves as wounded. The second emerges from the first and is a shift from seeing ourselves through the lens of contempt to one of a budding compassion. And the third is moving from silence to sharing. As long as we see our suffering as evidence of worthlessness, we will not move toward our wounds with anything but judgment.
One woman I worked with blamed herself for being molested when she was ten years old. She carried that story with absolute conviction, and she hated that little girl inside of her. At the time, there had been no attentive adults in her world to tell her that what happened to her was awful and wrong, that it had nothing to do with her. Fortunately, while we were working together, she had two young daughters at home who were about the same age as she had been when the violation occurred. I asked her one day to go home and look into the eyes of her daughters and notice what she saw. When she returned the next week, we sat down, and I asked her what she had seen. She said, “Innocence.” I asked her if it might be possible that she, too, was innocent at that age and not responsible for what happened. She nodded yes and began to weep for this interior girl for the first time. This was the beginning of her healing and her return to community. For the first time, she was able to see what happened to her as a wound and not as a commentary on her worth. She was able to take in the first few breaths of compassion and begin to tend this tortured inner self. From there, she was able to make the last move by sharing about her experience in the open light of community. Her shame dissolved, and she was moved to grieve for that innocent girl.
That third move we must make, from silence to sharing, is important, but be mindful to share these vulnerable truths only with people you fully trust. As Goethe said, “Tell a wise person, or else keep silent.”30
Premature Death
Much of our grief comes from having to crouch and live hidden from the gaze of others, and in that posture we confirm our exile. I hear these outcast brothers and sisters every day in my practice. Their numbers are many, and their grief encompasses every aspect of human life. For some, these outcast pieces are connected to their sexuality and bodies; for others, it is their anger or sadness—or their joy and exuberance—that has been banished. For many, it is their needs that were ignored. These outcast portions of soul do not quietly languish at the edges of our awareness; they appear as addictions, depression, or anxiety, calling for our attention. They appear in our dreams as waifs and orphans, in images of ghettos and prison cells. One man, struggling with alcoholism, had a dream that he was walking into a bar, oblivious to a beautiful woman standing there. As he entered, she shouted, “Hey, when are you going to pay attention to me?” Here was his soul calling to him, demanding that he turn and attend to his neglected life.
