The Empowered Therapist

TL;DR: We can feel pressured to get to the bottom of our feelings- to try to solve them rather than just letting them exist right alongside us. Grief, especially complicated grief can emerge when we least expect it, and it is our acceptance of this grief, and ourselves, that allows us to build body trust and awareness.

I woke up this morning filled with grief, nearly crying before I even opened my eyes. I searched my brain for the reason- I wondered, what I was I dreaming about or drifting to in my unconscious state that brought on this heaviness. And when no answer emerged, I allowed myself to focus just on the energetic and emotional form the grief had taken on. No judgment. No pressure to come up with a reason I felt immensely sad. No urgency to respond to myself in a way that would make my experience “better.”

Afterall, what even is “better” when your heart is aching? We’re conditioned to believe that “better” when it comes to pain, is less, but I’m not sure I want to feel less of the grief that resides inside of me. Likewise, I don’t want to ask my grief to take on a new form, because my grief had to do that all of the days my dad was living, yet entirely unavailable to me. My grief finally gets to be all the way felt, and I know that this pain is a long time coming.

When your caregiver is alive, but unavailable, there can be a prolonged and sustained experience of grief. We might even find ourselves pushing the grief away in an effort to allow hope to exist. We might find ourselves simultaneously feeling angry, sad, apathetic, and hopeful, which truthfully is a lot to ask of our bodies, especially if we have been estranged from a caregiver for an extended period of time. Had you asked me if I had hope that my dad and I would one day mend our relationship, I would have confidently told you no, but the truth is far more complex than that. Hope was fleeting over the many years where I saw him clearly and adjusted my expectations accordingly.

Sometime during the first week following his death, I remembered a text conversation we had about a year prior. I was living on my own for the first time since my early 20s, and while I am very determined, I’m not always handy, and managing things around my house was becoming an overwhelming task. My dear nephew had started checking on me some, and helping when we could, and his strength was certainly an asset when outdoor tasks needed to be done. During one particularly hard week, I found myself wishing I had a handy elder in my life, someone who wasn’t afraid to take a risk in home repair and figure it out as they went. My parents are very skilled with their hands, a classic asset to those steeped in the working class, laborer life, and I truly admire how much they have figured out all on their own. The desire was there and gone in an instant, because I knew no such elder was coming to my rescue, and I had long given up that form of hope.

Unbeknownst to me, my nephew had reached out to my dad to ask a few questions and see if he could borrow some tools that neither of us owned so he could help me with a much-needed project. It was a warm day with a cool breeze, and I was standing outside with the dogs on one of our many morning potty breaks when a text came in. It was from my dad, and it said, “Taking care of a home is a lot. Let me know if I can help you.”

I burst into tears. And I’m crying again as I look back at the texts to bring you into this story.*

I responded, “That’s nice. Thank you. It is a lot. There is a lot I can’t do myself which is hard.”

Reading it back I can feel the guardedness AND the hope in my response to him. The short sentences. The barely sharing. And then the little window in, acknowledging that something was hard- not a struggle, and certainly not the total truth of how miserable I was feeling, just a simple disclosure that I was sure he wouldn’t be able to receive. I had become accustomed to talking to my parents like this. Brief. Direct. Guarded. And still, a version of the truth, so that I could allow myself to stand in my own reality, independent of how they responded next.

His response hit me like a ton of bricks, and not because it was especially kind, or warm, or helpful, but because it wasn’t about him. He didn’t shift the conversation back to himself. He didn’t somehow become the self-proclaimed hero in my story, while continuing to do nothing at all.

“I can probably help you figure some things out. Just let me know.”

When I was sitting on my couch allowing my grief to take up as much space as it needed in the acute hours following his death, I thought about this exchange, and I realized that it unlocked a hope in me that I hadn’t yet realized. I recall allowing my mind to drift to daydreams of him seeing my house and all I had done on my own, and him being proud. I entertained the idea that we would slowly and cautiously enter into a little more connection. I fantasized about a version of him that wanted to soften so he could get to know this version of me.

I desired a different outcome than the one I was inevitably going to get.

So when I wake up grieving, this is the complexity that swarms my system. This is just one of the layers that exist for those of us who didn’t get what we needed from our caregivers, not only when we were young, but also as we age. This is the pain so many of us carry that feels so hard to explain, because the context is the power that stands behind the truth.

To someone who received consistent care from their dad, this text exchange would have been entirely routine. Likely, someone with an available caregiver would have even expected their dad to be there cleaning out their gutters and repairing the brick that supported their home. And yet, I had come to expect nothing, so this text felt like everything.

We never had the chance to mend, and likely even more time wouldn’t have yielded a different outcome. What I do know is that I can trust me to allow all of my reality, and his, to co-exist. I can allow my hope to be something I cherish and admire in myself. I can give my grief, in all of its many forms permission to take up residence without judgment or pressure to understand it. I can ache for all of the reasons, not just the one people expect. I can allow my own complexity, even when others do not allow theirs.

Dear ones, allow your grief to accompany you in your healing. Allow all of you to exist. Allow yourself to continue to process all of the parts of you that remain forever in process.

To those of you learning to allow your feelings to exist even when they are super uncomfortable, I see you.

*In revisiting these texts, I have come to realize that this conversation took place exactly one year before he died, nearly to the hour, and wow, does that feel emotionally charged.