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Guiding through Grief discussion (March 2021)
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15 Replies
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I have chosen to write this assignment from the view that I am the client.
During this intensive I was struggling terribly with my own depression, suicidal ideations, chronic pain, a stressful and debilitating workplace and mental turmoil surrounding what I was going to do about it all.
I felt comfort knowing that each of my cohort members reached out to ask about my wellbeing. I wanted to take that with me and put it forward for my life. I know that everyone lives with/or can’t live with their own grief and loss. Likewise, grief and loss look different and don’t always represent death. For me, I was dealing with the loss of a pain free life, potentially and most likely looking at a life of 24/7/365 pain and how I could ever make it through it. I also was experiencing extreme workplace burnout and dealing with coworkers that didn’t hold the same level of care for our clients. I knew that if I had taken a moment to just breathe, reach out, or spend some time sitting in nature that I would have gotten some comfort, but when you feel so far gone, you can’t see the way out. I had developed such a neural disruption that I was convinced the only way to be was depressed, in pain and suicidal. I was able to change one aspect of what was going on and everything else followed suit. When things are bad, they all seem bad, but something is good you can see the light everywhere.
Taking the time to sit out on the land with my thoughts and redirect my pain into something tangible and manageable helped me out of the dark. I had put in my notice at work 3 days before the intensive began, so I used that time to gather my portfolio of grooming clients and plan out my next steps in my mind where it couldn’t be lost in a notebook or scrap of paper. I also got some one on one time to just cry and be by myself, hold myself and talk to myself.
Overall, a lot of factors and things that I learned during the week of grief ad BC2 helped me overcome my struggles. I am grateful for the time and educational materials we were provided with.
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Ally, your openness throughout the program was an important part for me. I noticed how you were always willing to say exactly what was true for you and be honest about how you were feeling.
Knowing that we share our struggles as a collective makes grief more bearable.
I appreciate the way you named the experience of grief in losing parts of your own life. This gave me the freedom to give more space and compassion for the ambiguous types of grief that appear in the lives of my clients and friends.
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I read a passage in Jill Bolte-Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight that has been sitting with me in relation to my learning of grief and the grieving process. She says:
“Because the term “feeling” is broadly used, I’d like to clarify where different experiences occur in our brain. First, when we experience feelings of sadness, joy, anger, frustration, or excitement, these are emotions that are generated by the cells of our limbic system. Second, to feel something in your hands refers to the tactile or kinesthetic experience of feeling through the action of palpitation. This type of feeling occurs via the sensory system of touch and involves the postcentral gyrus of the cerebral cortex. Finally, when someone contrasts what he or she feels intuitively about something (often expressed as a “gut feeling”) to what they think about it, this insightful awareness is a higher cognition that is grounded in the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex.” (18-19)
Wow. When I step back and begin to unpack this statement, the implications for us and our grieving are significant. When we speak of grieving as a society, we tend to focus on how long a person has been grieving. The overriding introject seems to be that there is a timeline for grief, that somehow extended grieving is outside the parameters of what is societally agreed on as an acceptable length of time. The pendulum is beginning to swing the other way, where the acknowledgement of fully feeling and regaining emotional fidelity is championed and spoken to. Even I write a lot in this sphere. Still, when you dig into what Taylor is saying, grief takes on a whole new level for our clients, and for us.
We are certainly familiar with the feelings part of this statement, because that is where we tend to spend most of our efforts in understanding. There is sadness, anger, frustration, relief, uncertainty, apathy, and a whole host of emotions that can be bundled up with grief. The complication of blended emotions, (“I’m sad that she is gone and relieved that she isn’t suffering), can in and of itself be unacknowledged. When I’ve mentioned to a client that both feelings can exist in the same space, it is almost as if they have received a golden ticket, permission to fully feel all emotions that step up the table. How we got to the idea that there “should” be one overriding emotion is beyond me, but the consequences of that idea is definitely present in my clients and in myself.
Then there is to feel, as in, “I feel the softness of the blanket around me.” Feel, as in feeling the arms and pressure of someone’s embrace. Or, the feeling of the wind as you both rode bikes together as a child. It’s the feel as you kissed each other good morning, or the feel of a mother’s touch as she dressed your wounds. Here, in the upper middle part of the brain, grief is also happening.
Finally, the right brains “gut feeling.” Maybe this is when you knew you were falling in love with this person and that you had a notion there was a future together. Perhaps it’s the aspect of how you intuitively felt when this friend was having a bad day, and you picked up the phone to call. This could even be the intuitive understanding of what your child or partner would feel about your feelings. All this is happening in the right side of the cerebral cortex.
Is it any wonder then, that grief is so complicated? Multiple areas of the brain developed connections, pathways, networks all around the relationship to what has been lost. Siegel writes “we can define both the mind and healthy minds as emerging from integrated relationships ad integrated nervous systems.” (Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, 16-6). Both Taylor and Siegel are pointing to the same reality, that we are intricately connected and intertwined with the object of our grief.
When we look through this lens, it adds a dimensionality to grief that has been missing in the bigger conversation. Feelings matter, as does feel, as does intuitive feeling. All the aspects within us that send out tendrils to connect with others are hit with the shock of death, loss, and trauma. I say all this to firmly entrench this understanding within myself, as a means of holding clients in greater care. Also, to hold myself in greater care.
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Jen, I have read this several times over now, I so appreciate how you articulate your breadth of understanding and bringing the readings to the foreground. I’m now curious to re read that section of My stroke of insight with a different lens. It’s a rainy day here in Australia so perfect for some deeper reflection around grief.
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Response 1 @ Jen
Jen,
I love your example you introduced about different “feelings”. This is a very important distinction. It reminds me of when Michael taught us about the breath to surrender and to identify what feeling or sensation is occurring not emotion. Great insight about an introject in society around grief! Permission to fully feel is key it is something I feel weird about saying I give you permission to feel but somehow we need to hear it. We need validation for permission. It is complex and to add a trauma response with cycle of grief its takes a patient life coach to discern and uncover what may actually be happening in the clients brain. Thanks for the insight.
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Jen,
your insights on the readings always help me connect to them better. The layers of emotions involved in grief and their various locations in the brain and subsequently the body, is a source of fascination for me.
Multiple layers of emotions both positive and negative appear when we unpack grief. It is so valuable to look more deeply at this complex emotion.
Your clients will be lucky to have you as a coach. Your capacity to hold grief and patience to allow the layers to emerge is a powerful gift.
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I have tried several times since the intensive to sit and write this post but every time I seem to hit a wall, a wall of uncomfortable feeling, I do not want to unpack my thoughts around grief. Even from a coaching perspective.
I’m so grateful to you Ally for sharing your perspective and it has made my attempt easier today.
Grief for me a tricky one, as a nurse in acute settings, especially my time in haematology and bone marrow transplant, I am wrapped in the grief and trauma people experience every day, every day I go to work. I was always puzzled as to why the younger nurses seemed to let themselves feel everything, not compartmentalise it and get on with life.
My strategies were to compartmentalise, to be busy – all the time – and I hiked, I tried to get outdoors on days off as much as possible. Years ago, I experienced grief associated with the suicide of my uncle, it was crippling and completely changed the direction of my life. I wanted to be numb and not participate in the world, in the end I went to counselling just so I could find space to breathe again and find myself. This experience both toughened me but also gave me the resourcing tools to deal with grief in my nursing career.
Years of nursing has hardened me, made me cynical, and I feel less able to fully empathise with people’s grief. It makes me uncomfortable and If I could go through my coaching career avoiding grief, I would give it a good crack. I’m not completely heartless, the initial stages of grief, the helping a client with resourcing to be with their grief I would willingly do, but I feel irked and (eyes roll), with those who have been in the cycle of grief for so long, they hold it close, stuck in the pattern, wanting to let it go only to grab hold of it tighter and round they go again. These people I want to slap and yell ‘life is for living, get the fuck on with it!’. I was this person for a period, in hindsight it was short, it took about two years for me to cycle through the depths of despair, wanting/not wanting help, and then slapping myself in the face and getting on with it.
Even reading, My stroke of insight and another book, Maybe you should talk to someone in recent years triggers this frustration and impatience.
I have successfully not addressed the assignment question at all.
I am now curious about these feelings of frustration and impatience that arise, what does grief mean to me, how do I want to show up for my client when grief inevitably enters the coaching space.
I’m looking forward to reading everyone’s perspectives.
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Summary
After an eighteen hour shift I find myself here wanting to finalise my thoughts and learnings on grief. My shift yesterday was like any other, short staffed and the pleaser in me was happy to accept the double shift when they had no one else. Exoecting to be home by 10pm, I was now looking at not being home until 8am the next morning and being awake for over 24 hours.
Eighteen hours straight on your feet looking after people at their most vulnerable is not ideal for either party. The fatigue is almost unbearable and by hour 15 I felt myself second guessing everything I was doing. I’m sure my more challenging (demanding) patients noted the frustration in my voice as I tried to politely assist them with their non essential needs at 3am.
One of my patients had been transferred from emergency for a trial of life, she was an 82 year old, septic and not a candidate for surgery so it was really up to her to rally. She was at a ceiling of care that anything further would entail ICU, which she wasn’t a candidate for. She had her family present overnight, thankfully her daughter was exempt from the COVID rules and able to be by her side as she laboured through the night.
I regularly tended to the patient, providing support to both, offering small gestures to the daughter so she wouldn’t feel so alone. Dealing with palliation in a medical assessment ward is not something you would choose for you family, it is open plan and offers little privacy.
On my final check to administer antibiotics, her breathing could be barely noted, she was cold clammy and no peripheral pulse. I found myself crippled by fatigue and froze, how do I tell her daughter she is passing away? Is she passing away? Am I delirious? Has she already passed? Should I have done something more?
I then had this overwhelming surge of grief, suppressing it I had to ask for the team leaders assistance to confirm what I already knew. I knew what needed to be done and did so accordingly but this grief that welled up inside, I could find no words or gestures to offer support. My suppressing of the feeling manifested in inappropriate humour, I was so tired I was going to cry if I didn’t.
Meanwhile, all the learnings of EBI swam in my head, the need for the grief to fully sequence, for me to draw on resourcing and remain professional. Something I would have had no issues with if fatigue wasn’t raging. When I finally drove myself home, I let the tears coming and then the sleep. I woke later today with a new perspective.
As my previous post said how I like to avoid the discomfort
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Response 2 @sophie-turner
Sophie, in some ways I can relate to your attitude around other’s grief. I had a parent who never sought help for their grief and growing up with that made me cynical and less able to empathize. I would roll my eyes and have that inner dialogue about just move on or take care of your shit already..It is okay to feel how you feel. Grief is complex. I’ve also be in cycles of despair mourning loss discovering more layers to it all. As a doula I’ve been in a hospital setting and have encountered long hours and unbearable challenging scenarios pushing me to my depths of preseverence. The grief or loss I witnessed during some births was in the form of the outcome the laboring mom wanted. Some outcomes of some clients was not what they wanted or imagined. For example a mom who wanted a natural vaginal birth instead had a cesearean birth. My role as guide advocate continouous compassionate care taught me how to be present in a sudden loss. I had no choice I agreed to be with them until the baby was born. Although I knew going into a birth that anything can happen the client didn’t expect the outcome and from a brain perspective any release of hormones that flow with birth are reduced with medication and possible stress response in a laboring woman. There is much notion of loss in maternity care and birth so I try to offer realistic direct frank scenarios to program the expecting parents brains for resourcing and empowered choices within a small scope of personal control. I think these tools and guidance can translate to non-birth clients who are grieving. I find when someone can consciously choose something in their life it supports them but also give them the self-autonomy even in challenging life events.
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Initial
The client I’ve worked with experienced the loss of her sister. Her sister’s death was anticipatory loss but brought her into the the cycle of grief nonetheless. I witnessed her experience of loss consume her with shock. I noticed it in her body and energy. Her facial expression. Her silence. Protest was presenting but in a subtle way as in her message to me that she couldn’t believe her sister was gone. What came up in her process later on was guilt. My client was a healer and was trying to sort out all the things that were not resolved or healed in her sister’s life that contributed to her death. After arranging all of the end of life responsibilities my client took charge of I didn’t notice obvious disorganization. She kept a lot to herself. She came from a family and culture that didn’t outwardly express strong emotions. My client actually quickly reorganized and maintained a baseline of character throughout my time with her. She did express extremely heavy sensations in her body in her heart but that had lifted with time. She kept her self busy by being engaged in a yoga community one that was even more valuable as a healing sanctuary/resource. In assessing where she might have been with this lens of The Cycle of Grief by Mary Kathleen Rose, I was able to track, assess and show up and navigate my role as coach more clearly. In the beginning of our relationship I had to lean into the competencies of coaching presence and establishing safety and deep listening. Instead of longer reflection and severence work I would add short concise questions to help her move through her life like “what’s next”. Then offer presence and listen for what she needed help with and tuned into who could support her what her network was like. I checked in with her about resourcing later on. She told me she had fallen away from her ritual of mourning which is what she wanted to get back to as a goal. I walked with her severence listening to what she named as distraction and how nature could support her through this. She wanted a sense of ease. Things had become so hard suddenly and she lost her focus in work and life. After the session she made her way to the beach her nature connection and back in flow with her mourning ritual of writing to her sister. This all taught me to deeply listen, try to see or learn what their environ is like and explore safe nourishing places in nature for support and processing loss and to identify mourning rituals that spontaneously arise and be present with all of that.
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Summary
I’m taking away the loss line we were taught. I thought that was brilliant and can be ritualized in transformational work. Also to treat my limbic system with self-honoring care. The more awareness and presence I bring to myself and my quest the more grounded and resourced I can be for my clients. I think now I feel more confident to address this in professional work as we all have some burden we carry we all have wounds and have experienced loss and there is a big conversation needing to happen around how to support in a healthy way that needs collective imput. I think the brain science will help people put into context what has been their experience with grief and loss. I think the trauma resourcing and nervous system regulation will pair well with offering hope for personal and collective change but I do see this is small intimate groups where safety is established first. The wounded inner child is calling for help I “feel” as an undercurrent to our adult lives. Let’s nourish our little one within.
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I feel so connected to what you have expressed here. The mere mention of grief also brings up a discomfort that feels unbearable. My mind starts to reach for distractions. The physical sensations are palpable.
I’m glad I am not the only one who put this off. Reading Jen’s reference to Jill Bolte Taylors “My Stroke of Insight” provides some context and reminds me that there is a physiological component to grief.
Thanks for sharing your resistance. It meant a lot to me to read your share.
Right now, I’m struggling with the gradual loss of my father as I knew him because of Parkinson’s disease. Somehow the notion that we all share grief brings some comfort.
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This intensive on grief was fascinating for me. Having grown up with my father, a surgeon, we often minimized the experience of grief and loss. It was liberating to open this concept up in my life and allow it the space it deserved. Having grown up this way I came to fear and avoid grief.
Having gone through the Gestalt portion of EBI, I came to view grief as a cycle of experience with many colorful layers. It needs time and space to cycle through the nervous system. This could take years and when the cycle of experience is denied as it often is in modern life, a person is limited stunted or suspended in limbo.
I often wonder if the some of the clients who seek coaching because they feel stuck are actually experiencing stunted grief.
When working with clients around grief, the one thing I have learned to do is allow space and work with the breath. Recently I had a client who cried for the entire session, and I simply sat with her and allowed the energy to cycle through. I’ve learned not to try to put a positive spin or reframe something that inherently sucks for the client. As a coach this would be disingenuous. I’ve come to realize that before transformation can occur the surrounding emotions must be allowed to process and move through, otherwise the affective filter will stifle any authentic change. Even when the changes are positive, their can still be a grieving period for the loss of the old way of being and the comforts it contained. Transformation and grief are closely connected. Words are like futile paddles in a boat tossing through a furious ocean- presence is really all we have in these moments. It has to be quality.
In facing grief, the coaching presence and relationship are key. Presence in the face of grief means being a witness and a safe support for authentic emotions to emerge. This can be an amazing gift in a society that continuously denies grief or lacks meaningful rituals for this deeply human experience.
I was recently in an West African dance class. There had recently been a death and a birth in the community. I was amazed at the way some of the dancers were moving- the emotion was like a current being expressed by their entire bodies. They were dancing the complexity of emotions cycling through the community, sorrow, loss, despair, celebration. I understood the movements from a deep place inside me- something human, but forgotten. I don’t quite know yet what to do with this information but it points me towards a desire to do some work with somatic experiencing perhaps as a next step in my professional training.
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In all of our intensives, the connections betwixt and between continue to be made for me. In this intensive one of the connections that landed very solidly for me was between the ways in which we can correlate guiding through grief and the stages of change. Because grief can be so uncertain (e.g., when will it hit us?, in what ways will it manifest?), there is some comfort to be found in a construct like Kubler-Ross’s five stages. Naming stages can provide otherwise absent mileposts and landmarks that can help a griever feel less untethered and lost. This is where I wondered about the stages of change that we discussed against the backdrop of the brain. Perhaps, where the brain is the hardware applied to stages of change, the mind is the software for the different aspects of grief.
Change is inevitable, and I would argue that grief is also inevitable. We discussed in Brain and Change that the “Termination” stage is not a destination upon which to set our sights. There are aspects of the Termination stage that will serve our continual changes, perhaps feed back into the loop of Maintenance and other stages. As we grow, mature, and arrive at different events and points in our lives, changes previously created will require maintenance, fine tuning, shifts, and new needs may inform new changes. I think the same is true with grief. Like with the stages of change, “getting over it” and/or achieving a feeling of being “complete” with grief is not a destination upon which we would set our sights in partnering with a client as a Guide. Similarly, there are aspects of grief that will serve our continual changes and evolutions as we move forward.
I found it curious that we were advised to beware of “stages” of anything that people look to as a standard or expected steps they “should” be going through. When discussing stages of change with our clients, we are sharing a tool. From one point of view, starting from guiding through change, there are connections that come to mind for me between any sort of life changes and grief for that from which we are evolving away. From another point of view, starting from guiding through grief, so too are there connections I see between any sort of grief and changes that evolve out of those processes. If we are providing a framework- perhaps Rose’s Cycle of Grief- we can guide as NCCs through ceremony and with ritual, in the same way we would in sessions that incorporate modalities like Partswork, and/or exercises like resourcing.
That’s where Prend’s “The Myth of Closure” helped bring it together for me. Within the microcycles of individual sessions and ceremony, there is incorporation. As we Guide through grief with ceremony, and with Nature as a partner, we are also within a macrocycle, over the course of any number of sessions, and there is another kind of incorporation and healing. In many ways, grief is associated with a loss of some kind, but it is not an absolute loss. There is the remaining energy of what was lost, the memories associated with it, and maybe there are physical reminders that remain. Even if we eradicate the physical, there will still be residual evidence of what was previously present.
The goal is not eradication with grief, just like the goal is not the stage of Termination with change. As guides, we are working with our clients to microcycle through ceremony, with incorporation, within the ever-present and ever-evolving macrocycle of healing. In my notes from the module, I wrote “people grieve when they can.” When I think about cycles and ages and stages, I also added to my notes that, in different places in their lives, and in different ways, “people will also grieve how they can.”
A question that came up for me during the module was, “In what ways does Nature grieve?” I feel sad that I know woefully little about this. What ceremonies and rituals exist in Nature after a loss is experienced? In what ways can I, one who humbly partners with Nature and stands in awe and wonder at the marvel and magnificence of Nature, honor those losses and support that grief?
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Summary
I have spent a great deal of time in this module reflecting on my experiences throughout my life of visiting the homes of those in mourning, and in the last 20 years, as a member of my synagogue’s Chevra Kadisha, a group that supports the preparation of a body for burial, the staying with the body until the time of burial, and also the mourner’s home and the week of shiva. When entering into any of these situations, especially that of a mourner’s home, a container has already been set, and we are doing our part to continue holding those sacred spaces. In the home of a mourner, it is customary that we do not speak first. We remain quietly with the mourners, and if they wish to talk, share memories, or ask us something, then we follow their lead and energy. If they wish to remain silent, our presence is the comfort, not our words. Just as we do as Nature-Connected Coaches and Guides, sometimes the deepest listening takes place when no words are exchanged at all.
Building off of that, I often think about the “point A to point B” description of Coaching and Guiding, and with grief there are no endpoints. By allowing one who is grieving the permission to engage and/or not engage in any sort of giving or receiving of language, we are not moving them away from the awareness that they are in the act of grieving. It’s all about allowing one to experience the grief. The hardest part, I think, is holding onto that and remembering that the permission does not expire, even after the “officially” recognized (e.g., days off from work, religious periods of mourning) timeframe is over. Holding onto that permission for our clients, while also guiding them on other paths, can be hard to lose sight of and crucial not to.
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