Take A Few Years to Heal

How we can't rush the journey of true growth

In the last few years I had some normal and expected losses and then some insane and painful events happen almost simultaneously and now that I am breathing well again I wanted to share my intensely honed belief that real healing requires a great deal of time. It just does. I have been a counselor sitting in the musty, dirty and on fire fox holes of grief and loss with many others and I know that real healing, the grace that can reknit our personalities and our souls, only comes after a long dark night. Sometimes a year or more or 3 or 5. Its just the truth. Stay with me here…

In our really whacky, ‘fast acting and empty relief ‘culture (Including most New Agey advice to be positive, everything happens for a reason nonsense etc.) this truth is not understood or honored. Our ancestors, who had to work harder and move slower than us did know this. They created and upheld rituals and special clothing and ways of helping and carrying people who had lost much, and in their own grief still helped others. They helped neighbors they didn’t like, they fed relatives who had not fed them, they knew that in order to stay sane and well, healing happens only in a living and breathing community.

When brutal losses happened to our distant people they were often given reverence and sometimes even a lifetime of understanding “She lost her husband and child” “He lost his family in the war” “She was never the same after her sisters died” “She was changed overnight when her son died.” No one expected those who had carried great grief to ever completely ‘move on and grow from the experience” and certainly not turn it into a workshop or a clever essay. I imagine most people got better and started to go through the motions of life, but some had to be carried, their hearts were too broken. In this age we may choose to carry others and may may need to be carried as well. Its the human way.

I think people in our age expect too much from themselves when it comes to healing deep losses. We pay for workshops and read books and keep ‘working on it’ while still deeply grieving. If we are not gentle with our hearts we can fall into a trap of berating ourselves for what is a human process. (I see this as late stage Capitalism in one of its ickiest cultural manifestaions. Hurry up and get back to productivity! Chop Chop! But this is another TED talk for another day)

Read the books, take the workshops, AND sob and take your time, lean into your pain until it wraps around you and teaches you what it needs too, until its fabric is part of you. Its not only the way to feel better, it is what happens anyway in time, even if we try to run, drink, smoke, eat and otherwise dodge it all away. If we don’t die of our wounds we come to love them a little.

So my own small story of painful losses is not much different than yours I am sure. I just experienced a weird, temporal anomaly where the losses were free falling and rapid and my best long term coping mechanisms were watered down to nothing and my heart exploded. Literally, I had an episode called Takotsubo Syndrome, or Broken Heart MI, a heart attack of emotional origin.

The amount of disturbing events sound crazy all laid out so Ill shorten the list, as to be believeable, I listed them in a note for this essay and decided all together they sounded unreal. I am still full of gratitude for everything good in my life, grateful for example that I am NOT living through war time or the loss of several family members at once, a child or my home and safety. And yet… my body digested too much pain in too short a time.

That’s one of my main points actually, sometimes our hearts have a hard time bearing a large accumulation of ‘lesser’ losses and yet, many of us are trainwrecked by the scale of smaller losses tipping over and stealing our health and mental well being. I coach my clients about this all the time. I remember the words of a very wise professor I had in Undergraduate Senior Seminar, Dr. Paul Finn. He was already about 50 or so and we were all bright and chipper 21 year olds who knew it all. (My parapharase of his widom is below, although I will never forget his GIST)

“I want you to remember this when you are about my age, and I will be long gone of course. You will have pain, you will have losses, and you may find that you make it through the job losses and being broke, Broken engagements, the bad health news, the infertility and the Cancer treatments, the loss of your parents that I hope you do all experience because otherwise it means you died young. (DRAMATIC PAUSE to make sure we were paying attention.)

“Its been my experience as a psychologist that people tend to really lose it when they have too many, rapid fire humiliations, wrong turns, slight betrayals, real betrayals, broken teeth and such. When too many of these small but real sufferings add up, and you are at a certain age (points finger toward himself) you may feel like you are insane. You cant avoid these times, they come to everyone eventually and they pass too and in fact they are really just mathematical anomalies, the skew of life… (he taught statistics!) I want you to rest and let yourself feel them, just as you would the big C or a death. Getting older and older is reallly hard if you don’t let it soak in and feel it, if you dont let yourself adjust.”

So, ignoring my wise former teacher’s advice, I had a heart attack, one called Takotsubo Syndrome, or Broken Heart Syndrome, and was quite ill, I experienced betrayal by two people I considered a life long connections, I was robbed of a large sum by an employee (who turned out to be a embezzeler) and had several deeply personal losses mixed in with these stand out events. It was enough disruption to rock my deep faith in humanity and myself and it was a challenge to not feel like a victim and I keep open to whatever ‘lessons’ the Universe was tossing at me.

I really wanted to bounce back better right away, but now, a year plus has passed and I can tell you I am finally feeling my Terminal Optimism return. I had to sit with the pain of accepting that not everyone I care for deserved my trust, not all I thought were kind and honest were so. I have recouped most losses and some I am actually now grateful for. But it took a full year of cocooning, reading, meditating, writing, making soup and accepting, accepting and accepting “life on lifes terms” as the 12 step wisdom tradition advises.

Please take your time to really heal if you faced deep losses, I don’t know and can’t say when it will be better but I know you will heal and this pile of pain will morph and change to a right sized lump. Give yourself time. Call your ancestors in for the passing of time, they know the way and will stay patiently for your quiet transformation. Ignore all the advice that doesn’t fit and open to new ways to be.