I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out:
“It tastes sweet. Doesn’t it?”
“You have caught me,” grief answered
“And you’ve ruined my business.
How can I sell sorrow when you know it’s a blessing?”
~ Rumi ~
These days it is ever present as the losses multiply. The loss of what we wanted and can’t have, of what we thought would happen and didn’t; the loss of safety as we interact with our neighbors and the people we care about; the loss of normalcy, of a sense of control over our choices and our futures; the loss of connection with our loved ones who remain out of geographic reach.
For people with developmental threat assessment disorders (Complex PTSD), grief presents deep challenges. Grief can trigger emotional flashbacks to a young and helpless limbic/emotional state when our need for attention and care was met with judgement, hostility, or neglect, instead of kindness, compassion, and care.
When we feel grief as an adult, it may cause a shame spiral–an “inner critic” attack (Walker 2013). This inner critic attack causes more catastrophizing and self-abandonment, until we are so full of fear or shame that we resort to our defensive trauma response behavior: flight, fight, freeze, or fawn. This is the self-abandonment cycle of Complex PTSD.
Our deepest mammalian hard-wired emotions are triggered by the losses and uncertainties in the pandemic. Our patterned responses to our own internal suffering keep us stuck in repeating patterns of self-abandonment. We do to ourselves what was done to us. If we are unable to mobilize self-soothing or self-compassionate behaviors, we will resort to self-abandonment when our deepest emotions are triggered.
Being able to stay present to all our feelings, especially grief, is a critical step in the process of reclaiming emotional health. A mindful meditation practice can help by increasing our ability to witness and accept our own emotions and internal processes without being reactive to our own feeling states. Mindful meditation builds the capacity for reflection. When deep grief is triggered, moments of reflection can restore our adult mentation, reminding us of who we are now. When we can stay in our adult brain and feel the feelings of our abandoned, sad, and wounded child, we can respond to that part of us with compassion and care. When we give ourselves what we needed as children—kindness, care, compassion—we break the cycle of self-abandonment.
Releasing grief restores autonomic regulation. Tears release cortisol, the primary fight or flight hormone. The importance of allowing tears to arise –to well up and out–cannot be overstated. Offering kindness and compassion to the wounded child inside, instead of judgement, shame, or abandonment, heals attachment pain.
The feelings we flight, fight, freeze, and fawn from (grief, sadness, shame, despair) were overwhelming and frightening to us as children because of how we were treated when we felt them, not because there is something inherently wrong with those emotions or with how we expressed them. If we learned to fear our emotions, it was because of a frightening or abandoning parental response. The emotion was normal: the response was not.
The depth of our ability to be there for an intimate generally depends on the depth of our capacity to practice unwavering allegiance to ourselves. (Walker, 2013)
Resources
- Gordon, James. The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma Harper 2019
- Hanson, Rick. Hardwiring Happiness; The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm and Confidence, Random House, 2013
- Kessler, David. Finding Meaning; The Sixth Stage of Grief. Scribner, 2019
- Levine, Peter. Trauma and Memory, North Atlantic Books, 2015
- Mellody, Pia. Facing Codependence. Harper Collins, 2003
- Van Der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score, Penguin Books, 2014
- Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Azure Coyote Book, 2013
- Wolynn, Mark. It Didn’t Start with You, Penguin, 2016