This does not mean that those who mourn are sick. This simply means that their lives have been turned upside down, tossed about like fruit [in] some kind of cosmic blender.
This does not mean that I am sick, depressed, or suffer from a disorder. This simply means that I am human. This means, too, that I opened my heart in love to another human being and when that person died, I felt their loss. Deeply.
We live in a society that tends to embrace the quick fix. We live in a society that is enamored with it's ability to medicate. And, I would say, that we live in a society that is not tolerant of grief, or those who are locked in the throws of this universal human experience.
Well, yeah. These 2 quotes from the article really hit home with me. Especially the cosmic blender, Hops -
From the Twiggy story - in the worst of what I experienced, I drew a tornado and a helicopter and bombs on a wall-papered suitcase of doll clothes. My mom (who knows WHAT she was thinking) had sent it to me, about the time I started therapy. As I started looking through a bunch of old pictures of me, from that time and started remembering finally - I thought of that suitcase and in a frenzy, dug it out of one of the stacks of "stuff" that filled my basement. And then, seeing it and touching it - like some clairvoyant imitation - it came back to me. I drew this for myself and my brother. Like Hansel & Gretl's breadcrumbs, I'd left myself a "clue" that expressed in pictures what we went through - since talking about it was a punishable offense with my mother and we weren't allowed to talk to anyone else, either. "It" never happened, according to my mother. (Alice in Wonderland is another really good metaphor for what my inner experience was like - except there was no Johnny Depp in mine.)
The tornado was the cosmic blender. The helicopter and bombs were an interpretation of the Vietnam era made personal - incoming bombs with no warning and no place to hide - no safe place. Everything in my life was topsy-turvy. Everything - including my ability to tell "real" from just feelings and thoughts... and my mom wasn't any kind of resource either: she took advantage of that state to gaslight me into her "version" of what happened and that "it was for my own good" to not have a clear memory of it. Because: according to her - I was just like her and not able to process my grief. What a crock of the "droppings of water buffalo".
I laughed & laughed - but didn't understand at all - when my T told me early in our sessions, that she was going to teach me how to "take an emotional shit". She didn't often use that kind of language... and I guess it was intentional; to make an impression on me. Now I realize, she meant to teach me to finally process all the grief that got laid aside in my Twiggy phase. Later, when I would ask - "WHY did all this come up NOW?" She said it was a mystery about the timing; that no one had any idea about what provoked it. But I now have a couple of ideas about the timing of it... the why's. But this other "thread" that I keep referring to and haven't started yet is where that goes.
Another of my crazy questions just came up this week - why is it, that some people resort to absolving themselves of responsibility completely and blaming other people, society, fate, whatever - while other people will over-blame themselves, kick themselves past the point of common sense... making the normal, unpleasant bad things of life even worse than what they are? (Don't answer that; I think I know... and it goes in this fictitious new thread.)
And all this is so pertinant to me, personally. My MIL who now lives with us, will be 83 in a month. We've become friends and I'm finding personal resolution of old grief, by being "allowed" to care for her in a useful way... in a way that works for her, in a way that supports her privacy and independence and relationship with other family members. A very close friend of mine is dealing with the immiment death of her Nmom, who's been declining with alzheimer's and dementia and just recently took a seriously bad turn for the worse. Friend's grief issue isn't her mom, however - it's with her dad, who for 60 years was a loving, devoted husband who never said a bad word or complained about the N in his life. He is punishing and blaming himself for not "fixing" her and resisting all efforts to take care of himself. Right now, he's sort of a "poster child" of that dangerous place in the grief blender that make the DSM folks think an "intervention" is necessary. Maybe; maybe not. I think what they're missing is that grief is more personal than even sex, you know? It's a "life change" of the whole person, too. A natural transition and not an illness, despite all the the outward appearances. And many, many people make it through that dangerous place just fine. I tend to think my friend's dad will be one of these, even though it doesn't appear that way, right now.
