How the grief lands

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Grief hits people in different ways. To me its a definite process. As I write this I sit within it. Like a tree with its core hollowed out. It feels personal and lonely. It is mine. 

My recovery is not special but it is complex. My trauma has been interlaced with loss. Loss of a sister to suicide and the loss of a father who I never had a relationship with and who caused a lot of the family pain. I am coming to a place of peace. The journey to get there has been brutal. Physically, mentally, within and without. Family, friends, work colleagues have to exist in the field you create and when the material you are carrying overwhelms, there is only one place it can go. 

How do I know I am coming to the end? I am highly tuned to my process after 11 years of cyclical behaviour that has increased in intensity over time. As I have, in parallel built the capability to carry my pain, the emotion has stayed within to be processed, not released (as much) outwards in tears or migraine. There has been a shift over the 11 years and I am coming to a place of compassion and acceptance. The day to day reality of that process is too much to share in one post, but it will come out over the coming weeks and months and I hope, help others recognise that the body knows what it's doing.  

It is very hard to describe what grief feels like. Depth varies and for me it is linked to the depth of the awareness or awakening to a reality that I'd covered up my whole life. I have a saying I like to use; "It's always self". This is cognitively easy to understand, we read it, we absorb it - you can't change the world, you can only change yourself. Whilst I believe with all my heart that this is true, the ego, the matrix of behaviours you have created to remain safe will do all they can to sabotage everything rather than accept the dissolution of self. Of course. Something that's kept you safe for 50 years is not going to go without a fight, and if you're the kind of person who has survived deep trauma and grief, you are also the kind of person that is going to take a lot of (self) convincing.  

The dissolution. It comes in waves. It is part of the grief. It is the grief. It is acceptance that something is not as you've created it in your mind. It is living your life backwards to understand the impact of that belief system. It is a realisation that how you adapted to keep safe was not your fault but what you were exposed to. It is a physical release from a nervous system that's wired not to let go and whatever is released is flooded into your body for final processing. It is brutal. It is not something I would wish upon anyone. 

I know I am close because the release and the grief I am dealing with now is based on patterns that I created before I learned language. Patterns that have permeated every relationship I have ever had. I know why. I know how. But when you're sat in it, it still hurts.  

 

 

 

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