Digging Deep, Part II: looking in the mirror

In my Thanksgiving article last November, I wrote about gratitude and grief prompted by the phrase: ‘Grief is love with nowhere to go.’ It resonated deeply because my father had become extremely frail 18 months before and I was already grieving for him.

‘I’ve learned much about grief over my lifetime: it’s impossible to live a full life without experiencing many losses and endings including the deaths of loved ones. There is no neat timeline for when we are ‘done’ and the way we grieve is complex and different for each person, dependant on many factors, including our early experiences of attachment…i.e. how we first learn to relate…our experiences of endings and our early experience of change: was it generally positive or challenging/traumatic?

We grieve because of an ending of someone or something. For many years, I cut myself from feeling an ending, protected by my default defence mechanism of ‘intellectualisation’, i.e. over-rationalising and staying safely in my head. This served me very well: I did not have to feel regret or the raw pain of loss. I would bury any pain and rush to the next chapter, the relief of a new beginning.

Of course, this inevitably meant I carried all that unprocessed grief with me: to the next relationship, the next job, the next country, the next ‘whatever’. It grew worse; each supposedly fresh start brought accumulated, heavier baggage. The more I ran, the more I came back to the same emotionally stuck place. Nothing ever really changed. Until one day, several years ago, I was forced to stay and face an ending. I had run out of places to run, and I had to stay and face what I was most afraid of…me. This is what Gestalt therapy calls the ‘futile void’. It is a very scary place, the unknown with no certainty or guarantee of outcome. It is why many keep pulling back from this place, why they keep spinning in the ‘busy fool syndrome’, filling it with noise, anything not to stay in their stillness and face the void. It’s also why many try and ‘fix’ those in the futile void with banal clichés like: ‘Everything will be fine!’  Digging Deep

My father finally passed in late March, 7 weeks ago, and I have been deep in my ‘futile void’ grieving, trusting this was where I needed to be. It has helped enormously that I began grieving two years ago when my father was first hospitalised, extremely ill and frail, and I could see the man I knew disappearing fast: I knew that was the beginning of the end.

I was also grieving for the ending of my ‘Family of Origin’ as my mother had died 2 years before. Our ‘Family of Origin’ is the first family we are born into… or adopt…as babies. We can then have many subsequent, including non-blood, families but the significance of our Family of Origin is that this is where our first emotional bonds were formed, it’s how we learned to relate to others and how to express…or swallow…our feelings. It is also where we acquire our emotional and psychological blueprint for our self-concept, imbibing, often unhealthy and unconscious. messages that shape our beliefs, behaviours, and emotional responses in our present world.

I knew that evening two years ago when I first began grieving for my father, that it was ‘right’ even if it didn’t make immediate sense to me. And I knew not to retreat into my old default defence mechanism of ‘intellectualisation’, staying rigidly stuck in my head. As the Jungian Psychotherapist James Hollis says: ‘It is your defences, not your original wound that cause the problem and arrest your journey.’ So instead of dismissing my feelings, I surrendered and allowed myself to feel the fullness of my loss: I howled and wept and felt the raw pain of unbearable grief. It was simultaneously very painful but also deeply cathartic and I kept listening to my instinctual body…my Physical Intelligence, PQ… letting that guide me, not my head which was very disapproving, telling me not to be so dramatic and that my father was not dead yet. I also knew at a very deep intuitive level that I needed to do this now, that this would free me to see and think clearly in readiness for what lay ahead.

And so it proved. It took two years and many crises, with my father’s health but also within the family: anyone who has been through the dissolution of a family of origin will know how intense this can be. There are a lot of landmines and egos to navigate! And of course, it’s not been exclusively about sadness and grief: as can often happen at such times, my beautiful granddaughter was born 8 months before my father’s death, a joyful reminder of exuberant vitality and…crucially…the precious circle of life.

Through the ‘futile void’ depth of these last 7 weeks, I have received the most extraordinary love and kindness that has touched my heart more deeply than I can express. I might be grieving for my father and the end of my family of origin, but I have been profoundly reminded I have many families…both blood and non-blood…and that I am much loved. It has made all the difference to my healing.

In stark contrast, I have also been struck and troubled by how many people responded in panic and with great awkwardness. I first became forcibly aware of this when my mother brutally died of Covid in 2021. I had just left her in the hospital, very shaken and shocked, and I unwisely checked my iPhone: there was a message from an HR/People Director asking me to respond to a non-urgent client request. I wrote back briefly saying that I would do so very soon but that my mother had just died of Covid. Within minutes, he responded saying: ‘I hope your mother gets better soon!’ I was astonished and could have reacted very angrily but this was a man who prided himself on his people skills and I knew he would have been mortified by what he’d done. His response told me many things about him: I already knew he was very stressed and close to burn out and obviously hadn’t read/digested my message; but beyond this, for all his pride in his people skills, he had reacted in panic. I chose not to point out what he’d done, but it did give me pause and question his current suitability in his role.

I had forgotten this incident until I began to experience similar reactions over these last 7 weeks. In response to the greeting, ‘How are you?’ I would reply gently and calmly: ‘I’m ok but my father has just died.’ Initially I was shocked by some extraordinary reactions, including panicked exits and wildly off-key remarks, but then my professional research-self kicked in, and I began to test what was going on. At first, I thought it was about culture, gender, age, nationality etc. but that didn’t pan out: the most beautifully empathic response sometimes came from the unlikeliest person. So, I began to dive deeper. What was causing these reactions? Was it the word ‘death’ that panicked them about their own mortality; was it a triggering of unprocessed grief of their own; was it simply an ignorance about what to say in this context; or was it more than that: an inability and/or unwillingness to be with emotions, their own or others?

As I continued my research, I’ve arrived at this understanding: it comes back to our relationship with endings and how we respond to great change, i.e. going into the unknown, that ‘futile void’. And the constant factor I’ve witnessed regarding how we respond to change and the unknown is our mindset: do we have a Change/Growth Mindset or a Fixed Mindset, like my old defence mechanism of ‘intellectualisation’? Then, I was clinging anxiously to what I thought I could control and fiercely fighting what I couldn’t. For many people in this binary mindset, anger is the only acceptable emotion permitted, and it is never expressed healthily. For this is a power struggle…kill or be killed…a refusal to let go into the unknown, including opening up to feelings, our own or others. And it’s also about ego, an arrogance that I know best and my way is the only way, so other ways of being, thinking or feeling are experienced as very threatening. This combination of control and ego manifests in doing great harm to others and to ourselves, attacking whatever cannot be reduced… including emotions and experiences…to quantifiable, materialist terms: i.e. if I can’t touch it or understand it, it does not exist.

Why does all this matter? Why does it matter to be open-minded and also take responsibility for our emotions and reactions, i.e. to look in the mirror? As a lone individual living on an island, it might not matter that we stay stuck in our heads, that we stay rigidly to our world view. But we are not lone individuals. Our thoughts, feelings, words and actions have great impact on others and the more power we have, the greater the impact. I’ve learned that it is in times of great transition that all this really matters. It is very tempting to revert to toxic and destructive thinking and behaviour that will keep us stuck and isolated. But it is having the courage to keep our minds and hearts open, to look humbly in the mirror for where we need to change and to connect empathically with others that will guide us through to that new beginning, that new chapter of life and hope.

Hannah Elizabeth Greenwood