From My Couch To Your Couch Ep.2-Soul To Soul: Emancipation Through Healing
Category: Grief
The Authorship To Your First Love Story and Heartbreak Belongs To You: Mother’s Day Edition
We are entering into the season of honor for parenthood, with the arrival of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, which often evokes a wide range of emotions and expression of these primary relationships that mark our first love story or our first heartbreak. First up, of course is Mother’s Day.
The relationship with mothers and children can be quite complicated. This has become more evident with social media playing its public part in the celebration and sorrow of this day, where we’re reflective on our experience of our mothers, which shapes our multilayered lens of motherhood.
Mother’s Day is a pretty straight forward and beautifully, honorable day when it comes with the gift of physical connection and emotional availability, as well as the ongoing life evidence of unconditional love. Even for those of us whose hearts are heavy with the physical departure of our mothers on this day, there is still a blessing in missing the physical connection of the nurturing relationship with your mother. There is a privilege of having a treasure chest of memories of her love that carries you beyond her earthly presence.
This day becomes a bit more complicated when you have to mourn the difference between the hallmark gestures of motherhood and possible limitations and absences you actually endured. There are individuals mourning the emotional and physical absence of mothers still living on this day, as well as mourning the forever lost opportunities for any possible joint healing and mending that wasn’t afforded prior to the loss of their mother. While people are preparing, attempting, or proactively healing these first love stories and heartbreaks; language to accompany this healing is constantly being explored, developed, and evolved. This is where it becomes important to remember that people’s relationship with their parents belongs to them. And though advice on how someone “should” be, feel, or speak about their parents might come with good intentions, ultimately it’s a hi-jacking of another’s journey to make sense and fit with your own (whether you have similarities or differences within your own maternal love story.)
If you find yourself being triggered by how another expresses their feelings and experiences of motherhood, remain curious and follow through with why it’s causing a disturbance within you. This moment is more about a lesson and guidance to you than it is about a relationship you have no ownership of (even if that other person is a sibling…being born to the same person does not equate to the same experience of that person for various factors.) I implore you to show up in your truth of celebration, honor, and grief and allow others to do the same.
A child’s physiological wellbeing is determined in utero from their mother’s physical and emotional wellbeing within her world, as well as how it’s nurtured once birthed or bonded (inclusive of motherhood via adoption and surrogacy) in the mother’s maintenance of her wellbeing. The depth of that visceral connection remains in the shaping of that child and their movement over the course of their life. Let’s remember the magnitude of the parent child dynamic and allow everyone the authorship to his or her first love story and/or heartbreak.
Be blessed in your happy, memories, and/or healing this Mother’s Day!
Written By:
Shameitra N. Green, LMFT
*Shameitra Green is a psychotherapist and founder of her private practice, Nexus Therapy, where she serves adolescents, adults, and families in Pearland.TX and surrounding areas. Shameitra’s client populations includes individuals and families dealing with complex trauma and PTSD, survivors of neglect and sexual abuse, grief, and attachment disorders. Shameitra also provides trauma informed trainings and consultation to assist with agencies, schools, and trauma professionals in enhancing their trauma informed best practices.
The Tangled Web Of Grief In The Midst Of COVID 19
Grief
simply put, but not as simply felt, is mourning the loss of how you know your
world to be. And COVID-19 is all aspects of loss from physical, mental,
emotional, financial, and spiritual practices. The grief of COVID 19 has struck
us in that extreme visceral manner that frightens us the most, as it’s been
sudden, unexplainable, unending, expanding, and debilitating.
As I have been physically distant while socially connected, I have commiserated
as the hours, days, and weeks have passed in the loss of celebratory milestone
events such as birthdays, graduations, and weddings; communal outings such as
sports, concerts, festivals; and self care regimens such as gyms, salons, and
barber shops that offer joy in the midst of the mundane. All big, not small,
because each of these moments represent the lighter side, the sighs of relief,
and the answered prayers to the heavy lifting and demands of life.
However, there is another side of living that is just as tender and finds
itself being stolen away by COVID-19, and that would be in the memorialized
traditions of those recently and increasing in years departed loved ones.
The thing with grief is not only does the mind remembers, but the body remembers
too. And often times grief is triggered because your muscle memory detects it’s
been here before when evoked by a current situation while your mind catches up
to the recall and connection of when. If you are an individual who is
experiencing the death anniversary (angelversary) of a loved one, or within
the intense year coined The Firsts without your loved one, or in the most
unfortunate place of having lost a loved one where the rites of
passage/arrangements of a funeral or memorial is being delayed or shifted;
these unforeseen times of COVID 19 has created an intersecting and layered mess
of grief (as though it needed to be more tangled than this process naturally
is.)
So here are some reminders to help tend to the multifaceted grief within the
COVID-19 times:
1.) Stay curious to yourself. Initially your only job is to notice your
emotions and their associated thought. This does not equate to needing to do
anything about it just yet…just NOTICE so you can lend a name, a physical
sensation, an energy, etc. to your being.
2.) Try as best you can to think back to the most recent time or last time you
have been here (felt this) before (again… the body remembers as well.) This
can help you to not minimize or displaced your grief and give yourself a more
accurate measure of your needs in your grief process.
3.) Allow for your emotions to arrive and exit. All emotions need is the
permission to be acknowledged and accepted and what follows is insight into your
process of allowing them come and go. What eventually happens is you give
yourself evidence that feeling your feelings will not be the demise of you,
which decreases you experiencing yourself as an emotional threat. This evidence
becomes your resourcing and reminder that you will be ok on the other side of
the emotional tsunamis of the ongoing grief process.
4.) Continue to honor your traditions in remembrance of your loved ones as best
as you can in what feels right for you. For some it maybe turning inward and
removing the noise of the news and social media. For others it may be the
lighting of a candle symbolizing your loved one’s light and presence, or taking
some time to look at family photos to reminisce. Or it could simply be finding
a safe place for a moment to let your heart express it’s missing and longing
for your loved one through tears. Your traditions may shift during these times,
but they do not have to be lost.
5.) Reach out to family and friends in transparency about your grief. We are
all being stretched in our new normal, so normal anniversary check ins or check
ins specific to your loss may shift some. Try not to take it personal and use
this opportunity to show up for yourself in sharing what you need in support.
Because the people who love you still want the opportunity to love on you as
best as they can.
6.) Remember to speak your loved ones names through memories and the missing of
them. There’s a fear of being a burden or “Debbie Downer” during the grief
process, and this can heighten in these COVID 19 times where we are all aware
of collective struggles. However, there is also a collective empathy on the
rise because we are on the same emotional continuum together. Grief is a
collective theme right now and transparency is the open door to a virtual
support group many didn’t know they needed until authentic connection made it
so.
This leads me to my last aspect of grief I feel is necessary to mention.
Many people might find themselves feeling better in their grief process, amid
the woes of COVID 19, and please understand this is normal as well. Often times
in grief people feel alone, as if the world keeps turning as normal while their
whole world has been halted to a screeching stop and forever changed. Being
that the world, in a sense, has been halted and operating in abnormal and
unfamiliar ways, it’s possible for a grieving individual to feel more
understood and connected in this universal disarray. It is human nature to want
to feel understood in our most vulnerable moments, and the grieving process
carried the emotions of and struggle with the experiences of social isolating
and distancing well before we all simultaneously held the grievances of Corona
(COVID 19)
Written
by:
Shameitra N. Green, LMFT
Founder of Nexus Therapy
*Shameitra Green is a psychotherapist and founder of her private practice, Nexus Therapy, where she serves adolescents, adults, and families in Pearland. TX and surrounding areas. Shameitra’s client populations include individuals and families dealing with complex trauma and PTSD, survivors of neglect and sexual abuse, grief, and attachment disorders. Shameitra also provides trauma informed trainings and consultation to assist with agencies, schools, and trauma professionals in enhancing their trauma informed best practices.
Therapy: A Radical Act of Self Care and Discovery
Often
times when we are culturally given permission to claim and stand firm in our
mental, emotional, or physical spaces; we hear statements such as “Do You” or
“Speak Your Truth.” But what often happens is this reclamation of independence
is celebrated, until reality sets in that to “Do You” and “Speak Your Truth”
comes at a cost. The cost of unraveling the “you” that was handed to you along
the way through the relational lens of family, peers, career, spirituality,
etc.
At the unraveling stage of healing, you start to
feel like a stranger to yourself which makes this thing called therapy, a
resource to help you, feel like it’s the very thing that threatens you….
should you fight, flight, or freeze? No! You should stay and BE because this
first stage is needed for you to learn how to not operate and respond on
autopilot in all the ways you adapted through your survivor mode to past
traumas or direct/indirect messages of how you accessorized others’ sense of
well-being. This is the stage where you start to become aware and pay attention
the “hmmms” and “ahhhs” of your intuition that you disconnected from or stop
trusting at a certain point.
The bridge stage of healing soon follows which
is the phase of healing where you start to feel a little more settled in your
healing space and realize your resilience is stronger that your fear of
unraveling…..and honestly you have already done the hardest part which is
surviving. During the bridge phase, you start to recognize you can’t logic your
way out of your emotions and you can’t feel yourself away from your thoughts.
You need to connection of mind, body, spirit to honor and recognize the
totality of your human experience through your wounds and your healing. In
survivor mode, the bottom part of our brain becomes active as the upper parts
shut down to prepare for the objective at hand to just survive some way some
how. Our bodies and mind then continues to form a habit around what we know to
work in our physical and emotional times of need, which is compartmentalizing
or approaching life through “black and white” terms. The problem with that is
while surviving works through compartmentalization, living and healing works
through connection of whole being. The bridge stage starts to merge all the
pieces of you and evokes the questions “what of my past do I keep because it
informs and serves my direction, growth, and goals?” “What part of my past do I
need to thank for getting me this far, but I now need to let go because holding
it beyond it’s immediate purpose is starting to hinder my direction, growth,
and goals?”
The interdependence stage is the later phase of
healing where you understand the importance of defining, re-defining, and
claiming your own sense of self, while accepting that the quality of connection
with others serve as a reflection and periodic self inventory to how you
nurture or neglect your care of self. I intentionally did not state this as the
end of healing, because healing is not a linear process and life is a delicate
balance of surviving, existing, and thriving. The attention in this stage is on
self-preservation. The rules for this stage are the development and
re-development of boundaries. The practice of this stage is accountability. And
the on going question of this stage is “where do others end, where do I begin,
and do we make for a healthy or unhealthy blend?”
To walk into an unfamiliar space with an
unfamiliar face to put into question the known of survival and/or dysfunction
and commit to the unknown towards healing is therapy at its essence. Now THAT’s
a radical act of self-love and discovery that deserves to be revered as the
strength it is!
Written by:
Shameitra N. Green, LMFT
Founder of Nexus Therapy
*Shameitra Green is a psychotherapist and founder of her private practice, Nexus Therapy, where she serves adolescents, adults, and families in Pearland. TX and surrounding areas. Shameitra’s client populations include individuals and families dealing with complex trauma and PTSD, survivors of neglect and sexual abuse, grief, and attachment disorders. Shameitra also provides trauma informed trainings and consultation to assist with agencies, schools, and trauma professionals in enhancing their trauma informed best practices.
