When experiences like this happen when you are already living with trauma, already stressed & overwhelmed, already pushed way past our emotional capacity to cope with life – then adding a heavy emotional load to a nervous system that is frazzled and overloaded can take us into terribly dark and painful places.
I spun out of control in silent circles of grief.
I was smashed and bruised and in utter pain.
And I didn’t know how to get support.
Even the idea of getting support felt too wildly painful. I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want it to be acknowledged because to speak about my loss felt to me like a risk of completely falling apart.
So many of us are not used to feeling supported, and so when traumatic experiences happen, the support itself can feel too risky, too dangerous.
When we have learnt to sit alone in our pain, it often takes great healing to be able to even accept support. To stay alone, silent in our pain can feel, weirdly, safer.
Now – looking back on my journey of over the past 16 years with this – I do feel grief for the loss. But now I also feel so much grief for the tender-hearted woman who was so lost, so unable to seek support, so unable to do anything but hold herself so tightly and just white knuckle her way through her grief.
I held my three year old son too tightly. I held my breath for what felt like a year, hoping no one would mention my loss.
I created pat phrases for the people who brought it up, trying desperately to shut them down before I shattered inside.
I held beta blocker pills in my purse at all times for the racing-heart panic attacks that I suffered from.
I listened to Buddhist talks and played solitaire all night as insomnia plagued me for 9 months. I tried to dampen the pain with alcohol, but it didn’t even touch the pain.
As with all human experiences, time is a great healer. Time was the only healer I had to lessen the raw intensity of the grief.
But as I mentioned, the grief was still inside me, requesting, calling, shouting out my name, hoping I would one day stop and tend to it.
My grief yearned for space and acceptance.
It wanted to be acknowledged
It was desperate for my love and tenderness.
For connection with other people who understood.
My grief needed to be seen.
And so the work to release this from my body was slow and gentle.
Building safety in my nervous system so that my emotions didn’t feel dangerous to me anymore.
To give myself time to let grief come into my body, let it fill my heart with sadness, let it push tears from my body. To gently let my grief come up and be fully felt. To release it little by little.
And for me building that safety in my nervous system was the only way to be able to feel everything that I needed to feel.
When we have grown up, as many of us do, without emotional safety, without someone who was able to hold us through the ups and downs of our emotional life, then it’s very hard for us to be with the full spectrum of sensations of our emotions as adults.
To be able to let ourselves cry and feel the aching pain in our hearts – so that that Grief has space to be felt.
To feel loss that is also tinged with something else, a love, a recognition of the love that was there before the loss.
Allowing the sadness to build up and emerge. Letting someone hold us -physically or emotionally – as we cry.
Allowing ourselves to be supported.
And by feeling all of the grief from all that we have lost, all that has been painful – we get to then feel all of the other spectrum of beautiful emotions – love, joy, peace. All of it.
Many of us enter the new year not as bright sparkly excited beings, but as human beings carrying the weight of the human experience in its many diverse forms.
My commitment to myself is not to ignore the ‘bad feelings’ or try to get them to stop.
But to know every single emotion has a purpose.
To grieve is to know that we have also loved. To acknowledge loss is to know that we are human.
Now I honor all that I carry. I stay connected to myself and recognise everything that is happening to me – to allow the joys and sorrows, the whole human experience.
To honor everything that I feel and experience – and support myself with infinite tenderness, love, understanding and compassion to myself.
And I have learnt that when I tend to myself, when I honor all that I carry, when I allow the grief and sadness, and whatever else I feel, the attention and love that it is seeking – then I also open up to the wild beauty and joys of this world.
And my heart is full of love. So much love.
I can now rest in the strong arms of my husband as he hugs me. My husband who can now hold me, as I can hold him, in everything that we experience.
Because we have both learnt the power of creating safety in our nervous system to allow all of the human emotions the space that they need.
If this feels helpful, of use to you, I would like to leave you with some questions.
What are you carrying into 2025? What do you need to honor in yourself?
What might be seeking tenderness, support, understand and love?
Where can you bring more compassion to yourself and your experiences?
And do you have a sense of what you need right now? What are your emotions asking you for?
Whatever you are carrying I honor you, and send you love and tenderness for all of it.
