Nearly forgotten, but not quite

May 2018.

     Suddenly I realize I’ve practically forgotten the copy deadline for May’s article. It’s after midnight and Friday. Yikes.  I haven’t missed an issue of The Nimbin Good Times since writing for this paper in March 2009, and I can’t start now. So, what to write about?

     I’ve been thinking a lot about intergenerational trauma in recent times as I see the effects frequently among my clients. I have people coming to me with feelings of high anxiety, sleep issues, and accompanying digestive problems that are not easily simply understood from personal histories, per se, but suggest that something more is going on.  Some deep questioning from me often reveals a pattern of anxiety and depression shared by the parents and grandparents of my clients, and often shaped by war experiences and alienation from family at critical times.

     I remember working some years ago, with a man with sleep problems and associated weight issues (weight problems is identified in the literature as being associated with long term insomnia) whose mother experienced bombs going off in London as a little child. She couldn’t trust enough to sleep properly and was, and remains, always on edge and anxious. Her cortisol levels must have been through the roof.

     Cortisol is a hormone that is released in response to stress and is known as the ‘flight or fight hormone’.   It is also associated with maintaining blood pressure, and anti-inflammatory and immune processes. Interestingly, cortisol also works in tandem with the hormone insulin to manage constant blood-sugar levels, so it plays a part in digestion.  High cortisol levels are associated with diabetes, a condition my client also had.

     At an epigenetic level, my client was likely affected by the experiences of his mother a nearly three decades before his birth, and not just from the stories that she may, or may not have told her son. Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene function that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence itself. Bodies don’t forget, it seems, and they hand down the generations their imbalances created by trauma. Trauma upsets nervous systems across the board that impact on the whole health of the descendents.  It becomes critical that those who seek counselling receive it with reference to trauma therapy and not merely symptom control. Good therapy is thus, in my view, a depth psychotherapy that really helps shift those levels of fright-flight-fight reactions to more than manageable levels.  Really good therapy frees up the whole self so that the energy previously captured in iterative anxious responses now becomes available for creative output and innovative work and play practices.  Clinical hypnotherapy is often useful alongside counselling in this process, but that is the client’s choice.

     I am always interested in that coming to a place of playfulness from the tensions of hardline panic because then the whole being of the self is softened, loosened, and ready for new experiences. The client can then move on to what really excites and motivates them, and, what’s more the memories of difficulties are practically forgotten.  It’s a curious thing, this forgetting, because it is possible to see that there has been fundamental change at a more than cellular level. The whole person is lively, fitter, glowing, and sort of bouncy. What was once a stuck problem story is now recounted with how things once were, with only a little bit of the pain previously experienced.

      Remembering the trauma experienced by an antecedent family member or members helps the client recognize that their own symptoms don’t necessarily reflect anything they themselves have done, or not done, and this fact often contributes to a freeing up from some aspects of the symptoms of anxiety they have felt. It shifts the experiences to a sense of something that can be witnessed as opposed to drowned in. So a chance to speak of such things to a therapist is really useful.

     Another side effect of doing therapy with a counsellor is that the changes experienced translate into changed family dynamics and even family members realign to more healthy choices. Interesting stuff. And now to bed.

    

Relationships and the matter of grief

April 2018

     The stages of grief a person goes through after the death of someone known to them are typically described as: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, or DABDA. This is the formula taught to medical students and grief counsellors the world over, since it was first described in 1969 by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying.  DABDA advanced our understanding of the grief process, for sure, and did much to illuminate what had become an embarrassing situation for dying patients and their families alike. Death in our society, after all, is often felt as a somewhat awkward life event, treated in subdued tones behind closed doors. With the advent of research and the institution of counselling sessions for those who have suffered the death of a friend, spouse, parent or child, the five stages of grieving became the bench-mark for not merely understanding the emotional process of facing death, but practically prescribing how it will be.  Non-DABDA responses to death such as relief and or even joyfulness came to be “read” by some as not facing facts, thus practically pathologizing what might be a right response for that person according to the quality of relationship they had with the person who died.

     There really isn’t a “right” way to grieve and we need to recognize this. Loss can be liberating, it can engender sadness and happiness at the same time, it can be felt as desperately sad, it can be felt as not much at all. The rubric of DABDA doesn’t recognize the complexity of relationships, and thus the multiple possibilities of feelings and expressions of loss. This matters because we are often quick to judge those who do not express feelings of loss, as being hard hearted, unsympathetic, robotic – and sometimes impute, wrongly, an intent that may be utterly fanciful (the person wanted the other dead, or maybe they did it, or some such). May not a relationship fluctuate between love and hate? May not a person die in stages and that a final cessation of being be greeted with relief and not grief?  May not the dead person have already been absent for many years (“dead” to family and friends) before their actual passing? Maybe one's spouse died suddenly after a violent argument, or maybe they died just before divorce. One may indeed have felt deep love once, but the release from a profoundly difficult situation may well have elicited plain relief rather than grief. Loss is not always simple and grief may not be always present.

There is considerable social pressure put upon those who experience relief, rather than grief – such is the pressure of the social expectations encapsulated in the DABDA concept – so that they may go on to wonder about the authenticity of their own responses. Perhaps there is something wrong with them, perhaps they ought to feel pain, why don’t they feel pain, they might think.  Those looking on may wonder at this silence of a response and suggest it hides inner turmoil, denial, even depression perhaps, and yet who is to say that there is conflict there at all? The pressure brought to bear from within oneself and from family, friends, and counsellors, can hinder an honest, authentic statement about what is really felt. Maybe, the very act of getting real  with a client or friend about death could liberate actual feelings in the pair of them. The listener can do well to provide that space for deep listening. We really do have to listen to what is actually said and not be too quick to suggest that a response is lacking in some way. Maybe until we do that our judgement is clouded by our own discomfort.

There are no rules to how grief is to be done; there are only responses to the quality of the relationship a person had with the one who has passed. That is what is important here; that is what matters.