Wednesday's Woe - Denial After 6 Years?! ~Tommy and Angie Prince

Every day since you've been gone, there's such an isolating loneliness and an aching so deep inside; it's a feeling that fills my head, my heart, my eyes and my ears, a feeling that steals away the joy, leaving only the torment of my tears. And every day when this feeling comes, the power and intensity is like a thousand drums pounding in my heart tearing me apart.

My heart and I will never get used to your being gone.

Wednesday's Woe

Denial After 6 Years?!

~Tommy and Angie Prince

To deal with the reality of what happened to our child, we could not function with such reality "in our face" all the time. As psychoanalyst Otto Rank describes, it is neurotic to not face our live's truths, but it is also neurotic to face our harsh truths at all times. We do need to process the death of our child into our brains, our psyches, our bodies, our souls, etc. But we also need to take some breaks from such harsh reality at times to give our poor systems a breather. We have to face death and yet live at the same time, so it becomes a living nightmare.

We talk about life's rhythms. One thing that can stop our life's rhythm in its tracks is to momentarily "set aside" your child's death by becoming busy with life, then happen to glance at a picture of her you haven't seen in a long time ~ a flash of normalcy at some other time in your life comes face to face with the harsh reality of her death. What???! NOOO!!!! That couldn't have happened to my baby, not that!!! Not in her young life!!! The very striking picture of her screams out "Beautiful Life in All its Normalcy." But, No!!! You're "Chutes and Laddered" back down to 'Start" in a second's time. Square One. Day One of your grief. And the pain comes tumbling down over your heart like a freight train to where you wonder if you will survive...

Thursday's Therapy - The Disruption of Life's Rhythm

Grief requires us to re learn the world by putting our lives back together after the loss, and by coming to terms with the pain and anguish that accompany the devastation caused by it in our lives. Over time we move from being our pain, being totally absorbed in it, to having our pain where there is a residual pain and sadness in our hearts.

~Wings of Hope-Living Forward

Thursday's Therapy

The Disruption of Life's Rhythm

~Tommy and Angie Prince

Six years into our Child-Loss Grief, we are still discovering what we can and cannot handle. 

One of the things that has been disrupted this past month is Our Life's Rhythm. We can be derailed so easily, and the energy we have to expend to regroup, and recover the rhythm, to some degree is almost more than we can garner. Through being triggered, becoming hypervigilant, not being able to get a good night's sleep for days in a row, developing digestive disturbances, to having strained relationships in the family, there's a compromised state that renders us even weaker than we were, to where it is a real fight to find a Life Rhythm, especially with the sadness that's always there, with the Child-Loss trauma that's always there, the devastation that's always there in our whole soul, our whole being, and our whole outlook on life. 

With hypervigilance, our body has been compromised with a lack of sleep, and triggered by the realized awareness of our close friends' or relatives' reactions to our very real Child-Loss changes due to the impact of our grief and trauma. It is like a mirror being held up to our already-grieved selves of the picture of "life as it once was" that these loved ones are still expecting us to align with, though we have told them time after time after time, we cannot. Of course we would love to have this "life as it once was" back because it included our baby girl and therefore our world of normalcy! But to hold this "mirror of our normal past" up in our face now as an expectation they have of us amidst the thick of our grief, feels like an added "cruel joke." Now, we know we are disappointing not only our selves, but our other beloved companions through our grief. This knowledge of disappointment is a further load to our already grief-burdened backs.

We recognize the critical role now that "flexibility" plays in our lives of coping with our heavy grief. We have a new appreciation for folks' flexibility when it is there for us. The people that can be flexible with us, being willing to lay their expectations down and work with us amidst one of our steep waves of grief pounding us down, are the absolute jewels. Others, with their rigid expectations of us, send alarms through our systems. Their inflexibility becomes disruptive to our already fragile Rhythm.

Then with our systems so compromised, here come the raw memories, the delayed, unworked grief that has been awaiting our notice. Yet we are so vulnerable, to now face these loaded unworked grief pieces now throws us into a raw-grief state that triggers our PTSD. Now cortisol roils through our system to where we don't know what is a true crisis and what may just feel like a crisis in our grief-stricken state. Real or not, our bodies don't seem to know the difference and the visceral reactions to those unworked pieces of our child's death throw us into our Fight-Flight-Freeze-or Dissociate mode. And that is not a pretty sight.

Six years into our Child-Loss Grief, yet this month, we feel we are barely hanging on...

1st picture and Quote: via grieving mother, Jill C. and ~Wings of Hope-Living Forward
2nd picture, thanks to ~Lessons Learned In Life's Photos
3rd picture, thanks to GodVine's Photos