Tuesday's Trust - The Grace Card ~Tommy and Angie Prince

Tuesday's Trust

The Grace Card

~Tommy and Angie Prince

Tonight, Tommy and I watched a movie... about what you ask? Just ask our two sons -- What do we do to take a break away from our grief and trauma? You probably guessed it ~ we watch a movie about grief or trauma!

We entered into watching this movie tonight with fear and trepidation as we've watched our share of "somewhat hoaky" to "pretty hoaky" movies about grief. We all know it is pretty hard to show what a child-loss parent's grief looks like...

And here comes this dvd that is made up of mostly volunteers... {We don't mind that of course ~ our nephew was an actor volunteer in "We Are Marshall" (he was the kicker on the football team), and our own son Rollin recently has been cast in one of these types of movies, one called "Laughing at the Moon," but this movie has not yet been released. (I'm sure you'll hear more about that later!)}

We were teasing each other before watching this particular grief movie, called "The Grace Card" by saying:

"We'll give it ten minutes...!"

We seem to have this need to check out all the movies we can about child-loss. 

Another movie we recently checked out was, "The Other Woman" ~ another movie about child-loss. Though it had a famous actress (Natalie Portman) starring in it, it seemed to fall flat to us. But then our standards are pretty high about whether people can "capture" such a grief as the one we are living out day by day, hour by grief-struck hour.

In the movie tonight, "The Grace Card," fortunately we were pleasantly surprised (if you can be pleasantly surprised about grief). The "grieving family" members were continuing to show the pain and struggle that I'm sure can still be with you after 17 years of grieving, complete with the toll such grief takes upon every family member, each feeling grief's pain and chaos in their own unique way. The main character, the "father" in particular (who is a Christian stand-up comedian by trade) did an excellent job of portraying the angst of a child-loss father: with the soul-searching questions, the guilt, the isolating oneself from others who don't or can't "get it," the power of life-stopping triggering moments, the guilt, the anger, the repulsion over "God-talk" when it is plastic, cliche, cheesy, or a quick cop-out versus the authentic experience of God that can be loving, comforting, challenging, growth-producing, and life-transforming. 

How many of us secretly harbor that self-blame still? How many of us feel the continued raw anger and wonder where is this coming from, and is this perhaps the start of bitterness, or is the anger mere self-protection needed to survive another day? This movie showed a simple but powerful concept of grace ~ grace toward others, and grace toward yourself amidst such grief. 

This movie seems to stand alone in showing the transcending quality that the spiritual component can bring to one's grief. The movie aptly captured both the angst of child-loss, but also the redemptive component that can come in child-loss as you learn to extend grace to yourself (and others) amidst your pain. 

And "The Grace Card" didn't show this redemptive quality in a cheap way, but in an authentic-enough way that we were right in the pain with the parent. And we were right there in the grace with him too. 

This movie is one that seemed to come close to capturing some of the real agony of a child-loss griever, and that of the other child-loss family members. And yet, it also presented a fairly authentic portrait of the grace that we trust is also an important aspect of our healing as God, by His tender mercy, enables us to learn ways to transcend our terrible angst and pain.

Picture, thanks to Amazon.com 

Thursday's Therapy - How Do We Best Cope with Severe Loss and Trauma? (Part Five) ~With Dr. Mary Baures

Thursday's Therapy 

How Do We Best Cope 

with 

Severe Loss and Trauma?

(Part Five) 

~With Dr. Mary Baures

From A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON TRAUMA AND RECOVERY

By Dr. Mary Baures, Co-Producer and Author of Undaunted Spirits

Continued from last Thursday, the following is the final of the ten Coping Behaviors and Attitudes that Dr. Baures says Help Us Come Back from Profound Loss:

10.  Do not Generalize

People who get stuck in the grieving process often generalize the trauma to all of life. Because one person or group brutalized them, they seem to fear that many or most people are cruel and evil. The trauma, therefore, needs to be placed in a perspective which does not include the whole world.

Survivors need to realize that there is not only suffering, loss and evil, but also joy, support and loving.

When I compare the successful trauma survivors in my research to clients I used to see in the emergency room after suicide attempts, the ability to unite opposites emerges as an important prerequisite of survival from trauma. Those whom I met in the ER seemed to take one tragedy and generalize it to all of life. If someone had abused them, they felt that no-one was safe and that neglect, violence, sadism, danger and evil characterized all the world. These negative attitudes dampened all hope of being able to create a nurturing or productive future. In a present that may have been marked by constant flashbacks of past abuse, death seems preferable to the life they were living.

Psychiatrist Robert Lifton (1976), who studied survivors of Hiroshima and veterans of the Vietnam war, says that

"In a survivor's struggle between life and death, it is necessary to assemble those images and feelings that propel one toward the future."

Many of the survivors he interviewed had been to a "land of death," and returned with possibly grim, but also revitalizing truth which became a demand on the rest of us.

Lifton argues that the most poignant and difficult struggle in recovery is to reinstate a larger human connectedness. 

As survivors assimilate knowledge of an annihilating force into altered mental structures, they need to try and maintain harmony with the elements of life over time and space.

As we saw before, recovery entails both looking toward the future and an assertion of the continuity of life. 

The resilient individuals in this film accept the dark side of life without being defeated by it.

The catastrophes in their lives taught them that opposites do not root each other out. They found that struggling to accept losses involves many negative emotions, but that not all the emotions in a crisis are negative.

The Chinese character for crisis consists of two equal symbols: one meaning danger, the other opportunity.  

The survivors in this film came back from extreme hardship to take the opportunities that were opened by the very danger which threatened their lives.

Thank you to Dr. Mary Baures for her very enlightening article!

http://www.cambridgedocumentaryfilms.org/media/guides/strong.pdf

Thursday's Therapy - How Do We Best Cope with Severe Loss and Trauma? (Part Four) ~With Dr. Mary Baures

Thursday's Therapy 

How Do We Best Cope 

with 

Severe Loss and Trauma?

(Part Four) 

~With Dr. Mary Baures

From A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON TRAUMA AND RECOVERY

By Dr. Mary Baures, Co-Producer and Author of Undaunted Spirits

Continued from last Thursday, the following are the next three Coping Behaviors and Attitudes that Dr. Baures says Help Us Come Back from Profound Loss:

7. Broaden Your Point of View

The ability to take in and balance different points of view both between the self and others and between different parts of the self enable us to be more intimate with the self and others. 

The survivors' ability to take in new perspectives on themselves seems central to how they transformed in a positive way rather than becoming stuck the way so many trauma victims do.

Max Cleland is a good example of someone who developed by interacting with the world. When he attended his first party as a triple amputee, he believed that his disability would cut him off from other people, but he discovered that when someone has been obviously hurt, other people disclose things they would not normally talk about. Later, when he was trying to become a success in politics he walked around on artificial legs, although the effort was exhausting. When he was struggling up the steps to a victory party, the wife of a mayor stopped him and asked why he was using the artificial legs: people, she said, loved him just the way he was. He was able to take in her comments and realized that he needed to accept and love himself the way he was, too.

TV producer Alan Langer, who is disabled from multiple sclerosis, says he had two choices. He could either have done the most with what he had, or he could have made himself unhappy because life did not turn out the way he thought it ought to. "When it rains out, you can either enjoy it or curse it… I know that no matter how bad it gets, there's always something I can do. It's how you hold the life you have… if you let circumstances affect you, it's your choice."

8. Letting Go of Bitterness and Hate

Allowing oneself to feel the fury of hate, especially when one has been abused by another person, is often a healthy part of the recovery process, but it is only healthy if one can also learn to let it go. Hate minimizes a victim's feelings of powerlessness and self-blame.

But after anger has been experienced, when self-compassion replaces self-blame, and when the terror of the traumatic experience is no longer too intrusive, it is necessary for survivors to let go of hate to give them vitality and hope.

Victims of abuse frequently blame themselves and lose self-esteem. Feeling anger toward the perpetrator may be the only resource available that allows personal respect to be maintained. Robert Lifton (1988) suggests that the survivor's anger is an alternative to living in the "realm of the annihilated." Anger, according to Lifton, may be a psychic lifeline when the individual is surrounded by images of death.

We hate in response to an injury that causes deep suffering or threatens life, but the wish to kill or injure the perpetrator can be self-destructive. As James Chu (1987) writes, "to have allowed the victimization in the first place, 'counter-dehumanization' is not a psychological victory" (Davenport, 1991).

9. Rage and Revenge Fantasies

Judith Herman (1992), who works with trauma victims, suggests that the revenge fantasy frequently gives the roles of victim and abuser the same frozen, wordless quality as that of the traumatic memory. The victim longs to rid her or his self of terror and shame by retaliating. The desire for revenge emerges from the feeling of helplessness and is an attempt to restore a feeling of power. Although the victim imagines that revenge will bring relief, the opposite is true. Repetitive revenge fantasies actually increase the victim's torment; intrusive images can be as frightening as the trauma itself. They can never compensate for the harm that was done; more likely, they make the survivor feel like a monster. Those who actually succeed in revenge suffer intractable disturbances (Herman, 1992).

In her work with women who were raped, Herman found that survivors must come to terms with their wishes for revenge. As anger eventually is channeled into righteous indignation, the survivor can become free of the revenge fantasy and transform it into legal action. As she suggests, 

"(G)enuine contrition in a perpetrator [of violence] is a rare miracle. Fortunately, the survivor does not need to wait for it. Her healing depends on the discovery of restorative love in her own life; it does not require that this love be extended to the perpetrator."

Revenge never evens the score or creates fairness because it entails an escalation of pain and a cycle of hatred. As Levin (1992), who studied conflict resolutions, maintains, "justice" does not always solve problems. She illustrates her argument by quoting Ghandi: 

"If we all live by an eye for an eye, the whole world would be blind." 

Learning to forgive seems to play a central role in recovering from trauma, not least of all because revenge fantasies, which focus most of one's energy on the wish to hurt another, leave little room for positive actions.

~To be continued next week...

Thursday's Therapy - How Do We Best Cope With Severe Loss and Trauma (Part Three) ~with Dr. Mary Baures

Thursday's Therapy 

How Do We Best Cope 

with 

Severe Loss and Trauma

(Part Three)

From A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON TRAUMA AND RECOVERY

By Dr. Mary Baures, Co-Producer and Author of Undaunted Spirits

Continued from last Thursday, the following are the next three Coping Behaviors and Attitudes that Dr. Baures says Help Us Come Back from Profound Loss:

4. Denial

Denial helps us pace ourselves through the process of adjusting to catastrophic loss. Without denial many of the survivors would not have been able to live through their traumatic experiences. 

If Arn Chorn-Pond had given vent to his anger and feelings of injustice he might have lost control and killed. He coped by denying his rage and humiliation.

In recovery from trauma, denial or a sense of unreality or numbness, a feeling of dread combined with a feeling of being afraid to know, can alternate with emotional overload (Horowitz, 1983). This cycle is aimed at restoring the self and accepting new realities. 

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1985) similarly argues that adjusting to a new reality is a gradual process. Denial provides us with stability and coherence while we rebuild our basic ideas about life and incorporate them into our internal world. Before we have the resources to accept radical change, denial divides it into manageable doses.

Although he lost both his legs in Vietnam, Max Cleland could not accept that he would never walk again. Through an extraordinary effort, he did what doctors said could not be done: he learned to walk on artificial legs, although they caused him intense pain. He saw the pain as a further test of his endurance. His dream of walking kept him moving hopefully into the future where he rekindled an interest in politics; winning an election eventually gave him the self-esteem he needed to face the reality that he would never walk again.

When people are frightened by overwhelming feelings which disturb a fragile equilibrium, denial is a scramble to ward off panic. Panic is an extreme form of anxiety which comes from not knowing the world one is in (Rollo May, 1969). Trauma destroys our sense of security in the world, but in adjusting to the experience, denial allows us to let in only as much pain as we can tolerate at one time.

5. Hopeful Visions of the Future

The people whose story this film tells forged hopeful images of the future which served as a holding environment, gave them a model to strive for in their imagination, and, as they attempted to make their dreams a reality, gave them a respite from their present difficulties.

Max Cleland began to come back from a severe depression when he decided not to dwell on all the doors which his disability closed for him. Such a focus, he realized, kept him from seeing the doors which it might open for him.

Robert Lifton (1988), however, makes the point that survivors must look backward as well as forward in time, in order to assemble images and feelings that assert, however tenuously, the continuity of life.

6. Developing Skills

Survivors of trauma need to learn to accept those things which they cannot change; more importantly, they need to learn how to work a change where they can. 

To that end, survivors have to, and frequently do, acquire skills having to do with both work and relationships.

Before the trauma, many survivors had skills that seemed appropriate to their gender. Women were more skillful at intimacy and connecting to other people; men were more independent and aware of their agency. 

In dealing with the crisis, the men became more skillful at intimacy or communication, the women realized their own agency more fully and became more independent.

Prior to an accident which left her paralyzed from the chest down, Nackey Loeb lacked confidence. With her husband, she attended meetings at their newspaper, but she would always just sit in a corner and knit. 

The intense struggle of learning to function gave her a kind of self-assurance that she had never known before. 

After William Loeb died, the newspaper needed her and she was able to go in and use the skills she acquired in her own survival. 

Just as women seemed to gain confidence during their crises, men learned how to love and connect in new ways. 

Author Andre Dubus, who spent much of his life protecting those weaker than himself, had to reexamine his concepts of manhood after he became disabled. Before, masculinity was associated with physical strength, but after his body was badly damaged he developed new relationships with his children and learned how to take support from them.

http://www.cambridgedocumentaryfilms.org/media/guides/strong.pdf

Thursday's Therapy - How Do We Best Cope With Severe Loss and Trauma (Part Two) ~With Dr. Mary Baures

Thursday's Therapy

How Do We Best Cope With Severe Loss and Trauma

(Part Two)

~With Dr. Mary Baures

From A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON TRAUMA AND RECOVERY

By Dr. Mary Baures, Co-Producer and Author of Undaunted Spirits

Part Two

Last week, we closed our post with the following quote from Dr. Mary Baures:

"In my research I have found that positive transformations in the wake of trauma (tend) to take forms which are larger than the self, and which turn healing into an intersubjective process. The survivor takes a new interest in relationships, culture, society, or spirituality. In coming back from profound loss, certain coping behaviors and attitudes are of central importance..."

Today, we pick up here with the start of Dr. Baures listing and elucidating such important coping behaviors and attitudes that she believes are of central importance to our coming back from profound loss. Below are just a few items of her list, hopefully with more to follow in the coming weeks!

(Coping Behaviors to Help Us Come Back from Profound Loss:)

1. Aligning oneself with larger forces

In our emotional development, we need to consider our relationship to the community at large. Survivors especially need to find ways out of their private suffering and realize the universal aspects of their losses.

Finding a mission in the trauma converts injustice to a (life)-giving meaning, and enables us to rework the themes of the trauma. Art Chorn-Pond found a mission in helping other victims of war. His suffering taught him that human dignity must be revered; therefore, he has devoted himself to speaking for the children of war, since he found that when he needed people to speak for him, there was no one there. Max Cleland's greatest fear was that his disability would cut him off from society. As a politician, among other things, he has mastered this fear by pushing for legislation giving the handicapped access to public building.

2. Helping Others

As Erikson (1964) suggests, people need to be needed or they will be driven into too great self-absorption. Similarly, Hoffman (1993) stresses the need to strengthen our sense of belonging to the larger web of being. After living through traumatic experiences, the survivors in this film strengthened themselves through the care and compassion they gave to others. After having been hurt, they healed themselves by helping other(s) who had been hurt.

The Cuban Armando Valladares, a former political prisoner, recalls his experiences: "At times when one is treated like a beast, the only thing that saves you is knowing that somewhere, someone loves you, respects you, fights to return you to your dignity." In now being that someone for people in situations comparable to the ones they themselves have lived through, the survivors in this film create a sense of community which helps both themselves and present sufferers.

In her talk on "God and Horror," Hoffman (1993) points out how important it is for the clinician to remain present in the room and empathize with the patient when working with people who have suffered evil, or been abused by another person, because only human love can make that kind of horror bearable. Similarly, she argues that those who abuse can only do so because and when they feel that their victims are "separate."

The hurt and the humiliation these survivors went through seems to give them a deeply rooted feeling of being connected to a community and a desire to help others. Their highest aspirations apparently flow from their deepest hurts.

3. Creativity

Creativity enables us to transcend trauma by granting us access to more active means than merely hanging on, coping, or getting through. Studies show that resilient people negotiate emotionally hazardous experiences proactively, that creativity helps us convert pain and loss into something positive, helps us to process the themes of a trauma; it can give the dead a kind of posthumous life, and transforms destruction into something that can be shared. A private hurt thus becomes a universal one.

Creativity may have some fundamental relationship to separation and loss; it has been shown to help people negotiate their fear of death and loneliness. Writing, painting, and other creative activities enable us to tolerate threats to our psychic integrity. Visual art work seems to tap proverbial feelings and unspeakable violations, and certain kinds of writing, especially highly metaphorical kinds, can also express terror otherwise unspeakable.

Some psychologists, such as B. S. Skinner, have tried to show that people are inescapably molded and programmed by their environment, but creativity might be a way for them to liberate themselves from oppressive experiences and free themselves from conditioned responses. At the same time that they enrich the world and find universal aspects to their private hurts, they also enrich and expand their sense of their own selves.

Clinical studies teach us about the universality of grief reactions, but through studying creative responses, we can get a sense of the equally important uniqueness of the individual's feeling of grief. Being imaginative may be a vital part of survival; it also can be seen as a celebration of the individual, and hence, a way for her or him to struggle against the reductive assault of abuse.

Through creativity, survivors can find something new in trauma; it is a vital part of healing. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud stressed the importance of the creation and acceptance of a new reality within which the survivor masters her or his experience. Unless trauma can be integrated in such a way, it will be repressed and relived over and over again as a contemporary experience rather than belong to the past. Such a response to loss is a closed circuit, regressive and private, whereas creative thought is an open circuit, progressive and communicative.

The research of traumatologists like Bessel van der Kolk has shown that trauma creates speechless terror. In Pet scans of survivors' brains, the left side of their brains, which is responsible for language, was revealed to be mainly inactive. This proves that telling the trauma story is a crucial part of healing, even though therapists have learned that mere talking is not enough.

The task of the survivor of trauma, then, is to evolve new inner forms of life which include the traumatic event. None of the survivors in this film clung to what Robert Lifton called the "death imprint": they acquired a special form of knowledge and inner growth from having been to and returning from the edges. They mastered trauma by establishing their lives on a new basis; creativity helped them find something new in the adversity.

http://www.cambridgedocumentaryfilms.org/media/guides/strong.pdf

Thursday's Therapy - How Do We Best Cope With Severe Loss and Trauma? (Part One) ~With Dr. Mary Baures

Thursday's Therapy

How Do We Best Cope With Severe Loss and Trauma?

Part One

~With Dr. Mary Baures

From A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON TRAUMA AND RECOVERY

By Dr. Mary Baures, Co-Producer and Author of Undaunted Spirits

A severe trauma cannot leave the psyche unchanged -- either we deaden parts of ourselves to seal off the emotional wound or we find ourselves transformed profoundly in working through the experience.

Instead of repressing the trauma, the people in this film (Undaunted Spirits) have recreated their selves through its horror.

While struggling to cope with major losses they found a mission or goal with which they aligned their will and upon which they set their hearts. The excitement of achieving that goal animated their lives, and as they joined with others to make their vision a reality, it gave their life a transcendent value which sustained them while they adjusted to catastrophic loss. Their character and identity was shaped by their new commitments: they became part of what they love.

After the trauma of almost being destroyed, they aligned themselves with forces larger than themselves. After losing something that may have been holding them together, they went through "a dark night of the soul" where they began searching for a new ground and a new anchor. Sometimes they found faith in themselves through the faith of others.

Creative projects -- using images, symbols, and rituals -- and helping others enabled them to set new priorities, to discover new values and emerging strengths in themselves.

All the survivors in this film made a choice to embrace the incomprehensible aspects of existence -- evil, torture, pain, death -- without having to "understand" them. By accepting them as a part of life, these survivors were able to transform it. Instead of cutting off parts of themselves to get to get rid of what was horrifying in the trauma, they examined the horror, and their own feelings of depression, anxiety, dread, shame, and guilt, in order to find the messages within those feelings.

As psychologist and Vietnam veteran Arthur Egendorf (1985) writes, when we stop trying to flee the horror we can look back on a traumatic experience as having led to a life-enhancing revelation. Once we hit bottom, it reveals an essential, basic truth: that we alone have the power to take care of whatever our life needs. We give voice to the power to recreate our own life.

Bottoming out and beginning the ascent takes place with a fresh conviction. Out of intense suffering, the survivors in this film vowed to do what they could to prevent others from suffering the same.

Max Cleland helps other veterans. Marcia Gordon assists other women trying to come back from the depression underlying addiction. Arn Chorn-Pond helps other children of war. Michael MacDonald works to banish the hand guns which played such a key role in the deaths of several members of his family.

Through their social activism, they began to express, not so much what life should give to them, but rather what they could offer to the world. When they found new goals and priorities in the aftermath of trauma, their negative experiences enriched rather than devastated them.

In my research I have found that positive transformations in the wake of trauma tends to take forms which are larger than the self, and which turn healing into an intersubjective process. The survivor takes a new interest in relationships, culture, society, or spirituality. In coming back from profound loss, certain coping behaviors and attitudes are of central importance...

~Dr. Mary Baures

{Highlights, mine}

Next week, we hope to continue this article which lists and elucidates such important coping behaviors and attitudes that Dr. Baures shares are of central importance to our coming back from profound loss…

Thank you to Dr. Mary Baures' article enlightening us as to creative ways people have of overcoming great losses.

To be continued…

http://www.cambridgedocumentaryfilms.org/media/guides/strong.pdf