3 | Understanding Your Story of Loss
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
—J OAN D IDION
W HAT IS YOUR STORY OF LOSS? I F YOU’RE ANYTHING LIKE MY clients, you are carrying around the story of how your loved one died, and it’s heavier than any suitcase you’ve ever pulled through an airport. Yet nonetheless, this story comes with you every place you go. This story is one of the most significant of your life, and it has shaped who you are today.
Some of us keep our stories buried deep within us, and others of us feel compelled to share our stories with anyone who will listen. Whichever the case, these stories live inside of us, and they demand to be heard.
In my initial meetings with new clients, I give them all the time they need to tell me their story, because so often they have never really had the opportunity to do so. This story has been burning within them since it began, and most people find great relief in being able to spill out all the details. Being able to tell our story has an enormous impact on our healing process and almost always serves to decrease anxiety.
In my work, I’ve come to understand that one of the significant reasons anxiety manifests after the death of a loved one is from not allowing ourselves to fully examine the story of our loss. Some people suppress their stories simply out of not having a natural outlet, and others do so from a fear of feeling more pain. In the clinical world, this is called grief avoidance, and it can be quite common and normal to want to avoid confronting the loss so directly.
But several things happen when we stifle our stories of loss. Namely, we lose the opportunity to really explore that story, to unpack it, to deeply understand it, and to give it a home outside of our bodies. When we find ways to externalize the story, we gain the opportunity to see the different ways that the story we are carrying serves us or harms us.
Today I run a series of grief retreats focused around mother loss with my professional partner, Hope Edelman, author of the best-selling Motherless Daughters. These four-day retreats always begin with a morning of story witnessing, in which each participant gets the chance to tell the story of losing her mother to our entire group of twenty-five women. To say this is a powerful experience is an understatement. Some of these women have never shared their stories. Many of them have never even met another motherless daughter.
So for them to tell their story in a room of two dozen women who deeply understand their experience is very healing. Hope and I consider this a vital part of the retreat. We feel that once the women have shared their stories and felt seen in this way, then they are better able to open up to the work at hand of deeply processing their mother loss.
I asked Hope some questions about the power of storytelling for this book, and you’ll see many of her insights throughout this chapter. Hope lost her mother to breast cancer at age seventeen, an experience that caused her undue amounts of sadness and anxiety throughout most of her adult life. In her late twenties she penned Motherless Daughters about the powerful effects of mother loss on women, a book that was incredibly meaningful to my healing process when I discovered it at age twenty.
Throughout this chapter, I want to help you externalize and explore your story of loss. I think of these stories as living, breathing entities inside ourselves. The essential truth is that even if you are not sharing your story, you are still carrying it around inside of you. It is vital to find ways to let it out; to look at it in the bright light of day, and to share it, helps it breathe a little. It helps us breathe, too.
WHAT IS STORYTELLING?
As a species, storytelling is one of our most ancient forms of communication. It is the way in which we have passed down lineage and preserved history. Telling stories is one of the most essential ways we learn about ourselves and our world.
Even if you do not consider yourself a natural storyteller, you must recognize your innate ability to be one anyway. Think of the story you tell about how you met your significant other, or how you came to adopt your dog, or the first car you ever bought. There is always a story. And now there is the story of how you lost one of the most important people in your life.
In the beginning, a grieving individual will often recount the story of the death, perhaps beginning with the initial illness or the preceding events that led to an accident or suicide. I can’t tell you how much of my work has been spent simply creating a compassionate and safe place for someone to tell me the minute details of the last few months of their loved one’s life.
The further you are from the loss, the broader the brush strokes become, but when I see clients who are in the first year or two of a loss, they are still holding on quite closely to the small details that led up to the actual death. They tell me about the date their mom first discovered a tumor, the name of the first doctor she went to and the second and third doctors, the medications, the surgeries, and a complete blow-by-blow account of the complicated aftermath that ensued. Each of the last painful days is described in detail, often concluding with a shake of the head, expressing disbelief that any of it even happened at all.
Every small moment is important to tell in the beginning. These moments help us understand this horrific thing that has happened. Many clients I see turn these details over and over in their heads, trying to make sense of them, working to make it all line up, and in doing so it is sometimes with the hope that if they can figure out a missing puzzle piece, maybe they can still change the outcome. (This is the kind of magical thinking that comes with the bargaining stage.)
Even though we can never really change the outcome, it helps to tell these stories anyway as a way of understanding and accepting them. It is so hard to walk around in our daily lives, bottled up with these painful memories. But unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of obvious outlets for them. As much as we might want to, we cannot unspool the details in a Facebook post. Nor are they dinner-conversation fodder when you meet an old friend to catch up. Nonetheless, the impulse is there, so we must find healthy and appropriate places to share our tales of loss. When we don’t share them, anxiety festers.
Hope Edelman says, “What happened to me, unfortunately, was that after my mother died, the curtain of silence came down. The messages I got about grieving were: This is something we don’t talk about. This is something we try to get over as quickly as possible. This is something that makes other people upset, so we don’t talk about it. I think it was that that led to the anxiety. Those messages were the lid that got put on top of the boiling pot.”
Figuring out how to talk about our experiences of loss is vital. When we look at them as stories, we can see that they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning of a story paints a scene and brings the listener into the world being described. The middle of a story is usually composed of the most action and conflict—the characters come up against challenges and attempt to overcome them. Sometimes they fail and sometimes they succeed. And the end of the story contains some kind of resolution.
Our stories of loss typically contain these very elements as well. I’ll use my own as an example. The beginning starts when both of my parents got cancer at the same time. In telling my story, I would describe how old we all were, where we were living, and what our lives were like when the diagnoses happened. The middle of the story would cover all the ups and downs of my parents’ cancer treatments; the fear, sadness, and confusion we experienced; and the emotional reactions and decisions we made as a result, peaking with both of their deaths. The end of the story would be what my world looked like after they were gone and how I found ways to begin to move forward.
This structure should feel familiar to you. It is typical of most books and films and also of the stories you tell about yourself. We create stories around the most meaningful moments of our lives, the experiences that shape our identities. Taking a look at the way we are telling these stories is very important, though.
I’ve been both a writer and a therapist for most of my adult life, and I’ve always been fascinated by
the way the two realms intersect. As a therapist, my main focus is to help clients explore the stories they tell themselves about their lives, and as such it’s been invaluable to me to have training and experience in exploring the art of narrative.
My initial sessions with clients usually consist of listening to them tell their story, not just their story of loss, but the story of who they are and the life they have lived up until now. These tales are constantly growing and changing. And as we mature into life, we understand ourselves and our pasts on deeper levels all the time. One experience lends a different light to a past experience, and this past experience enriches the new ones we move into.
“This is also how we externalize the story,” Hope shares. “It gets it out of your head, and it puts it out in the world. It’s a way of starting to make meaning of it, because when you tell the story to someone else, you have to give it some kind of structure and coherence so that other people can understand it. Memory comes to us in a big hodgepodge of images and memories and feelings. But when we try to harness all that into a narrative that we can share with somebody else, we are starting to create a sense of meaning out of it. And that’s at the crux of grief work. Making meaning of the loss.”
But sometimes we tell the stories in ways that don’t always serve us, stories about our lives, our relationships, and ourselves that are no longer true or perhaps slanted a bit in the wrong direction. Maybe they served us at one time—for instance, to see ourselves as a victim or to see ourselves as somehow wronged—and those narratives can get stuck. But often, upon closer inspection, we realize that they don’t fit anymore. As a therapist, I work to help clients examine these long-held narratives and begin to rewrite them.
That’s what I want to help you do in this chapter. I want to ask you to unearth your story of loss, to take it out in the broad daylight, learn how to share it in a healing way, and learn how to examine and truly understand it. This isn’t always an easy process, but it is one of the key ways to alleviate your anxiety.
One of the metaphors I like to use in my practice when meeting with a new client, particularly one who has never been in therapy before, is that of a suitcase. I explain that each of us carries around a metaphorical suitcase, stuffed full of all the things that have ever happened to us, all the choices we’ve ever made (both good and bad), and all the relationships of which we’ve been a part.
When a new client comes to see me, it’s as though they drag this bulging suitcase into the room and open it up in front of me. Boom, right there on the floor between us is a giant pile of all the things that make up this person’s existence. There are childhood traumas, romantic partnerships, family relationships, career choices, health issues, bad habits, mistakes, grievances, regret and anger and sadness. It can be overwhelming for them at first, to see it all laid bare like that.
I came up with this suitcase analogy after I had gone through my own therapeutic process. My first experience in therapy was at age twenty-five, after both of my parents were already gone. When I opened up my metaphorical suitcase in that little room all those years ago, I was horrified and overwhelmed by what was inside. There were my complicated teenage years watching both of my parents battle their illnesses, the pain and unrelenting sadness I had over their deaths, and also all the terrible behaviors I had indulged in as a result—drinking and bad relationships. It was a lot to take in all at once.
But with the help of my therapist, I was able to really take a look at it all for the first time. I realized there was so much about these parts of the story that I had never truly explored. For instance, I had spent years thinking I was a terrible person for not having been with my mother the night she died. In reexamining that story, I opened up to the idea that perhaps I was a scared young teenager who was in denial because everyone else around me was too. In this way, I began to change my story of loss to one that was less excruciating and much more healing.
When I work with clients now, I explain how together we are going to carefully examine the contents of their suitcase. I tell them that we’re going to pull things out one by one and take a hard look at each, processing any pain or grief and working through any regret and anger. After we’ve examined all the contents, then the fun part begins. We will begin to repack the suitcase, but in an entirely new way. We will decide what needs to stay or go, what needs to be put back but in a different place. And maybe we will even find some new tools to add to the suitcase that weren’t there before.
This is precisely what I want you to do with your story of loss. When we carry these stories around deep inside of us, without truly examining them or letting them out into world, we are doing ourselves a disservice. I believe that on some unconscious level, our stories are begging to be heard. Silencing them only serves to let them languish inside of us, causing a persistent knocking on our soul’s door that often takes the form of anxiety.
There may be many aspects of your loss that you have not wanted to look at, parts of it that are so painful, you’d rather skip over them. But trust me, doing this work is what will ultimately set you free from that pain and also ease the tensions that lead to anxiety. And I think you’ll be surprised to find that the pain often isn’t as intense as you think it will be or, at the very least, that it’s more bearable than you anticipated.
I want you to imagine me holding your hand as we go through this chapter. Everyone has a story. And everyone has parts of their story that they feel ashamed of or sad about. There is no one who has lived a life unscathed. Your story is part of who you are, and owning it is how you will move forward.
HOW CAN YOU TELL YOUR STORY?
Now that you understand a bit more about how exploring a story on a deeper level can quite literally change it and change your feelings about the loss, I want to offer you some ways you can do this yourself.
Hope suggests that “people can explore their stories by talking to other people. Support groups. Friend groups. Social groups that come together. The Dinner Table, for example—an organization which invites people to come have potluck dinners and talk about loss. They can explore by writing, certainly, either in journals or in classes where you’re encouraged to write. You can write it; you can perform it. You can externalize it by making a work of art, through painting, through ceramics, through collages, through scrapbooking. These are all ways of telling your story—they don’t have to all be in the spoken word.”
Storytelling Outlets
Joining a grief group. There are grief groups in almost every part of the country. These groups are often offered through bereavement centers or hospices. Most groups are divided by age or type of loss (for example, loss of a spouse, loss of a child, loss of a parent). These groups are open to anyone who would like to join, although some may require that you are a certain number of months out from your loss. Meeting regularly with a group of people who have experienced a loss similar to yours can have profound healing effects. Hearing their stories and sharing yours can help normalize your experience and provide you with a safe place to share your story among people who understand. See the back section of resources in this book for how to find grief groups in your area.
Writing about your loss. I’m going to explore this tool at length in Chapter 7 because it is one of the most valuable tools available for processing grief.
Anniversary or holiday gatherings. Invite friends and family to bring stories of your loved one to gatherings and prepare your own stories to share.
Online grief forums. There are many online outlets for people who are grieving. Similar to joining a grief group, you will have the opportunity to share your story with people who can relate and hear other stories of loss that will help to normalize your own. See the resources at the end of the book for a list of online support.
Finding a safe friend or family member who is willing to listen. Choose one or more people in your life who are willing to listen to your story. Let them know that you need to share for a while and ask them to withhold judgment or advice.
Finding a therapist. Meeting one-on-one with a therapist to explore your story can be invaluable to your process. A therapist is trained to create a nurturing and safe environment in which you can share even the hardest parts of your story that perhaps friends and family are not capable of doing. See resources in the back of the book for tips on finding the right therapist for you.
LETTING THE STORY CHANGE
As I’ve emphasized above, one of the most important parts of this work comes when we allow our story to change, when we can dig deep enough to recognize that we are not always telling the story that best serves our healing process. To illustrate this idea, take a look at how Hope’s story changed when she was ready to really look at it.
HOPE EDELMAN’S STORY SHIFT
About ten years after my mother’s death, I began by researching her life. And in doing so, in talking with her friends, in getting her medical records, in reliving some parts—even the hardest parts of her illness and death, even the aftermath—I was able to make a different meaning of it, and that was really important to me.
I carried the narrative, the story, for a good ten years or more, that my mother was never told how sick she was. That the oncologist and my father knew the test results, and the oncologist would give them to my father, and my father, either on his own or with a doctor’s input, would tell my mother what the test results were. That she never got them directly from the doctor herself.
So when she told us kids—there were three of us—that she was getting better or that she was in remission because nothing was showing up—she believed that to be true. That was my story. And in my story, my father and the doctor had conspired against my mother—two men against one woman—so that she never got to make decisions for herself or say good-bye to her children. And I was pretty mad about that. For a long time.
Anxiety- The Missing Stage of Grief Page 7