I was talking to a friend recently, and he described himself as a “shittier version” of himself after February 10. “It’s the darkest thing imaginable,” he says. “I’m right there all over again, witnessing atrocities that I never actually witnessed in person. But I can see it. Over and over and over. The first four weeks it was a loop in my mind, Playing over and over and over. Then I wanted it to stop, and I just shut down. For the last three weeks I just walled up all concepts of the memory and avoided thinking about anything as hard as I could.
“All that did was build pressure when the dam finally burst. And now I’m stuck in this shitty new version of me, who’d probably be diagnosed as clinically depressed. I’m working on finding my way out of it, and I think I see the path, but its long, and there is much work to be done.”
I want to help him, but I am not, as some of you may know, not the most socially adroit being on the planet.
So I called Christine Dernederlanden, an author, podcaster, and a trauma survivor, who helped people after 9/11.
We talked for the better part of an hour, and she will (hopefully) be starting to write a column in the paper, but here’s an excerpt from that conversation.
“The first thing to know is that the stages of grief are not linear, and not everyone experiences grief the same. It’s not organized, and it’s different for everybody,” says Dernederlanden.
She pulls out a chart, showing the seven stages of grief. “All those things that are happening around you? They’re all impacting your grief. And I think we have this misunderstanding that everyone feels the same as us. That everybody’s at the same stage of grief that we’re at. When we look at grief, it starts with disbelief and shock. And that disbelief is different for everybody. And everybody will process differently.
“Right now, many people are feeling uprooted by grief. The very first thing that we need to approach and look at—and it’s something that people can do over the next week—is look at that denial and grasping that you’re in right now and ask what have you grasped? Where are you in that stage of grief?
“At this time, people will be looking for clarity. Sometimes, people will start blaming. And is that what we should be doing?”
She compares grief to a pinwheel. “When we’re dealing with denial and grasping of grief and you start to feel all the different emotions—anger, sadness, happiness… there’s all sorts of different emotions that you can be feeling. I don’t want to say one is right and one is not. It’s whatever you’re feeling.
“Take a moment and draw a pinwheel. It sounds like child’s play, but when we are grieving, we need to go back a little bit. If you complicate it, you’ll just end up bamboozled.
“Some days you’re spinning. Some days the wind is like that. And you might feel like you’re crazy. Or that the world is out of control. I have people tell me ‘I wake up in the morning and I’m angry. Then in the afternoon, I’m bawling my eyes out. And I’m afraid to be happy.
“These are all normal emotions to be feeling at this time. What is the first tangible thing to do? Recognize it. Recognize you’re the pinwheel and some days you’re like this and you can’t function. Other days you stop. Maybe you stop spinning on guilt. You feel guilty because you’re alive and your loved one isn’t. But the bigger thing you need to realize is everybody else has their own pinwheel. Everybody else is grieving. And they are struggling, too. So when you walk into work or you’re in a community and you see somebody else that may be expressing anger, but you’re standing there crying, or you see somebody else who may be smiling. Just realize that they each have their own pinwheel spinning and they’re each trying to process.
“We can’t go from disbelief to resilience in one step. Our brain goes from disbelief to grasping the situation and then it moves forward to a little bit of clarity and then it might go back to disbelief for a little bit and then it’ll pull itself forward again. So in the starting and the stopping, the very first thing we need to realize is that there’s this windmill in each of us that is spinning at this stage of grief.”
Because resilience isn’t something that can be gained in one step, she says it is important to set small goals. Maybe even micro-goals.
“Maybe you’ll want to go out to get a cup of tea or coffee at a coffee shop. But what happens when you’re starting to try to figure out grasping grief and what’s going on is that we isolate ourselves. Our emotions are spinning around, and we feel we can’t go out. Something that can help: start a journal. Start writing down your goals for each day. You can write that ‘I’m gonna get out of bed today and I’m gonna walk the dog.’ Or ‘I may want to smile at one person’; ‘I may want to go for that coffee.’
“But realize that those goals are reached by steps. So maybe the first day you just get out of bed and take a shower. Maybe you get out of bed and sit in the living room chair. That is okay. That’s a step towards healing. We think we should hit the end zone right away. But grief doesn’t work that way. Grief is something that needs time to heal. You need to be able to have that compassion for yourself. Some of the things that I like to write about is eating regular meals. Taking short walks. Keeping a consistent sleep schedule.
“We tend to have this thing called rumination where the brain plays the events that took place over and over and over again. And sometimes it’s hard to calm the mind. That’s where journaling comes in. If we can just take a moment, write it down on paper, or speak it into your phone. You’re allowing your mind to let go of it and put it somewhere else. So that is an excellent way to help with sleep deprivation.”
This is just the first part of our conversation. To listen to more, visit the Tumbler RidgeLines Facebook page or YouTube page. To find out more about Christine, visit griefuprooted.com. To order one of her books, visit robertspress.ca
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
