Grieving...a topic that for many of us has been in the forefront of our minds, as we watched a broken hearted family in our local church bury their six year old daughter.
The title of this post, "You can't heal from what you won't feel," is a phrase some of my "*Mops" moms and I repeat as we walk along side our sons on a path fraught with pain. The refusal to grieve is always a temptation. Often, it is a survival technique; during the height of our son's crisis, when heartbreak came in unrelenting blows like a nightmarish carnival ride that refused us exit... it was simply too much. Denial is a valuable, self-protective mechanism that provides a temporary stop-gap solution for pain that threatens to topple us headlong into oblivion. It is, however, a tool, among many, that when abused can leave us emotionally arrested. If we're not careful, we may find months and years that go by while we sit in an emotional stupor. Other tools include, avoidance, self-anesthetizing, detachment, and distraction, and on and on.
My personal favorite is detachment, I became amazingly skilled at this as a child. I was particularly sensitive as a preschooler; I cried a lot. Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of good reasons to cry, but around six, I figured out that this wasn't working for me. In fact, in my six year old mind it was beginning to threatened my very existence. "I'll give you something to cry about," "crybaby," and a general sense of rejection were the byproduct of my emotionally labile personality. My memories from six on have a dry, heartless quality to them; my feelings had fled for safer haunts.
What is my point in all this? I have come to realize just in the past couple of weeks that even though I have survived the past 18 month crisis mentally intact, and physically whole, I have become detached from my heart, not completely, but like a poorly abridged version of a classic novel I have gaps. I grieved a great deal as I crawled through this dark, cold valley, but at times it overwhelmed me and I checked out. I'm contemplating what it means to go back and process. Why?
My Barometer for whether I have grieved thoroughly is my God sense. When I shut down parts of my heart to cope, I shut down my ability to sense God. It is the only faculty we have built to receive things of the spirit. If I don't take care of my heart, my spirit suffers. Without the spirit, there is no capacity for joy. We become the dreaded, and strangely popular zombies that have taken over the entertainment industry, haunting the emotionally living, hoping to suck some kind of life from what they seem to have...endlessly frustrated.
I don't want to be a zombie. Now to the business of grieving. But how? any suggestions?
*MOPS is a nationally recognized program for "Mother's of Pre-Schoolers." My friends and I hijacked the name to mean "Mother's of Pot Smokers." (It's the little things.)
