What’s Gained by Honoring Loss, Part 2

Part 1 in this series on Loss is a recent podcast conversation with my good friend Patti Carey.
You can listen here on my website or here on Apple Podcasts.

It’s Having a Moment

Loss is making headlines these days. Have you noticed? My intent here is not to dwell on loss, but to see what we can learn about ourselves from it.

We’ve been publicly counting the loss of lives since the beginning of the pandemic, and noting the demise of Life As We Knew It as we pass through each phase. We treat it like a new phenomenon, but this kind of loss has been happening for a while. Actually, since forever.

We tend to forget that we’re old hands at loss. As creatures of Nature, we’re wired for it. Sometimes loss even brings joy (see Elena’s face, above), or relief (like when teenage acne disappears) or thrills (as when women reach 50 and finally stop caring so much about what other people think).

The Pairing of Gains and Losses

Those losses represent gains, because that’s how Life works—it’s always paired with Death. Glance outside this spring and you’ll see the evidence: rotting logs with new shoots popping out from the decay. Sprouts in the compost bin. Baby teeth need to get out of the way so the next set can emerge. Old ideas of How Life Should Be are laid to rest in order for the newer version to take root.

We know this. We leave for school, gaining autonomy while losing the familiarity of home. We get a new job, which devours our free time while gifting us with new challenges and a sense of purpose. (Hopefully we’re not just losing sleep and gaining stress. 🤪)

We enter relationships, start sharing toothpaste and coordinating calendars. We adopt pets, decide to have kids, move to a bigger home. As we gain (🤞🏽) belonging and love and connection and more closet space, we simultaneously lose control over our schedule and a host of daily choices and the ability to leave the house in under 30 minutes.

Balance, Naturally

Gains and losses are natural. The goal is balance, not the absence of loss, because that’s how Nature works. Trouble comes when we avoid doing the math because we know somewhere in our mind-body that the imbalance is severe, and we don’t actually want to know the truth.

Truth-aversion signals hidden dis-ease, and makes healing impossible.
Truth-telling plunks you onto the healing path, whether you meant to go there or not.

Let me show you what I mean, because I made a quick jump right there from Loss/Gain imbalance to Healing, through Truth (which happens to be the only viable route).

Crisis of Identity

In the podcast, I said that my marriage—more specifically, its dissolution—is the biggest loss I’ve faced so far, and one I’ll be processing for the rest of my days.

Why? Some people pass through divorce with barely a scratch, it seems.

It’s not so much that I was devastated by the loss of a love. Break-ups are hard, yes. But what made this one so tangled and meaty is that behind the surface wound was a core wound: my loss of identity.

See, in my childhood and early adulthood, Family, Church, and Marriage were the ginormous and central institutions in my life. I can’t overstate their importance; they formed my Holy Trinity. School was probably in fourth place, followed by Friends, Sports, What to Eat for Lunch, and so on down the list of priorities.

The decision to end my 16-year marriage was a ground-shaking proclamation that I would now be putting my own well-being ahead of the rules of Family/Church/Marriage. It catapulted me (if catapults can take 10+ years to move a person) out of innocence and wishful thinking, and onto the road of reexamining everything I’d ever believed about myself, been taught about the world, or come to expect from life.

It forced me to question:

the integrity of my values
my ability to judge character
my ability to make big decisions for myself
whether I was capable of healthy relationships
whether I still believed in God
whether I could be a “good person” while abandoning Church and my Family’s religion
what commitment to Family actually meant
what being a responsible mom looked like
every definition of “right” and “wrong” that I’d ingested
what else I might have put blind faith in, that needed to be reconsidered (I’m still working through that list, which is why it’s a lifelong endeavor.)

On and on, and continuing on.

The Loss Behind the Loss

Who was I once I gave up on my Holy Trinity?

It was the hardest come-to-Jesus (😉) experience I’ve ever had. A complete Loss of Life As I Knew It and the exact opposite of How I Thought Life Was Supposed to Be. It demanded radical truth-telling, and, most painfully, showed me how capable I was of deceit. All my life I’d seen myself as a Good Girl, and definitely—like, duh! obviously!—honest. 😇

I learned that I was a seasoned betrayer, particularly skilled at betraying myself. 🤥

I’m calling this identity crisis the Loss behind the Loss. I think it’s what sets certain persistently thorny losses apart from the rest.

It was deep, it was difficult, it is ongoing. And yet it’s been life-affirming in the most blatant way. I was and am affirming the importance of my own life, each time I continue to tell and live the truth. The Losses and Gains add up again in a more balanced, Nature-al way.

Yes, there is grief in admitting the truth. In equal measure is the capacity for joy.

Our Great Big National Wound

I’m not the first person to point out that our country, these so-called United States of America, is in an identity crisis. We thought we knew who we were. We had our Holy Trinity of values, spelled out in the Declaration of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We had perfected our other, un-holy trinity of imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy into a neat package for worldwide export, with the contents labeled “freedom, democracy, and innovation.” The world bought it up. We became famous and highly sought after, like internet superstars. All of our Instagram photos showed us having-our-sh*t-together. We were unstoppable. Invincible. Probably even immortal.

We invented (unless I’m mired in American hubris!) the fixed concept of How Life Is Supposed To Be. 👍🏽

Off-screen, meanwhile, we’ve been a complex mixture of scrappy resourcefulness plus genocide. Wild creativity built with slave labor. Tenacity laced with unbridled greed. Punishing exclusion disguised as piety. We can be kind, generous, and funny; infantile, duplicitous, and ridiculous. We wear our upsides loud and proud while glossing over, banning, or locking away the paper trail of our bad behavior.

We’ve stolen, wrangled, and been given power that we lack the responsibility to handle. Like hormonal pubescents, we couldn’t care less about balance.

Hard Choices

Cultures with deep ties to Earth-based wisdom do not, as far as I can tell, delude themselves with this kind of bravado, nor with certainty about How Life Should Be. They see the life-death-life cycle everywhere, and understand that stasis—as well as enormous power imbalances—are un-Nature-al and can’t last.

But we thought we were stronger than Earth! If the globe is warming, we’ll just build a giant air conditioner and send it into the atmosphere. That oughta work! 💪🏻💥⚡️

Friends and fellow countrypeople, the façade of our Greatness is crumbling and we’ve got a very tough choice to make. And believe me, I can sympathize with tough choices.

Do we choose our collective well-being, which will require serious self-examination and truth-telling en route to healing ourselves and the planet? Or,
Do we fight tooth-nail-and-gun to grip the grotesque mask to our face, as our integrity falls away and we’re left standing in our underwear?

I see many folks choosing Path 1, and large swaths of the population choosing Path 2.

What About You?

Everywhere we look—in Nature, in society, in our families—there is healing work to be done. Just because we have a lot of experience with Loss doesn’t mean that we’re skilled at telling the Truth about the ones that sting most. But we can practice.

Where could you promote healing by being a compassionate Truth-teller?
What do you know about the core wounds, that you can share with others?
Where have you been faking honesty or pretending away painful losses?

I don’t believe the saying that Time Heals All Wounds. It might heal tiny paper cuts, like that time in second grade when your best friend snubbed you to sit with those other girls at lunch. Even small wounds heal faster when tenderly kept clean. Deeper gashes need more care.

Healing Paths: My “Big Three”

First let me say that I’m not a therapist or a trained healer. I’m simply a human with personal experience and a voracious appetite for learning about psychology, healing, and trauma. I’m sharing what has helped me, but I encourage you to seek out the support you need.

My Big Three Paths to Healing:

ART helps show us the places that hurt. You might start writing or doodling or swooshing paint around and see what comes up. In recent years I’ve discovered the delicious full-body resonance of singing, which soothes like a tonic. Dancing is never a bad idea. In each case, try to be curious and not too judgey about your efforts. Nothing shuts down healing and creativity like a harsh critic. Plus, healing has no use for perfectionism anyway.
NATURE, also known as The Great Truth-Teller, is a compassionate healer. Find a tree to talk to or lean against for support. Hands-in-dirt calm the spirit. Stop to actually smell the flowers. Bare feet on grass. The sound of water. Beholding a long view across the valley, or a longer vista to the stars—puts things in perspective in a hurry. Follow the phases of the moon; know where to find her both day and night.
BODY wisdom. Quiet down and ask your precious body what it needs. Being of Nature, it speaks only truth. We’ve been taught not to listen, or worse, to play the harsh task-master and overlord of our poor corporeal self. It’s never too late to relearn your body’s language. Start by giving it rest, better food, and some gentle touch.

Humility, Not Heroes

We don’t need heroes, and the solutions to the world’s problems can’t depend on sweeping legislation that may or may not ever come to pass. What we DO need is more humans who speak and understand the languages of Truth.

What’s yours telling you?
Pam

P.S. If you noticed that I’m a day late in publishing this, I want to first say thanks — I’m honored by your attention to my posts. 🙏🏽 It wasn’t until I’d almost finished my essay yesterday that I realized what the real point was that was trying to come through. Writing is like that: You sit down thinking you have something to say, then in the process some other notion arises that seems more relevant than the original thing. Writing to learn, to better understand.

And I decided this topic was important enough to spend the extra time. Plus, the deadline-breaking was good practice for my recovering-perfectionist self. ❤️

P.P.S. The Doodling Lunatics are gathering around the Zoom table, under a waxing gibbous moon, on Friday, May 13th at 5:30 pm Pacific Time. I’ll send the link when it’s closer. All are invited and will be warmly welcomed.

P.P.S. If you’re in need of (for lack of a better word) Creativity Hand-Holding, get in touch! I’ll be offering one-on-one Creative Courage Coaching (?), Imagination Tutoring (?), or something of the sort with (hopefully) a better name, beginning this summer. More info will be available shortly.