Category Archives: Powerlessness

Hot Comfort

Hot ComfortRichard Easterling, 2014

 

 

“Love is a Temple
Love a Higher Law” U2, One

“I don’t even know what I would have wanted someone to say.  Not:  It will be better.  Not:  You don’t think you’ll live through this, but you will.  Maybe:  Tomorrow you will spontaneously combust.  Tomorrow, finally, your misery will turn to wax and heat and you will burn and melt till nothing is left in your chair but a greasy, childless smudge.  That might have comforted me.”  Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

 


I went through one of those trap door rabbit holes in cyber space the other day and ended up reading about the Temple at Burning Man.  Burning Man, of course, is the yearly art festival in the Nevada desert that is famous for a number of things, including the practice of setting fire to many of the art pieces.  My only experience at Burning Man was in 2014.  There were a million bits of wonder and feeling that came up for me in my time there.  It’s quite an event.  Look at pictures from any year and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about.

A participant may see a giant Golden Dragon with beautiful people on board partying at sunrise, flying zoetrope monkeys powered by drumming and a Barbie Death Camp.  In this gift economy, someone may offer to write the theme song for your life or make a sundae on your tongue.  You may get stuck in a sandstorm which leaves you stranded and disoriented and when it clears, a stranger may come along and offer you the best grilled cheese sandwich you’ve ever had–  it’s kind of like that.  And, because someone else is bound to tell you if I don’t, I should say that there are a fair amount of nude people.  Also, it’s hot, really hot.  Did I mention that it takes place in a desert?

Since 2000, one of the traditions at Burning Man has been the construction of a temple.  Various architects, the most well-known being David Best, have designed a different wooden creation every year.  Like may things at Burning Man, it is done on a grand scale.  The physical construction begins off site months before the event and continues on site in the weeks leading up to the festival.  Built to last only a brief time in an intense environment, every year the temple seems to be an extremely well thought out, intricate and gorgeous structure.

During the festival, the Temple is a gathering place of memory and reflection.  People bring pictures, personal belongings, and letters.  Pens and markers are available for writing on the wood.  It gets filled up with the space between the living and the dead.  It is a place of feeling and remembrance and is often packed with people walking, sitting, and lying down inside the walls.  During the week of the festival, it feels like an inviolate and solemn place.  And on the last night of the event, it burns.

Like other burns, it is done at a specific time, after it is emptied out and sealed up, with tens of thousands watching from a safe distance, feeling whatever they are going to feel.  People talk about it as a release, a spiritual catharsis.  It’s whatever you need it to be.

The McCracken quote above is from a book written about her experience of having a stillborn son.  This passage made me think about Burning Man and the Temple.  At first I wondered what about being told that you will be melted down could be comforting.  After baby loss, isn’t a person already so hurt and distressed that losing more of themselves is what they fear most?

But after considering McCracken’s words, I wonder if she is saying simply that it would take a dramatic, destroying image to resonate with what she felt inside.  Maybe she was responding to the knowledge that her pain wasn’t a brief illness that she would temporarily dip in and out of, but rather a loss that would take much more of her than that.  Maybe only a gutted, burnt out metaphor was a match for what she felt and the place she would be coming from to face whatever was next.  Maybe what she could identify with most was the idea of burning through every feeling and being taken down to almost nothing.

I wouldn’t confuse this with hopelessness.  A forest cleared by fire will have a next stage of growth.  A person who hurts to his or her core will still eventually let in new bits of life.  And every year a desolate playa in Nevada turns into a giant, vibrant city.

The time I went to Burning Man, the temple was filled with pictures, handwritten letters, pieces of cloth, at least one pine cone and some stuffed animals.  Robin Williams had just died, and there were several areas with his picture and notes to and about him. There were goodbyes written on the walls to every kind of loved one.  There were memorials to pets.  There were pictures of moms, dads, grandparents and the kind of friends that are family.

There were small items meant for newborns.  There were photographs of and names of babies, notes to and about the ones who didn’t make it into this world as well as infants who were no longer living.

On the last night, I pedaled to the temple burn at sunset along with others on foot or on bike–past the ashes from another burn, then a metal octopus, a miniature log cabin on wheels, a big group of people in sailor suits, a line of giant teapots strung together and some people sitting inside a neon star.

When I saw the temple burn, the first change I noticed was a soft orange glow inside, then flames outside.  The smoke moved softly and adamantly in one direction.  The moon looked tiny.  Everything seemed to slow while a small corner of the desert burned down into something else.

 

 

Those Plans

h“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”  –Mike Tyson

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”  –Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Oh Harold, that’s wonderful.  Go and love some more. –“Harold and Maude”, movie written by Colin Higgins, line performed by Ruth Gordon.


FYI– this is NOT going to be a post about the futility of plans.

I am as fond of plan-making as the next person and I have a lot of admiration for the planners extraordinaire who walk into my office.   Many of those women and men have developed and executed plan after plan in their lives.  They are often impressive plans.  Some people have gone to graduate school, some have found fulfillment in volunteer work, some have traveled extensively, some have developed exciting and rewarding careers and some have done all of the above.

The plans we make show something about us.  They are our articulated hopes and intentions that we may have been lucky and motivated enough to manifest.  The plans we make about our babies are particularly special.  These plans tend to involve our most tender feelings of love, hope and a desire to care for someone.  They are far reaching, shiny, and beautiful.  They involve dreaming on a big scale for something dear– a conjuring of a new person and beloved family member.  And when the plans go awry, when we lose our babies, our world gets a little dimmer in a particularly painful way.

Getting punched in the face (and I’m going to go with baby loss as a metaphorical face punch), as Mike Tyson points out, doesn’t put us in the best place to think about plans.  We are hurt and knocked off course.  We get taken to a different level of experience.  Some energy is shifted away from thinking and put into feeling.  We stagger back and reevaluate what we have sent out into the world.  Stunned and wounded, we wonder what’s next.

When confronted with the grief of baby loss, we often want to jump right back into planning mode.  We look for the fast track of grief, the short cut, the best way of doing it.  After all, we know how to get things done.  If only we could think or plan our way out of pain.  If only we could get some assurance of how long, how challenging this road will be and then get to the finish line as soon as possible.

I think at the juncture of being thrown into the grief of baby loss, a moratorium on planning is in order.  At least a temporary ban on heavy lifting types of planning.  This can be really hard to do.  Anxiety and desire to move on to some other experience may drive you to want to keep planning. The pain may feel unbearable.

Realistic concerns about wanting to try again soon for another pregnancy due to age or other factors may also be occupying your mind.  You may just be terrified of stopping and feeling.  These are all understandable worries.  And some distractions, denial and other ways of getting through your day are fine and may be really important.  But I do think grief is an experience where it’s really true that “you can run, but you can’t hide”.  Some wandering in the pain without looking for the exit is necessary.

So what would I suggest you do instead of rushing to make more plans?  I would start with spending some time breathing into your pain and uncertainty.  (Sorry if that sounds too groovy but literal breathing while feeling something is the gist here.)  I would encourage a respectful mental bow to the you that invested, that tried, that gave your heart to something so lovely.  The innocent you that didn’t know you were going to end up here deserves a moment of reverence.

Spend time remembering your pregnancy or your baby as much and in whatever way is right for you.  For many people, finding ways to honor their babies is a lifelong priority and this is a good time to start.  It’s also a way to honor yourself and your ability to love.

Pretty soon you’ll start working on some new plans.  That’s what we do.   We move toward the future by zig zagging in the way we think will help us get to the place we think we want to be headed.

You may be especially fearful that your next plan may not work out.  You may be especially aware of how wonderful it might be if it does.  You may know that you have been changed by letting yourself have plans that were big enough to fail and still matter.   But when you’re ready, your head and heart will tug at you again, leading you toward something worth the risk.

 

 

 

 


 

 

Preparing for Take Off

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“The Guide says there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything 

“I’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got wings.  Coming down is the hardest thing.”  Tom Petty Learning to Fly


The pilot in my life has tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to teach me the physics of flying.  So far there is only one fact that has really stayed with me.  It’s this:  after we have put fuel in the plane, ensured all the parts are working, buckled in, started the propeller, communicated with the tower, moved the throttle, flicked lots of switches and gone skittering down the runway in that wonderful, jerky fashion of small planes, after all of the steps and effort are made by the pilot to leave the solid surface of the earth, it is the air flowing over the wings that pulls the plane off the ground.

This piece of knowledge is remarkably unhelpful in moving me toward my goal of being able to land the airplane in an emergency, but it does help me make sense of some other things.  It’s a great reminder to me of how our piece of an endeavor may be big, complicated and important but, ultimately, not the whole thing.

Sometimes when the pilot and I intend to go flying we are stopped by clouds, wind or VIP events declaring jurisdiction over the air we wanted to travel through.  Once, we got in the plane, did all the steps to run up and were sitting on the runway when it became clear that an instrument wasn’t working properly.  Uncertain of the cause, we had to scrap the flight.  The last time we planned a weekend trip, changing weather forced us to decide against three successive destinations and we ended up driving to a nearby town instead.  Being a small aircraft pilot is both powerful and humbling– you get to do big things much of the time but are also always at the mercy of greater forces.

As a clinical psychologist, I feel that I have an honorable and important job.  I spent many years learning about human behavior and theories of how to help people.  Psychotherapists are given trust, privilege, and responsibility as we sit with people and look into their lives with them.  We are capable of having a great deal of influence over others and the results can be life-changing.  But the impact of our work is still limited by multiple factors.  Timing, skill, communication, chemistry, intention and motivation and other issues between a client and therapist might affect how things progress in a given moment or session.  For better or for worse, the result can never be entirely in our hands.

After baby loss, people are always trying to do something.  It’s usually a big thing, even if it doesn’t appear that way to others.  Sometimes it’s a bunch of big things.  It may be letting themselves feel more pain than they have ever felt before.  It may be trying to find a way to get through much of the day without crying so that they can return to work and keep their job.  It may be walking into an AA meeting for the first time, because the way they have been trying to cope isn’t working.  It may be sitting with that weighty decision of whether or not to try for another baby.  And whatever they are trying for may or may not take off.  Chance, effort, ability, help from others, and grace may all factor into the final result.

Living after baby loss, like living the rest of life, is about trying for the things that matter to us.  It just tends to be a hell of a lot harder than most of the other chapters we’ve lived.  We don’t know if we’ll get what we’re trying for, we just get to do the part that is ours to do.  We can only try to be there in the right position, moving at the right speed and holding on tight.

 

Smacking Sharks

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. – Abraham Maslow

Blue ocean underwater sun rays background


I recently spent some time reading aloud to a family member who wasn’t feeling well.  Our selection was Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, the true story of an Olympic runner who was in World War II. It’s not the kind of book I usually go for, but I plan to finish it as I’m finding it to be not just a page turner, but pretty darn inspiring.

The part we just finished (spoiler alert) involves the main character, Louie Zamperini, floating in a life raft after his B-24 bomber has crashed with the loss of eight men aboard.  He is one of the three crew members who have survived together on two life rafts.  After being adrift for 27 days, with the men in the throes of both intense starvation and dehydration, a plane appears overhead.  Unfortunately, it’s a Japanese aircraft,  which starts firing at them.  Louie jumps overboard to avoid being shot and the life raft begins to be riddled with bullets.

The area of the ocean where this takes place is infested with sharks, and as Louie enters it, he suddenly becomes the intended object of the next meal.  Weak and underwater, Louie is approached by attacking, open mouthed sharks which he fights off using the information he learned in a survival class (basically to widen his eyes, bare his teeth and bop the sharks on the snout with an open palm).

He goes back and forth between shark bopping and climbing back onto the raft in between the six passes of the plane and six episodes of shooting (plus a dropped bomb that did not explode).   When he climbs back aboard the raft for the last time he finds his two crew mates miraculously unscathed by the shooting.  The three of them manage to save one raft and patch the 48 bullet holes in it while taking turns pumping out water and clubbing the sharks that are now jumping out of the water to get at them.  Altogether a pretty intense series of images…


The story stirred up a lot of thoughts for me, and is currently serving as a marker of what a really bad day can look like.  It made me think, too, about how so many dramatic episodes in life seem to be a mixture of lucky and unlucky events.  Another take on the story could be that it’s a compelling message about not giving up in the middle of a crisis.  And it has definitely crossed my mind that I may want to invest in a survival class.

It also made me think about how in any challenge, no matter how dire or convoluted, we can only face our issues one step at a time.  We can only be where we are right then doing the little piece in front of us.  We can only be right where we are.

Louie had a bunch of things on his mind that day in the ocean and he was full of action, but he wasn’t really multi tasking.  When he was smacking sharks, he was smacking sharks.  Not dealing with starvation, dehydration, avoiding bullets, fixing the boat or trying to float to land.  He wasn’t even breathing.

If Maslow was right about the ability to live in the present moment being a component of mental wellness, and if all of those writers, meditators and therapists preaching mindfulness are also on to something, then our moment, our now, seems a bit more sacred.   What we are doing right now is what we need to be doing fully.  And all the moments coming will benefit from engagement with the one we’re having with now.

More aspirational than realistic as a way to be all the time?  Heck, yeah.  And what’s wrong with that?

I was pretty anxious during my last pregnancy, which occured after my two losses.  But I remember a point where I really started to appreciate that there were very few things in the pregnancy that were under my control.  I could try to eat well, take my vitamins, go to my doctor appointments and generally try to live a safe and pleasant life.   And that very short and humble list was the total extent of my control over the experience.

And sometimes, not all of the time, I felt the freedom of that humble list.  I could eat and think about eating (way too many bagels for some reason), take my vitamins and so on and those actions had meaning and purpose.  The rest of the time I could try to take up my now, whether that moment was about acknowledging and living with a moment of fear (which always passes eventually) or enjoying a moment of peace or hope.  Just like in meditation or any type of mindfulness, I didn’t stay in this place.  My mind would race away and I would have to circle back, but it helped.  It helped a lot.

In times of uncertainty, (which, realistically, is always) this is the only moment we have.  If we’re in a tough spot, breaking it down is likely to help us get through it.  If we’re in a great spot, it’s probably worth taking in.  Yes, we’re going to sleep through and space out through much of our lives.  But it just might help to notice that we can also jump in and roll around in a given moment.  Your right now experience may feel like a challenge, a gift, or pretty inconsequential, but by noticing it, you might live it a little more deeply.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Reviewing the Loss: Thinking and Feeling it Through

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“I must not have been careful enough.”

“Maybe I just don’t deserve a baby.”

“Of course it was my fault, I was the one who was pregnant. ”


I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has experienced a miscarriage, stillbirth, termination due to diagnosis of a fetal abnormality, or infant loss who did not spend some time worrying that she had done something to contribute to the loss.  And by some time, I mean usually quite a bit of time.

I know I did this myself and I think it’s probably an inevitable part of the process of grieving a perinatal loss.  As a species, we like to make sense of our world.  Being pregnant or having a new baby is a huge responsibility.  When we are the one carrying the baby or caring for the baby, it’s pretty compelling to believe that we have control over what happens on our watch.

Drinking coffee or small amounts of alcohol, having sex, riding in an airplane, eating soft cheese, deli meat or non-organic food, exercising, not exercising, thinking too much or too little about the pregnancy or baby, feeling too positive or not positive enough about the pregnancy or baby are all often mentioned by women as possible causes of their loss.

Although medical advice may caution us about some of these issues during pregnancy, it is rare to have them actually contribute to a loss.  But, despite what we are told about the evidence, sometimes it just feels better to blame ourselves rather than to acknowledge how little control we actually had over something so important.

Pregnancy and giving birth can feel like a time when we are granted special powers.  Our body steps up to do amazing things in the way of hormone production, shape shifting and perceptual changes such as a heightened sense of smell and taste.  We are tasked with the mind-blowing job of growing a new human and are usually given plenty of advice on how to do it.  All of these factors help set the stage for believing we must be responsible for what happens.  If we’re not the ones in charge of things going right for our pregnancy or baby, who is?

And then something goes so horribly, painfully, wrong.  Despite all of our strength and intentions, we couldn’t stop it from happening.  We search the world for a loophole to reality or a chance for a do-over and we come up empty.  What does it mean about us?  If it turns out that we aren’t Superman, who could make everything safe, are we Lex Luthor (the arch supervillan) who did something awful to make everything go wrong?

Maybe accepting our part in what happened involves coming to terms with how, despite all of our strong wishes and abilities, when it comes to certain medical realities, each one of us is a perpetual Clark Kent with no phone booth in sight.   We only ever had a few things under our control, and none of them were enough.  If we could have made the world spin backwards and saved our baby, we would have.  It just wasn’t ever an option.  Unfortunately, great responsibility doesn’t always come with great power (to mix in a Spider-Man reference).

So when your brain leads you to do the review of what happened and why, maybe you can try to keep in mind who you’re actually dealing with- a loving, heartbroken person.  You’ve already been through a lot and beating up on yourself isn’t appropriate or helpful.  Start trying to speak to yourself gently, as you would to your best friend if she were going through the same thing.

Think about what you need.  Is there any information that might help you to logically or emotionally understand what happened?  If so, you may want to try to seek it out.

If not, or if the information is not that clear or helpful, work on accepting the story you have with the knowledge that you have.  Part of this acceptance is to acknowledge the limited or total lack of control you had over your loss.

As you do your review, don’t forget the parts of your story where you went to your prenatal appointments, took your vitamins and did your best to care for your pregnancy or baby.  Don’t forget any sweet moments you had while pregnant or with your baby.  And definitely remember that your desire to understand is because of your attachment to someone very dear to you.  That ability to attach doesn’t come with the ability to fly or change the past, but it’s a huge part of being an imperfect and loving human.