General Board
Re: What is healing?
Posted By: T. <sugarandspicebbw@hotmail.com> (64.42.116.251)
Date: Monday, 4 February 2002, at 2:08 p.m.In Response To: What is healing? (Kris)
Well, I've never been to therapy, so I can't answer part of your question that deals with that aspect of healing and recovery. But I have experienced at least one very traumatic situation in which I feel as if I've had to heal, and come to a sense of recovery.
When I was 18, in the last month of my first year at college, my 16-year-old sister decided life was just too tough, and shot herself. It was truly a life-defining moment, and has forever changed who I am and how my family defines itself.
My mother, who by my definition is the weaker person mentally, was a rock. My dad, who is usually the rock, fell apart, and I was a numb blob running through the motions of grief without ever feeling it.
I was determined not to let my schoolwork suffer, and I buried myself in end of the semester business. My friends walked around on eggshells. My mother thought I had turned into a robot and had to go to therapy.
Later that summer I pretty much fell apart, and went through all the usual processes of grief, running from depression to anger, and then acceptance. My mom finally broke down, and had to go into therapy because she blamed herself. My parents very nearly got a divorce within a year of her death. My dad didn’t feel like he could talk to my mother because she was so distraught, and my mother was angry with my dad because he wasn’t sharing his grief with her. She was convinced he was cheating on her; he wasn’t. I stopped talking to them at all because I thought they were both being ridiculous. Needless to say, this wasn’t a healthy situation for anyone involved.
Finally, one Saturday morning when we were all together having breakfast, I looked at both of my parents, and told them that her death wasn’t our faults. We had no idea she was so unhappy or feeling so desperate. We couldn’t have anticipated that she would feel so over-whelmed with life that death was her only option. We could either choose to move on as a family and love each other, grieve for our loss, or we could become hateful, lonely people lost in our grief forever. I told them I loved them, and we couldn’t continue living like we were, so how were we going to change things. We spent a great deal of that day talking about our feelings, expressing our anger and hurt, and remembering all the wonderful things about her that we hadn’t thought about in a long time. Then we went to the cemetery and cried for a long time.
Since then, we have all become much closer, and there isn’t a time that I don’t talk to them that I don’t tell them how much I love them. My parent’s will be married until one of them dies.
I think the key for me and for all of us, as a family is that we decided we had to survive. One day at a time you just move forward and you remember with fondness, and you cry when you need to, but you just keep moving forward.
Obviously, this doesn’t apply for all situations in which healing and recovery are necessary. But I do think it’s a basic truth. Either you choose to move forward, changing what you need to change, or you wallow.
T.