The Daily Good today (10/22/23) was an essay by Francis Weller on grief. When I first heard about his work from my therapist, I went to a retreat on the west coast. But I have been struggling with a lot of sadness, hopelessness, bleak feelings and when I read this I realized where they were coming from.
There is another place of grief that we hold, a second gateway, different than the Iosses connected to losing someone or something that we love. This grief occurs in the places never touched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farther shore of our lives. …
These neglected places of soul live in utter despair. What we feel as defective, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied welcome and instead sent into exile, we are creating a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth. That is our predicament, we are chronically sensing the presence of sorrow but we are unable to truly grieve because we feel in our body that this piece of who we are is unworthy of our grieving over. Much of our grief comes from having to crouch and live small, hidden from the gaze of others and in that move we confirm our exile.
There is one more gate to grief, one difficult to name, yet it is very present in each of our lives. This entry into sorrow calls forward the background echo of losses that we may never even know to acknowledge. I wrote earlier about the expectations coded into our physical and psychic lives. We anticipated a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, reflection, in short, we expected what our deep time ancestors experienced, namely the village. We expected a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth, communal rituals of celebration, grief and healing that kept us in connection with the sacred. The absence of these requirements haunts us and we feel it as an ache, a sadness that settles over us as if in a fog.
How do we even know to miss these experiences? I don’t know how to answer that question. What I do know is that when granted to an individual, the aftermath often includes grief; some wave of recognition rises and the awareness dawns that I have lived without this all my life. This realization calls forth grief. I have seen this time and time again.
These are the words that touched me strongly:
“the places never touched by love” “These neglected places of soul live in utter despair. What we feel as defective, we also experience as loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth.”
“We anticipated a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, reflection … communal rituals of celebration, grief and healing that kept us in connection with the sacred. The absence of these requirements haunts us… ”
On Saturday, October 28 I wrote in my journal:
Woke up and was just lying there when I began to feel awful. Hard to describe the feeling: lonely, unloved, as though thrown out of the tribe, not labeled with a crime, but just being unacceptable. I realized I have to treat it as a part, and find some love for it.
Later in that journal entry I wrote:
My right shoulder hurts. I did way too many puzzles yesterday. I was feeling obstreperous. I’m going to have to look that word up, but the sound is so good to express how I felt — angry and perverse so I do something I shouldn’t because it’s bad for me.
[Margin: Obstreperous — stubbornly resistant to control.]
Now I understand that this is a part of me, rejected, criticized, and exploited by my parents, that I also have rejected, not quite sure why. I think I need to know why so I can apologize to that part, as well as comfort it. I remember a picture of me as a child, standing by a small table. I look very upset. They told me I had been running around and around the table, so they spanked me to make me be still and got a picture of a spanked child. Served them right. I think this has to do with anger that I’m being treated badly and learned that it wasn’t OK to express.
While I was still married, but my marriage was beginning to break up, my husband said several things that I got angry about much later, but failed to notice at the time. A form of denial. I wonder if the incident involving Mother and the Colonial Dames was another example of denial that I became aware of, and began to protect myself against.