My heart hurts.\u00a0 Grieving for Bella has gotten harder.\u00a0 Thursday I was depressed.\u00a0 Friday I started the day feeling totally empty, feeling like Bella had never lived.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t remember what she looked like.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t feel her spirit.<\/p>\n
Then I thought that a lot of my grieving in this lifetime has been for things I never got, not for things I had and lost.\u00a0 I called Lynelle and told her I needed a hug.\u00a0 She came right away and hugged me while I cried.\u00a0 I told her about the emptiness, and she said that this was what she had been worried about, that Bella\u2019s death would trigger my abandonment trauma.\u00a0 She said she was glad to see how strong I was at first, when I could feel Bella\u2019s spirit and the love we\u2019d shared.\u00a0 It actually helped a lot to be able to tell myself \u201cThis emptiness is about Mom not Bella.\u201d\u00a0 Then I was able to be with it instead of fighting it.<\/p>\n
This morning the emptiness was here again.\u00a0 I think I may not be able to work on it until I see Caryn for Somatic Experiencing.\u00a0 I worked on a project of picking out the best pictures of Bella so I could print them out.\u00a0 Sitting here, I remembered her running to me in the woods, her standing on her hind legs and shrieking Ee! Ee! Ee! when I got back after a time away.\u00a0 Her ecstatic wiggling when she realized it was me.<\/p>\n
My heart\u2019s hurting again.\u00a0 I realize that I\u2019ve been doing the S.E. technique called \u201cpendulating,\u201d going back and forth between the trauma, and the resource which today is good memories of Bella.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t realized that \u201cpendulating\u201d is actually something the brain does naturally when we\u2019re not interfering.\u00a0 That\u2019s why grief comes in layers, times of pain, and times of normality when you can integrate the pain.<\/p>\n
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My heart hurts.\u00a0 Grieving for Bella has gotten harder.\u00a0 Thursday I was depressed.\u00a0 Friday I started the day feeling totally empty, feeling like Bella had never lived.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t remember what she looked like.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t feel her spirit. Then … Continue reading