Why Completed Grief Doesn't Just Happen; It's a Process!

Navigating our way through the unresolved grief of our own past history is a process.  People tend to ignore it rather than to face it and work through whatever it is we remain traumatized about.  For example, when someone we love and care about suddenly dies, depending on what "else" is going on any one of the beloved survivors' personal lives.....our unresolved grief has the power to unhinge us.  Literally and figuratively speaking.  If you doubt this, take a look see at the latest documentary about Wendy Williams.  It is called "Wendy Williams:  What a Mess!"  After watching it, I felt horrible for what she went through in her personal life that she kept secret from every one who was closely connected to her.  

Then again, not everyone was or is a Wendy fan.  She was the equivalent shock jockette to Howard Stern, but as relating to her own chosen group of celebrity targets.  As she dished it out about who was doing what to whom in the R&B and rap music industry, her own life was unraveling bit by bit.  A self-professed cocaine user in her radio heyday, Williams herself states she was a "made" woman by the time she met her future husband Kevin Hunter when she was 29 and he was 23 years old.  Over time, that script flipped mightily and he became large and in charge of her personal and professional life.  Multiple miscarriages, serial cheating....it was "Hot Topics" fodder for Wendy who kept trying to keep it together professionally as her star kept rising while her personal life was crashing and burning.

If you haven't seen the documentary, I encourage you to do so.  By not pursuing her own unresolved grief work, she turned to the bottle in "coping" as she herself openly states.  "What would you do?" she keeps asking the camera while heavily sobbing.  Tough girl outside;  yet what a mess inside.

(Williams is alleged to being currently housed in an inpatient rehab facility for alcohol addiction as of June 2023..)  Her son has gone on record stating that he fears she will die because of her alcoholism and the people she has surrounded herself with who, he feels, are exploiting her financially.  How sad!  Yet how typical of someone who avoided facing what they preferred not to face when it came to processing their grief over their many life's losses....

I remember reading a tremendously powerful book called "Guilty By Reason of Insanity" by Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis many years ago.  Lewis, a forensic psychiatrist, dove deep into the minds of individuals on Death Row.  In her book, Lewis talked about the depth of denial these men had in common when it came to processing past trauma and loss through their own grief work.  Instead of honestly facing and then working through what happened to them, they stuck with the "My family was great!" narrative to maintain the family folklore.  Think about that.  Someone would rather go (at that time) to the electric chair than to admit that they were sexually abused, beaten, neglected, and/or otherwise treated like less than human---before they would rat out their father, mother, sister, brother, grandpa, uncle, auntie, cousin, or best friend's family member(s). 

Well, that's how it is with unresolved grief.  We are more afraid of walking our way through it than we are of getting over to the other side of it and to the point of genuine "acceptance".  Once you accept the reality of whatever "it" is that happened truly and deeply within yourself, it is impossible to stay stuck in the past.  You will move forward as you should.  Think about all the people you know, or have known, who seemed to be extremely "stuck" in their unresolved grief over----you name it!  A divorce that happened 18 years ago and she is still lamenting how he "ruined" her life....a son or daughter who just up and left home without ever looking back....the boss who sexually harrassed and threatened his employees for decades before being outed for his crimes..  THESE are just a few examples of life experiences that absolutely require grief work.  Don't we understand the importance of that yet?  Many do...and yet many of us still do not!

At my age, many of my peers are dealing with spouses showing signs of some form of dementia.  Well, ours was the generation that viewed drug and alcohol use as a right going back to early junior high school.  (That would be 7th grade for you Gen Z'ers out there..)  Not that alcohol and drug use is 100% a direct cause of dementia, but such a lifestyle sure doesn't work to prevent it!  So what is one supposed to do when your wife or husband of 30 or 40 years starts asking you questions that make absolutely no sense and/or talks about things that are not based in any form of real life and right now reality?  

I just heard about a wife who started screaming over the phone to her oldest daughter about "Clean out your bank account now..!!" because mom thought the American banking system was in the middle of financial collapse and everyone had to get their liquid assets out before midnight.  By the next day, mom was back to "normal" again without any memory of calling her daughter about the bank issue.

Grief can be complex.  Of course it can.  No "loving" relationship exists as a straight line.  There are curves and drop offs and all sorts of bumps and impediments which challenge one's personal trajectory between feelings of love---and feelings of hate.  This is what Otnow Lewis discovered in her work with death row inmates.  They could talk about their crime(s) without batting an eye or shedding a tear...but when it came to their own family of origin experiences, it was a very different story.  Usually one of denial and the stuff of legend and myth, which is much easier to navigate than authentically facing and then grieving our personal loss(es) from back there...

There are several grief books that are helpful for the person interested in beginning their journey into...and through the grief process.  "Bearing the Unbearable:  Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief" by Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is one of them.  "Getting Past What You'll Never Get Over" is another great book by John F. Westfall.  Both can be ordered through mel.org and your local library.  As I have stated repeatedly in this blog, you can then receive the book for free from your local library when you order online through mel.org and retain it for three weeks post delivery.

Do your grief work as acceptance is the only reality that can move us past what we have endured so we can experience true hope for what remains of our own future....

Until next post....

To Think Of Yourself Less Often....

We are all narcissistic to varying degrees.  This is because we all have suffered through varying experiences of rejection, invalidation, neglect, and by being true victims of true injustice.  Narcissistic injury teaches us that it is not o.k. for us to exist, we are a/the problem to him/her/them, and that we basically have no real value or worth as a viable and contributing member of society.  Narcissistic injury also teaches us that we are no more than mere objects to be exploited and used by others for their own amusement and/or gratification in whatever forms that gratification takes.

Now, one might think that such difficult life experiences would encourage a person to be resilient, compassionate, humble, and committed to doing what's right first and always.  Wrong!  In fact, narcissistic injury more often causes us move in a completely opposite direction.  Instead of being resilient, we get stuck in the muck of our painful past.  Instead of practicing compassion, we care less and less about the well being of others.  Rather than being humble, we choose arrogance to cover up our genuine inner vulnerabilities.  And rather than doing the right thing in any given moment...we choose to do whatever makes us feel "right" in the quickest way possible.

Instead of thinking of ourselves less often, we think less of others more often!  And that fact, I must say, is at the root of how malignant narcissists are not born...but are made!

Let's take a look at the life of "Joe".  Joe's dad died suddenly when Joe was 9 years old.  Joe had one older brother, who had an ongoing anger problem since their father's death.  "He was always mad.  Mad at  our mother, mad at me, mad at the world."  Joe didn't realize that his brother's anger was complicated due to the demands of their mother once she became a single parent.  As Joe's brother Sam put it, "She told me I was responsible for Joe when she was working. I couldn't do anything or go anywhere after school because Joe was too young to be home by himself.  I couldn't believe it.  My life was going to be over because I had to babysit my brother?!"  Unfortunately, Sam figured out he could have his friends come over to the house when she was at work and until 7PM each night.

Joe's experience with his brother and his brother's friends quickly became nightmarish.  "I was violently molested by a few of them when my brother was downstairs getting drunk with the rest of them.." states Joe.  "I was too scared to tell my brother or my mother what happened, because these guys who hurt me said they would kill me if I told anybody."  Wow.  Needless to say, Joe started drinking with his brother and these same friends by age 12 and secretly began cutting himself to "just feel something".

By the time Sam was 18, he quickly moved out and relocated to the opposite coast.  "I was glad he was gone...and I didn't care if I ever saw him again", claimed Joe.  Joe, when he turned 21, got a girl pregnant who already had been married before and had a two year old son.  "My mother went ballistic", Joe says.  "She didn't come to the wedding, and she treated my wife like dirt pretty much for the rest of her own life."

By the time Joe and his wife completed their own family, he found himself feeling smothered by them and their needs whenever they were all at home together.  "I don't know what it was, but I couldn't stand being home.  It was like I had to go literally outside of my own house in order to feel o.k."  Needless to say, Joe found his own "crew" to go out with after work....and their group's activities over time often involved drinking, drug use, and other women and men to be sexual with.

Joe's wife was beside herself.  "I have these kids with the man I love more than life itself, and the best he can do is tolerate our presence every once in a while?", she stated.  Her protestations fell on Joe's deaf ears.  Joe was too busy trying to make himself feel good on demand by focusing on what he wanted and when he wanted it and how he was going to get it.  

When Joe finally came into therapy because he just found out his youngest daughter had been molested by his oldest stepson for several years during her childhood, he was a broken man.  "I don't know if I can believe her", he told his therapist.  "She was always very clingy as a kid, but I can't believe he would do that to her."

It took several months working with his therapist for Joe to realize how he came from a family whose primary legacy was malignant narcissism.  During this time, Joe did some research regarding his own father's death.  He found out from his last living "elder" relative (his paternal aunt) that his father was killed coming home from a rendevous with his long-time girlfriend.  Both were killed instantly, but the family shut down the truth immediately and just told everyone it was a heart attack.  "Back then, my aunt told me, car accidents weren't reported in the newspaper unless a lot of people were killed at the same time."  

How did Joe feel about this uncomfortable truth regarding his own father?  "Well, why should I be surprised?", Joe pondered.  "I don't even remember him ever at home with us.."

Joe managed to locate his brother to ask him about their lives before their dad died.  "He was surprised to hear from me, but he did answer my questions", says Joe.  "He told me that my parents fought a lot when they were together...and that our mother cheated on our father with her boss at work for not just years---but decades.  He also told me that is why he left home so soon after he graduated high school, because he couldn't take her lies about her boyfriend/boss anymore."

Talk about history and the epigenetic links of malignant narcissism repeating itself through the generations!  Double yikes!

To think of yourself less often is the first step in breaking the chains that bind you to your own complicated past.  This is why I often suggest that adult children start asking their surviving family members/elder family members "What happened here?" before the passage of time prevents the truth from coming out as it should.  When we become blind to what our family's history has to teach us, we are pretty much doomed to repeat and re-enact the same patterns of dysfunction that we've kept ignoring and/or denying....

Until next post....