Hidden Grief
It is the beginning of my third therapy session with him. He acts like things are cool and he trusts me, but I feel his carefully crafted boundary of faux vulnerability guiding his every word.
I don’t blame him. The carpet of his childhood was substance abuse, and the wallpaper was chaos and distress. He doesn’t trust anyone, so we’re still joining.
“What type of food do you like to eat?” I ask casually, as he tells me about going to a food court. He pauses and stares out the window for a moment. I see his façade of charm and wit slide off of his face like melting wax. His freshly authentic face turns towards me and his eyes lock with mine. “I don’t know what type of food I like.” He pauses and I feel the weight of time pressing in on my body. “I eat what I’m fed” he says, holding my gaze. “… in juvie, the county, prison and in treatment. I’ve never had a choice, Molly. My whole life since I was 10... just eat what I’m fed.” I’m caught off guard by the wave of warmth rushing through my body which quickly crests into tears brimming in my eyes. He sees them because his eyes have not dropped their gaze, and I feel my jaw clench in a socialized reaction to resist my own tears. The wave passes, and I take a breath. “Well,” I say, “now is the time to find out.”
Grief and loss seem to be the cornerstone precariously holding together the arch of my clients’ lives. Of course, there are the more common experiences—although no less tragic—of losing a partner, child, friend or other loved one. Many have lost their jobs, their cars, their possessions, and their homes. But there are other losses too.
There are losses of things that never were. A favorite food. A dream. A sense of feeling safe. Something lost before it was even had. Hidden losses locked away underneath invisible grief. And sometimes, the weight of these relegated losses that surface in my sessions hits me hard, like a migraine, pounding with each beat of my heart. The layers of loss sometimes feel unending, and some days I’m not sure I am prepared or even know how to ready myself for the work. The task of unraveling these losses, attending to them through the process of healing feels like tracing my finger around the concentric circles layered on the surface of a redwood stump. I can’t do it. As soon as I begin to trace one circle, my finger grazes over its neighboring ring, and I lose my place—one circle looping into the next.
I wonder how the human body can engulf the diameter of this redwood stump. Certainly, no human heart can still beat after so much loss. But it does—they do. And it overwhelms me; sometimes with sorrow and sometimes with inspirational awe… usually both.
How, then, does a human being whose voice echoes loss with every syllable actually grieve? The only answer I can come up with, is this: they cannot do it alone.
Maybe that’s disappointing to you. You’re probably thinking, dang, she has a PhD, and that’s all she can come up with? But it’s true. That’s all I’ve got. We can’t process grief alone. We can’t unravel these concentric circles of unnamed loss by ourselves. It’s simply too much for one human soul to digest. And sometimes, this is all I can offer people—the embodied experience of not being alone with the loss and pain.
But in doing so, here’s what I’ve found: when you bring the hidden loss and the hidden grief into sight, and you shine a light of care toward it, it becomes malleable. Hidden grief has a way of fossilizing, but when the light of a trusted gaze falls on it, it seems to shift. It doesn’t disappear, but slowly over time, it becomes pliable, supple even. Eventually, what once was fossilized rock, becomes clay, ready to be molded into something beautiful.
And this is the best part—co-creating a new sculpture with my clients. Taking what was once painful loss and gently shaping it into a work of art. Sometimes we call this trauma mastery or posttraumatic growth. I prefer the less clinical image of geological softening. Layers and layers of soil compressing over time under the weight of gravity. But then, in the presence of water, these layers soften, earth always giving way to water. Nature, always nudging us toward patience, reminding us that transformation takes time.
And I suppose I am answering my own question. Hidden grief needs to be held. It needs to be held in the gaze of love and care. It needs time to soften. And then, when there has been sufficient softening, there is exists a new opportunity to mold beauty from what once was hardened grief.