trauma – Sunshine, Angels and Rainbows

Where do you store your grief?

This is one of the writing prompts for my HLH Journaling workshop tomorrow. And i can tell you, i know exactly where my grief is stored, my shoulders and my neck. Why, you ask? Because that’s where I like to bottle everything up and hold on to for later.

I’ve lost some mobility in my neck because of the block of knots that are my shoulders. I see a chiro weekly, a massage therapist monthly and I’m about to add my doctor shortly as I’ve started to get terrible headaches from the neck pain. My chiro told me that I need to add yoga so that I can breathe more. He can barely crack me, it’s so tight.

I workout, I try to stretch and relax as much as I can, but none of that changes my losses. None of that brings my people back. I feel like Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. But instead of the world, that ball is the weight of my grief. Heavy and pushing me down.

It’s weird how grief can affect us physically. Part of mine is perhaps psychosomatic, as I was injured in my shoulders and upper body when my son died. The body has a memory for pain and injury. It can remember exactly how something felt. I can remember the sensation of being struck by my car and thrown down the hill. It was not a feeling of weightlessness, but rather like I was in the washing machine, stuck on the spin cycle. And the natural reaction is to tuck. And I feel like ever since that day I’ve tucked into myself, physically. I slouch inwards, as if in defense or protection. Almost as if I’m hugging myself. Or holding myself together.

So this results in tons of shoulder and neck pain. I’m constantly trying to figure out how to make it better. I’m a problem solver by nature, so I need to make it better. I need to learn that my body is a safe space and instead of approaching the world in a protective posture, I need to open my arms to it. I need to end my reign in flight or fight mode and open up to the possibility of joy and love. Because I know that I feel that in my soul, I just need to allow myself to be vulnerable enough in my stature to accept it.

Guilty

Ok. So this. I am so guilty of this. It’s this feeling that if you just keep moving and keep busy, things won’t fall apart. If I keep balancing all of the balls up in the air, I can add a few knives, and a flaming stick. I won’t drop any of them if I just keep moving. Then I get overwhelmed. Then I get frustrated. Rinse. Repeat. Welcome to my grief.

When you’ve been dealing with trauma as long as I have, I think the busy just becomes a coping mechanism. I don’t mean to make my life so crazy and hectic, but it happened. Anytime you have little kids life is crazy anyway, so maybe it’s not all my doing. But I knew what we were getting into. Sometimes the chaos just makes the pain so much easier to bear. If that makes any sense?

If I’m busy and tired, I don’t have the time to acknowledge the terrible things that have happened. Sometimes it’s easier. It’s a break from the grief reality. It never does truly work for long, because grief always finds a way. And I know this. Yet I carry on and grief and I pretend to ignore each other for a bit longer until he shows up again, unannounced. It’s a game we play.

And then I do slow down. And it’s a grief slap like no other because I actually allow my mind to wrap around my reality. And it sucks. I sit and allow the grief to hollow me out once more. And I’m tired.

I wish I had answers. I wish I had a healthier grief relationship. I do know that admitting this and acknowledging it makes it easier to carry. Because I know I’m not alone.

Stretching and Crying

I have had back pain for as long as I can remember. My posture is terrible from years of dealing with a large bust on a small frame and trying to make myself look smaller. For years I worked in a male dominated field, so slouching my shoulders and scooping my spine came naturally.

There is so much wrong with this that I am aware of now, but being a woman in her twenties and thirties, I just wasn’t able to be comfortable in my own skin. Someone very wise recently talked to me about ‘making herself small to make others comfortable.’ And sadly, that’s what I was doing not only physically, but emotionally.

The car accident that took our Benny also had very physical consequences for me. I’ve written about spraining my ankle and the damage to my shoulder and the road rash. The bruising that occured on my back and side was like nothing I have ever seen. Until this accident, I never knew what a bone bruise was, but it took 6+ months to heal on my left leg and I still have damage. I have scarring on my right shoulder and elbow and my shoulder has never been the same since.

They did X rays at the hospital and I had a follow up with my doctor a few weeks later. But here’s the thing, when your child dies, your physical pain and suffering mean nothing. I knew that the ankle would heal and the bruising would fade.

The first thing that we sought was emotional support from a psychologist. Our family needed all of the help that we could get in processing what had just happened. It was during those months of therapy that it was asked why I wasn’t seeking further care for my injuries. And there’s no simple answer for that.

Maybe holding onto the physical pain was a way to punish myself for what happened. Or maybe it provided me a way to feel anything during those early and dark days. Perhaps it provided a reminder that the accident was actually real. Maybe it was just easier to continue feeling ‘small’ as a means to an end. It was probably all of the above if I’m being honest.

Whatever the case, it took me years to seek help. I finally saw a chiropractor and massage therapist and the doctor again. I’m not sure what the impetus was, or if there was one, but I finally decided it was time. Perhaps I was feeling forgiving towards myself or I was finally tired of feeling ‘small’. But that’s a whole other conversation.

I’ve been doing yoga and dance and stretching at home to try to keep everything feeling good during quarantine. A week ago I started a fascia stretch to work on opening up shoulders and chest and hopefully work on correcting my posture.

Today’s stretch was the hips and the instructor said that we carry emotion there and we shouldn’t be surprised if we cry. I was dubious. I had never heard of that. Guess I was wrong, because let me tell you, it was like someone turned on the water works. During a damn hip stretch!!

This is not like I was in a quiet space and able to get myself into the stretch emotionally. My littles were 3 feet away working on a puzzle and my cats were running around. It was the typical chaos and here I was thinking I would get in a quick stretch.

Because Google is my friend, I read article after article of the hips being a place where we store trauma. In further research in Psychology today I found that the hips and jaw are aligned and store so much of the flight or fight response based on one study.

I think sometimes that we forget how closely our bodies are connected to our emotions. Here I am 7 plus years out crying over a 5 minute hip stretch. I’m only halfway through this program, but I’m curious to see what else my body has to tell me about my current mental state.