Tag: Trauma

Reflections, Part 5

Posted on by Gail Shurtleff in The Suicide and its Aftermath

What I Wore

If there is one thing my sister Beth and I agreed on, it was that Joyce got all the cute clothes. We took the issue to my mother when we were adults, and her response was that Joyce had the personality for cute and bold, and we were pretty and feminine with our clothes types, and so, while Beth could sew and make herself originals, I got pretty from my mother.

To be fair to my mother, she was right. Joyce got the doggie dress that Beth and I wouldn’t have known what to do with. Joyce, on the other hand, would react when someone said that her doggie dress was cute, and then she’d extend the dress to its fullness that revealed a wiener dog. She took delight in the surprise. No, her two older sisters would have failed miserably with that task. Mom just got clothes, and she understood that her two oldest daughters didn’t have the personalities for what Joyce could pull off.  

My mother’s side of the family was filled with women who could sew for themselves, and they all sat at machines and sewed their clothes. But cousin Gwen said it best: “Your mother sews circles around all of us.” She did. While my aunt could create tiny things with personality, my mother created what I came to call dresses with personality, or “dressenality.” She sewed lasting creations that would get stored in memory. I knew when I got it and when I first wore it, and it became hard to grow out of clothes. Well, that’s one good thing about adulthood. Unless I grow, I can wear it for… forever.

A trip to the fabric store was all about the right pattern and the right fabric to go with the wonderful new dress. It worked like this: first look at all the pattern books, find what I wanted, and then, and only then, could I move to the fabric. Rows, and rows of wonderful fabric. If I wanted stripes or pleats in the dress, the dress requirements were much different. Florals? Would it look right? Mom always understood. Sometimes I’d buy fabric and wait for the right dress or top to show itself.  

In first grade, it was the fall colors of the flowers, and the yellow trim, the pleated skirt, and the joy that dress brought me. It was mine, and I loved wearing it. When I was seven, Beth wanted to make the dress. Mom let her. It was a purple twirly dress with long sleeves and a Peter Pan collar. It also had a sash that tied into an incredible bow. I wore it for a “daddy–daughter” night. I also wore it for my school picture that year. Growing out of the purple dress was a sad thing.

As a teen it was the pantsuit. Dark pink pants, a seersucker top that was multicolored, and white slingback shoes that I purchased while working for my father. Working meant I could buy clothes, and I did buy fabric. Why wear what others might be wearing?

When I wasn’t living at home, I’d buy clothes from specialty shops that catered to petite-sized women. They were nice, and I had my sentimental favorite. But, once again, it was what my mother would create for me that made me happy. It was the gift of a skirt and top. The print was on this electric blue background, and the flowers were rich reds, greens, yellows, and purples. The neckline was scalloped, and I had a red belt to dress it up. It was Jon’s favorite. When we moved to Germany, and then to The Netherlands, I thought the sewing would stop. It didn’t. On a home visit, I went shopping at Vivian’s Fabrics. She had to clean out and send it all off to loving homes. Her grandchildren were the recipients of much of the stash. So was I. The last vestiges of my mother: a blue dress that is pure style. I love it. Hopefully, I’ll have it forever. I wear it on special occasions.

With all the happy memories of clothes, how I got them, and where I wore them, I had to tell myself that the one that hurt I could part with.

August 28, 2016. It was the day that turned out to be the worst day of my life. What I wore is burned into my memory. After I showered, I chose to put on a skirt with a black, brown, and white print, and a light tan tank top. Because of the minor stroke I’d had in 2014, there we days when wearing anything with a sleeve wasn’t possible. This was one of those days. It was hot and humid outside.

I wore this as I walked down the stairs to have the final conversation with Jon. I wore this as I binged on Law and Order, and I wore this on that fateful walk into my kitchen—the place I never made it to. I greeted the police in this outfit. I wore it to phone the two sides of the family.

The memory of what I wore on this awful day was pounding in my mind. I was already dealing with trauma: this was the cherry on top. An outfit of a skirt and top had been put into the trauma caldron. NO, not clothes. Gail’s rule number one about clothes is that they are sacred and can’t be damaged. This skirt and top had become tainted.

I tried to wear them separately and together, and even though I wanted to keep them, I finally knew that I’d have to send them off to a home where they could be loved.

When I think back on this series of events now, I realize that it is more complex than just parting with clothes. This is about how we handle parting with something, and also recognizing that there is damage to our souls, and coming to terms with setting it free. This is about doing the deep grief work that is often overlooked in the process of getting to the new place. This is the place where new outcomes and life paths become real.

Jon and I were together for twenty-two years and married for eighteen of them. When you’re with someone that long, it is vital to sort it all out.

At the beginning of the process, all I thought about was that I would never marry again. It just hurt to think about doing that or being in another marriage. By about year three or four, I realized that I needed to take the relationship apart to examine it with no restrictions on what I would not look at. I remember being here at my desk and seeing the sun hit the window on the other side of the street. I started to think that if I didn’t take it all apart, I wouldn’t be able to move forward in a healthy way. Like the skirt outfit and dress that had to go (I sent the pretty dress I wore to his cremation to the secondhand place as well), I needed to be honest about my marriage. I needed to give it a real look under the microscope.

The first big thing I had to come to terms with was that I was dealing with compassion fatigue. While I understood this earlier in the process, I had not allowed myself to step back, pull it out, and dissect it for what it was: trauma. If I ever got to a point in time where I’d want to explore something new, this was a biggie on the road to figuring out a part of my marriage that I needed to see clearly.

The fact of the matter is that many grief journeys omit this step. This isn’t about speaking ill of the dead—though some of that might need to happen. It is about giving the relationship an honest critique, and understanding what made it good, and where the bad points were.

Breakups happen in marriages and long-term friendships. We’d be wise to look under the hood to see where we went right and where we went wrong. In most situations there are always two sides. Being able to look at something and accept the responsibility for our part of the “wrong” is difficult and painful. It is brutal work that needs to happen, and the payoff is worth the pain we go through to get there. This work is not for wimps. Ultimately, when we get through the hard stuff, it brings clarity to everything. Examination also means that we won’t leap into another relationship before we’ve done whatever work we need to do on ourselves to fix what we can.

I think that many people confuse grieving with crying many tears and being ready to move on. NO, the tears and the mess are only a part of the process.

What if the grief process is also a call for a life redo? What if the life we build after a death or loss of a partnership is one that takes us on a new path? What if we’re on a life journey, and this is just one significant stop in the process?

Reflections, Part 2

Posted on by Gail Shurtleff in The Suicide and its Aftermath

Read Part 1 here.

The Healing Journey

In July of 2023, I got sick. I wound up in the emergency room of the local hospital, and my kidneys were shutting down. They were at twenty percent function. I was disoriented, scared, and really not understanding how bad it was. At one point in the process leading up to my hospitalization, I became so confused that I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the bed. I couldn’t even think to turn the light on. That is sick, and that is scary. I found out after things settled that this is common for people facing this type of shutdown. Back to the narrative. A friend finally convinced me to call the doctor, who came and had me admitted, and by then it wasn’t good at all.

I was in the hospital for a week, and then a taxi took me home. I was disoriented coming out of the place because the hospital I was in was new, and I hadn’t seen it before. With low vision, this is a real issue.

I walked into my house, sat down my bag, walked to the sofa, and let out the tears. I sobbed, and then listened as my body and mind told me it was time to heal. It was time to do the work that led to healing all of it. All the trauma I’d stuffed. I had some therapy of my own to do, and it was time to find the therapist who would travel with me as I called the people to the encampment of the battleground. Funny how it works. It took another ten months to get to May of 2024, and to begin the intense work of cleaning out my mind and moving forward.

The healing process is an interesting thing. I’ve seen people who come to me and aren’t ready to do the work, and so they run away rather than to what can help. Others believe that grief and loss can be worked through in six easy sessions, and that there is a magic formula that the therapist can dispense. The fact is that this is a soul journey. It is a journey of the mind, the heart, and the spirit, if you will. It leads us to someplace else, and that someplace is the place of wonder and, ultimately, healing, such as it is.

On August 29, 2016, I sat at my dining table and looked at the lights that had been installed so that I would be able to see in my home. I wondered just how I, a woman with low vision, would be able to survive in a country where my limited Dutch would only get me so far. The only thing I knew at that time was that I couldn’t and shouldn’t make any major life decisions for a year. That is something my father had told me, and it was wise counsel.

And so, the journey of healing and discovery began that day, and in many ways it will never end. We may work through our grief and loss: we’re changed by it all.

The social system here set me up with someone to clean the house. At first, my then church came with meals until I realized I needed to cook for myself. If I needed to not work because I was compromised, I needed to do something for myself. I needed to let the process of grieving take place.

On Friday the thirteenth of January 2017, my mother died of a heart attack. We’d giggled, grown together, and experienced the death of my younger sister Joyce together. My mother was also an eight on the Enneagram. We understood this shared experience in life, and she taught me things despite not knowing about her beloved number. She just did life well in many ways. Because of where I was in the process of grieving Jon, I didn’t see and get fully the fact that my siblings telling me not to fly over for the memorial service was really bad advice. I’ve regretted that, and would do that one differently if I could.

By June of 2017, I felt ready to plan a trip to the US to see family and a friend. What I didn’t know then was that the trip would change the course of my life.

In late July of 2017, I flew to Salt Lake City to see some friends of Jon’s and attend a conference called Sunstone. At the conference I ran into people who were not Mormon, and it flipped a switch. I felt, and knew, that I had to check this other church out.

I then went to Oregon to visit another friend, and travelled on to California to see my family and visit the beach.

Staying at my brother’s place first and then moving on to my sister’s place was interesting. At the time I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d see both of them alive.

We made some good memories, and my sister and sister-in-law insisted I take my mother’s green quilt home. Now, they know of my love affair with blue. That green quilt would cause me to do a total room makeover. I painted the room blue, purchased a new bed that was blue and that the quilt would fit on, and realized that I had the piece of my mother that loved green. It has turned out to be one of the things I enjoy seeing, and it serves as a link to her and the love she had for me.

That trip also created a memory of my sis that I could never have done without her help. She got me on the flight with five boxes for less than the price of five extra boxes. I stood there at the airline counter, shut my mouth, and watched in amazement as she talked to the guy. I know when to shut my mouth. So, that quilt and other things came with me to be with me here in my new life.

The trip to the US changed my ability to sleep. In that first year, everything sleepwise changed. I didn’t sleep at normal hours, and family would question me as I called in the wee hours of my Netherlands morning. “Gail, what are you doing?” Well, when I can’t sleep, I call you.

Planning for the anniversary of his death had taught me that if I thought about it in advance, I could maybe, just maybe, control the tears and what would happen. It worked well for year one and failed for year two. What I really learned was that with the body, what we’re grieving will push its way to the surface and force itself on us in ugly ways. The life lesson: let go and don’t try to control what needs to happen. Healthy grief lets grief drive the process so it can heal. Even if grief must be put off because of life that must be done, it will surface, and when it does, embrace it!

What I’ve learned about the first two years of loss are that the tears change in quality and quantity. Looking back eight years, I can see all of the journey better now. How different it was and now is. In letting it all go, I freed myself to trust the grief process in ways that opened my heart and mind to healing, and because of that, I was carried to where I am now. July of 2023 had to happen so that I could write this in July of 2026. I see that now, and that is one of the huge things this journey has gifted me with. Wow, what an amazing place I’ve gotten to!

Icebergs and Admirals, Part 2: Reshaping the Self

Posted on by Gail Shurtleff in Discharging Trauma

This is Part 2 in a series about trauma. Please read Part 1 here.

The admiral, in her boat, realizes that this gatekeeping for trauma must be shut down. Her text goes something like this: “Look, I get that there is trouble landside. If this destructive protection continues, I can no longer guarantee that the iceberg will remain stable. We need to shut this down, and do it in a controlled fashion. Let’s get the loyal soldiers of the mind sent out to retirement!”

What happens when the soldiers find out they will be let go is a joyous celebration. The soldiers didn’t want to have to serve as warriors. Who does? Trauma happens, and they get the job.

The process of releasing all trauma stored in the mind is a slow and careful one. With willing participants, it will be hard: it will also be worth the pain of it all. Going through the process is not a pleasant experience.

I mentioned in Part 1 that many people avoid the work of releasing the trauma because they fear that if they do so, they will fall apart, and dysfunction will ensue. Here’s a news bulletin: they are already in that dysfunctional zone! It is sensed by those who are avoidant to the work, and by those who are not able to see what is really going on underneath it all. Those in the second group feel that something is “off,” and while they don’t say anything due to a social contract, they do know that, deep down, things aren’t right.

This can set up clients to embark on a healing journey alone. Sometimes the client gets lucky and has one or two friends who get it. The friends agree to stand with the client in the journey.

Way back in “postland,” I wrote about being in the room with someone going through hard things. This is what good friends will do. I had two such people in my life, and while I knew there would be times when I had to sit with things all alone, I vaguely got where the boundaries and the limits were in that support. Trauma can mess that up for people, and relationships. I came to find out that I didn’t have the full understanding I needed with limits and friendship.

With all things in place, I went into the hard work of getting things repaired.

One by one, the land soldiers were called to the front of a battlement where, for the first time ever, their hard work was acknowledged, and they were excused with honor. Each time this process happened, the iceberg that was out at sea would shrink in its burden and grow in its beauty to become its full and true self.

The therapist allowed my words to stand, and honored them as I did. It was safe to claim my words. Sometimes the sessions left me in deep and dark places, and at other times the session was liberating. All of it worked to create the ability to come to terms with the awful, and to give thanks that I had done what I needed to do to heal the pain of the past.

The healing enabled me to understand that it wasn’t my fault. For some things that I had to let go of, I had been a child at the time. For other things, I had to come to terms with things that happened in my adult life. There were reframings and realizations that I had to revisit loyalties in relationships. All of it was hard and painful and sometimes lonely.

Each time I was able to release a soldier from the burden they had so loyally defended, I felt something float away from that iceberg, and the reason for the solider being there to defend things was no longer present. Over a period of months, things changed—until one day everyone had cleared out of the fortress that had stood for so long.

Now, the work of rebuilding could take place.

Rebuilding means that you can reach for the sun. We grieve the past and begin to celebrate a new future. What healing looks like is a slow discovery of a new life: a life where warriors are no longer needed, and they are sending text messages to admirals guarding icebergs. Now the admiral sends out messages to reject an attempt to ugly up the iceberg, and to get to work on addressing the present issue so that the iceberg will not become something unwanted and sent out to sea.

Healing means accepting the responsibility of facing the stuff head on. Where we once stuffed our trauma and sent it out to sea—to the iceberg—we are now able to assign ourselves to the greater task of dealing in the present. This is functional, and at first it will seem strange. Learning to know when to seek help is a new skill that we now come to face willingly.

It is strange because, for so many years, you did things that led you to feel yourself that you could cope—just like others. You went to school or work, the bills got paid, you did normal life stuff—and you did it stuffing everything away. You fooled yourself into believing it was all OK. It is the ultimate lie.

The ultimate truth is that humans are not made to live in a state of trauma for their entire lives. Trauma can cause illness, the inability to function at our highest capacity, and shattered relationships. Trauma will lead us to believe that all is really well when, in reality, all is not well at all: it is the ultimate lie masquerading as truth, and the ultimate truth is that it must all stop. And so, the delusion of safety shatters. The real sobbing is the signal that, at last, the soldiers of the mind can be released to go sip drinks on the warm beaches and relax from their labours.

Healing is all about doing the right things for the right reasons. Healing is about grieving what once was, and celebrating the light of discovering that there are better ways to do life.

Healing also means that the admiral guarding the iceberg is given permission to send what was once hidden beneath the surface back to land. The admiral now protects the iceberg in new ways. She tells the land folk that they are strong enough to handle what comes up in life.

As we strengthen muscles that have been dormant for some time, we learn what we missed out on. We celebrate the new life before us.

We have WOW moments, and we learn that we can move ahead. For the first time, the carnage of the life we lead is seen clearly. Healing is a series of incidents that lead us to new self-discovery. The work of healing from trauma is about being willing to say WOW as much as we need to. It is about finding the courage to do something real: heal ourselves.

Where Were You When… ? (Revisit)

Posted on by Gail Shurtleff in Musings and Insights

This post was originally published on July 28, 2022.

On July 27, 1977, my life stood still as I watched my younger sister fall to the ground dead. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and we were in Paradise, California, at the 76 gas station. During the next two or three hours, word spread in our church community. People would later tell me where they were when they heard the news. No one asked where I was: I was living it.

That was forty-five years ago! The memory is still present, but the pain and trauma of what happened that sleepy summer afternoon stand in my mind; the wound of that past experience healed but will never leave.

To this day, those who knew Joyce remember where they were and what was happening. They tell me where they were, but they don’t ask where I was when it all went down. The code of “don’t ask” slammed it all shut. They don’t need to know. To this day, I don’t know what was said about where my mother and I were. We witnessed it all in its horror.

The truth is that our trauma was not for public consumption. My younger brother never got to say goodbye to her. I left with two cousins for school, and he was now home alone having to adjust to being an only child—when that wasn’t the plan. You never plan for something like this, and yet I had thought about it because I knew she could die.

Her death messed things all up. We had to re-group, re-think, and adjust to life with no Joyce. Forty-five years later, the memories of people telling me where they were surface. Today is her death anniversary.

My mother and I talked about it when we were older and had distance from it. Death was riding with us that day and somehow my mother knew it. She thought it was going to be her that would die. We finally talked it out and realized that we were glad we’d finally said the words—late as they were to our journey of loss.

The truth is we all remember the “Where were you when…?” question. Those of us who are old enough know where we were when JFK, MLK, RFK, and others were brutally cut down. We remember the Apollo 11 landing, Challenger, the other shuttles, and now school shootings. We stand as witnesses to personal and societal pain.

We’ve taken to gathering at impromptu memorials to share as a community, and yet there is still stigma around personal trauma.

We’re not quite there yet with personal trauma; it’s like the accident that everyone drives by slowly in hopes of seeing the gory stuff. It’s about people wanting to be voyeurs into pain that they would not want seen themselves.

The catch here is that the “Where were you when…?” question enables us to talk through our own trauma around the incident. So many knew my sister, so many loved her, and no one had expected her to drop dead in a phone booth in Paradise, CA. So, the collective mind was collectively blown. Because of the collective trauma, we process it how we can.

For whatever reason, all of this came up forty-five years after the fact. I now live in The Netherlands, I’m far from family, and so, I’ll put this up instead.

Today I purchased flowers for myself and they turned out to be her favorite color: yellow. I’ll enjoy them for her.

I look at the clock and think about the fact that at this time forty-five years ago, we all had to eat. Some of us went for pizza and some stayed home at my aunt and uncle’s place. I went for pizza. I know, weird. The next day, my parents and my younger brother got into my father’s car and drove home and planned the service and all that went with it. Where was I? I was assigned to clean the house and so, like the dutiful daughter I needed to be, I vacuumed and answered the door for people paying respects. I think I’d rather tell people where I was when JFK was assassinated. Where were you when…?

Author’s Pick: Sanctuary

Posted on by Gail Shurtleff in Beyond Grief, Discharging Trauma

For the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some “author’s picks” of posts from the last few years. This first one was originally posted on May 23, 2022.

There is a musical trio known as The Kingston Trio, and during their recording career they recorded a little ditty called “The Merry Little Minuet.” While it might have been humorous, it was also a serious commentary on the times. That little minuet has been playing in my head lately. The world seems to be falling apart. Wars, discord, unhappiness, and a pandemic all seem to be conspiring to bring us individually to a point of asking: How do I create a safe place of sanctuary for myself?

Those of us who have walked in the grief zone may be one up on this—but not necessarily. It depends on where we are in the process and how we’ve managed our self-care.

Sanctuary can be defined in many ways. The religious may see it as a place of worship. The spiritual person might see it as a state of being or a place in the heart. Still others may choose to view sanctuary as a specific location: their happy place. For this post, I’m going to use a bench found along a walking trail sheltered by trees that let the sun in so we feel its warmth.

How do we find this safe place? My experience is that it only comes to us as we shed the tears of pain, longing, desire, and uncertainty. It comes with the casting off of old certainties and beliefs and diving headfirst into the blackness of the unknown. It comes to us as we search for what we need and hope will spring forth from the ravages of trauma and personal havoc. In our recovery and rebuilding process, the hard work of deconstructing what was tires us out.

During our deconstruction process, we wonder about the ending. At first we stumble into momentary places of relief, but they are fleeting. Our work propels us forward to other new places of discovery. Slowly we encounter a place that offers us more than a brief rest and begins to take shape as a place of reflection and pause for our weary souls. Soon this place of the heart begins to heal us and to hold us in a place that we come to think of as sanctuary. It might hold us in a sacred place where only we’re allowed. It shelters and welcomes us. We can go there as needed.

With time, our reconstruction requires that we view our journey with both its pain and new hopes. We re-examine the old and discover the gift of the new. While what we’ve been through may have been hell, the place where we’ve arrived is a gift we’ve given ourselves.

Whether your personal grief was the loss of a loved one, the loss of health, mental illness that has left you debilitated, loss of faith or a faith transition, a failed relationship, or whatever hard thing life served you on your platter, you know this journey and place.

What does the above have to do with all of the crazy that is occurring in our world today? Those of us who have been to these dark places hold wisdom that will be useful to us in making peace with the world as it is.

We can and often do serve as witnesses that there is hope and support for you. We understand that pain can go away. We’ve asked the “When will this ever end?” question and discovered that we must hold space for searching our hearts. We’ve faced our personal realities and given them permission to blossom into something new and powerful.

We’ve come to learn that meditation, yoga, or a new spiritual self leads us to a park bench that we had no clue existed. We now sit on that bench and offer the questioner a place beside us. We can serve as life witnesses and companions for the weary because we did our own work.

As I reflect on the good, bad, and unpleasant of the past decades of life, I’ve come to realize that a topsy-turvy world can calm itself best if we center ourselves and take the time to quiet our souls. I look back and see how I didn’t have the skills to make it to a park bench. While I could manage a life-crisis situation and come out on top, I did not understand how to walk to the bench. The loss of my husband taught me to find the park bench and to be able to sit quietly on it. There is no drama here—only peace for my soul.

I think back on “The Merry Little Minuet” and reflect on my concerns for our present world state. Yes, I’m concerned that the U.S. is falling apart. I’m concerned that there is a war going on about a two-hour plane ride from here. I’m concerned that we’ll never feel as safe as we once did about viruses getting loose and infecting the world. I search my head and heart and in them I find peace because I’ve created a sanctuary for the soul. It is mine, and no one can take it from me.

Come, sit by me.