The Flow of Grief and Growth
This blog post explores how grief carries its own energy and information flow — one that creates growth by integrating experience, attuning to self and others, and marking meaningful moments as guideposts along the life path.
This connects to flow theory. When we're in a state of flow, we experience a synergy of connection across all aspects of energy and information, and that synergy creates engagement. Flow theory gives us a framework for deep engagement with the here and now. When a person can engage intimately with the present moment, there's a fluid exchange between their internal state — thoughts, emotions, memories, sensations, spirit, soul — and their external environment — interpersonal interactions, surroundings, stimuli. When we have the capacity to pay full attention to our experience, both internal and external, we cultivate integration. When we practice attunement — being in tune with ourselves and others and the environment — we also cultivate integration.
In this post, I use a term called Narrative Integration, which I recently learned from Dan Siegel's book The Neurobiology of We. I use storytelling to share an autobiographical account of my own experience practicing attunement, integration, and growth through grief.
As a therapist and teacher, I believe deeply in the power of storytelling as a key part of developmental growth. That said, I've held a question in my mind for years, through my own training, practice, and ongoing work toward integration and cohesion: what role does the form of storytelling play in therapy?
People in healing spaces and the therapeutic world often hold strong opinions about the effectiveness of "talk therapy." Many trained somatic and trauma therapists and people who call themselves healers in other traditions — myself included, at times — believe that talking about trauma isn't always productive. Meanwhile, practitioners of psychoanalysis believe so strongly in the value of talking and sharing that their patients can spend up to four days a week in session doing exactly that. I don't disagree with either approach. I think it comes down to the individual — their needs and where they are developmentally with integration and attunement and how the story is shared. When stories are shared in a certain way, we create what Dan Siegel calls an Autobiographical Narrative: a framework for organizing our experience in space and time. It gives order to consciousness, and that order creates flow.
Over the past twenty years, the two qualities I've seen do the most damage — both in my own life and in my work with clients — are a lack of integration and a lack of attunement. Both show up in our relationship with ourselves and in our relationships with others. Integration is the process of stitching our lived experiences together and finding the flow between them; embodiment is another word for the same idea. Attunement is what lets us stay flexible and responsive to what's happening moment to moment, and to tune into states of well-being and resilience as they arise. I believe practicing attunement is what creates integration and cohesion and increases the flow state.
The reason that these two qualities are so damaging and re-wounding is that many of our challenges as humans arise from our early years in life, from micro-traumas/stressors by the way our caregivers related to us and either cued into our needs or missed our cues we were sending for regulation. The latter is the process of attachment theory. I’m not going to go into depth here on this topic because it will need to be for another blog, but, essentially, the flow between physical sensation, thinking patterns and feeling is impacted by the early years of a persons life based on a caregivers ability to effectively attune to the needs of the infant. These initial patterns lay the foundation of our energy and information flow of emotion, thought, action of how we relate to others and ourselves. If we don’t have a flow between these within our early years through our caregiver attachment, miscue’s or misattunements occur and it can be jarring on the nervous system and result in emotional pain, stress, or re-traumatization. Furthermore, if there isn’t integration or cohesion of lived experiences in the form of an Autobiographical Narrative, an individual can re-experience this same pain, stress and re-traumatization over and over in their lives.
Now — let's see if I can turn my own story into an autobiographical example of everything I've just shared and create an integrated understanding of my story and how I’ve come to experience myself.
Two months ago, I attended my second grief vigil with a group in Salt Lake City, through my role as a Grief Tender for our community with the Flourish Foundation. My first vigil had taken place about a year and a half earlier, in a small town in Washington called Cheney, on the recommendation of an adored friend and colleague named Lindsay, who was doing her own grief work. Both vigils drew on the teaching of Francis Weller's brilliance and his most well-known book called The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
The first time, I came in with a clear focus — a specific theme that was already producing real sadness and deep grief. The second time was the opposite. I had no clear intention, only a sense that I needed to explore feelings of loss connected to the needs I had as an infant, such as being attuned to and soothed, that could have been complicated to recognize because my caregivers were deeply overwhelmed by an unexpected loss. The general focus was loss of innocence, though I didn't understand why. I'd had a loving, playful, supportive upbringing, and I know — still know — that I am deeply loved and wanted by my parents. The intention of this writing in no way, shape or form is to place blame on my parents because it is never helpful. The purpose of this writing is to bring awareness of my lived experience and how certain patterns within myself about myself that I encounter on a regular basis are connected to an early lived experience that impacted my nervous system.
What surfaced at this retreat was an awareness of how my lived experience of a recognition of the impact of my paternal grandfather's death on the adults in my life and their subsequent capacity to be present to my needs at the time, impacted the development of my nervous system. For example, as an adult, I notice patterns of an inability to soothe myself such as feeling of not being seen or not trusting myself or others, a relationship with food that results in overeating because of an insatiable need I can never quite satisfy, and a regular struggle with relaxing my body- all things that infants need their caregivers to help them learn to do. The insight and awareness of the impact of this grief on the entire environment I was born into, shed light on the patterns of the way my own nervous system developed. By learning about this through my grief vigil experience, I was able to develop a sense of integration- stitching together my lived experience.
Here is a bit of the story about my grandfather. My grandfather, Donald Missal, died suddenly, three months before I was born from what was believed at the time to be a heart attack. I was to be my parents' first child, and I know they were ecstatic at my conception and even more excited for my arrival. My father had just gone into business with his father — my grandfather — who had a retirement plan in place. As I’ve understood from stories told to me, my father was planning to take over the business so my grandfather could retire and travel. As is common of the human experience- our vision and plans for our lives don’t often evolve how we imagine which is another reason to advocate for developing the skill of attunement.
During the vigil, I met my grandfather Don for the first time. We were invited to participate in an ancestor ritual that was led by one of our facilitators. During this ritual, I felt a strong presence of warmth, saw an energetic light surrounding me, and I had an instant knowing that it was my grandfather. And then I heard a voice say to me, "I've been waiting to meet you for 45 years." I started weeping, flooded with warmth and unconditional love — and beneath it, a longing I hadn't known I carried, and in an instant it all made sense and everything became clear to me. His death was, undeniably, woven into my arrival in this world. My grandfather's death was the initiation of my birth. My grandfather’s death and recent connection to him, is helping me learn about myself and my nervous system patterns as an adult. The grief I felt and experienced in this moment, helped me grow and make a connection to my own understanding of myself and my life story.
When I came home from the retreat, I felt raw, unhinged, feral. My dear friend Lindsay listened and let me fall apart, then helped me rebuild. Everything I'd understood about myself before that experience came apart. This new connection to my late grandfather and my nervous system patterning of a struggle with soothing, nurturing and trusting myself and others, opened a portal into my soul I didn't know I needed opening — followed by a slow, tender, soothing rebirth into a new order of being. The amniotic fluid of that rebirth has been water, slow movement, music, sleep, and food. Still, the re-entry itself was brutal and continues to weave itself into the fabric of the rebuilding of my being.
Four days after the retreat, I was driving home from work and saw what I thought was a stick in the road. I drove over it. Only later did I realize it wasn't a stick — it was a beautiful, four-foot-long bull snake. I didn't want to believe I'd killed it. Disbelief gave way to acceptance: I had accidentally taken a life. The heartache was instant, followed by denial, sadness, and then a willingness to show up and tend to the death I'd caused.
That willingness turned into learning how to skin the snake and tan its hide. My husband — the true mountain man that he is knows a lot of primitive skills, and he guided me through it. Together we researched how to care for and preserve the skin, and I buried the snake's remains in the backyard. Since then I've been learning to embody the energy of a snake, and I've seen half a dozen since, including a baby bull snake that turned up on our patio. I've been drawn to snakes since I was a little girl, fascinated by the way they connect to the ground and the earth. In animal medicine, the snake represents transmutation — the ability to take something difficult and process it, purify it, and turn it into something else. This is something that I am able to do and learned at a very young age.
My grandfather's death initiated my birth. The snake's death initiated something else in me — a willingness to sit with what I'd caused rather than turn away from it. Both were unplanned, unwanted, and became doorways anyway, like the process of life.
What ties them together is the practice of attunement and integration. Attunement, as we previously discussed, is tuning into the thoughts, behaviors, environment, feelings and sensations within the moment of self and others and accurately understanding them. Integrating, is noticing the themes as they surface and making connections between them. Grief and growth, for me, have moved as a single current — internal and external flowing into each other, no real separation between them.
That current is what I mean by attunement: the capacity to flow with all of it — accidental death, unmet needs at birth, an unexpected visit from an ancestor — without needing any of it to be tidy first.