Grief. ‘Because that means what's meant to be will show up.’
When trauma, shocking events, and the calamity of CPTSD hit, it is easy to forget grief. Grief is somehow more stoic, subconscious, and with you by stealth. But it is very much present and important to acknowledge and listen to.
Last week, I was reminded of it. Lola, following trauma therapy, rarely tells me what was discussed. Often, it is just ‘it was a hard one’, we spoke about ‘him and what he did’. But last week, she did. She told me, after a night of nightmares, that she had spoken about wishing she was her younger self—the one before ‘it’ happened. She hated that she wished it, but she did. She told me she had visualized what she would do to him with her therapist as payback. It wasn’t pretty, and she thought about how that would make her feel.
I sat, listened, and told her I thought it was a breakthrough - that reaching this stage of the therapy, where she could acknowledge what he took and the years she wanted to erase, was part of the grief. She also remembers the years before the abuse, where his controlling behavior and anger were constantly palpable in our house, and where both of us became shells of ourselves, knowing it was futile to fight back.
It hit her hard last week. She wanted to be alone - a week sat in her darkened room - and I knew that she needed it. I can see the melancholy, a word that doesn’t seem strong enough to describe it, has now emerged as anger towards me, and I accept that it is a natural part of the process. The non-linear healing journey working its course.
I have felt the chasms of grief, and I felt it last week when she said she wanted to go back to her 6-year-old self. I used to hate, loathe seeing happy children in the park, angry that they were untouched, saddened that I will never know what my children would be like without this. Both bright, sporty, and full of potential, I know they haven’t been able to reach their potential, and I have to trust that they will still get there, even if it is a far slower process than for other teens.
It coincided with a smack of grief for me last week. In the turmoil of job hunting, I found acceptance that I was finally going to be leaving the control of the evil work bully soon. I suddenly felt waves of exhaustion, lost my normal gusto, and forced myself to sit with it. I let myself acknowledge the sadness that I would be leaving my team, a team I have spent coaching, nurturing, and bringing out of their shell. Anger that another bully was forcing me in a direction I didn’t want to go. I recognise now, though, that I have to sit with the proverbial grief, not busy myself to bury it as I previously would. I felt the depths of grief that ‘he’ not only took my children’s childhood but also my career.
It isn’t in any way of the same importance, but it is still there. I’ve managed to claw myself back, but I am not in the same place career-wise I would have been, and I feel it more with the financial pressures I face with remaining court debt and additional costs of the girls’ trauma therapy, tutoring, and uber-specific eating fads.
As I sat with the grief last week, I tuned in on Friday to the most excellent TV combination of Gardeners' World, followed by the new season of And Just Like That, which seems to me to be perfection entertainment. The words of Carrie’s new handsome gardener were exactly what I needed to hear: ‘Because that means what's meant to be will show up.’ I might not feel ready to enter my new stage, but I do trust that the right thing is around the corner.
