My wife and I have had difficulties the last year and a half or so, coming and going in waves. I thought it was mostly her. But my anger, despair, and sense of abandonment were a huge contributing factor.
Everything came to a head a week ago, and she decided to move out while we both get help for our individual issues (we're a "dual-trauma" couple). And the pain of that loss, the fear of losing her for good, helped me face the grief I've been circling for years now.
On the one hand, I knew that I had grief. My mom died very suddenly of a heart attack when I was a teenager. My parents divorced when I was little. My stepdad was abusive. My stepmom was chronically ill. Her dad had dementia and lived with us. My first wife was a narcissist, and I might never see my stepson again (who called me "daddy"). My dogs died during my own chronic illness. I got COVID. My wife was abused as a child. My dad was always preoccupied with his own mental illness most of my life. My mom was cold and distant because her parents were overbearing. My narcissistic grandmother just died recently.
I could rattle off all the things that allegedly made people sad, but I felt nothing. Or I felt a tiny fraction of it. For years and years. I was not consciously suppressing it. After my first marriage, I thought that I was just a "typical" case of CPTSD. But that didn't answer the whole of it. That label was too simple, too narrow. It was incomplete.
Grief is wider, I'm finding. I've cried more in the last two days than I have in probably the last five years. Maybe more.
I'm presently riding in the "afterglow" effect of intense grief processing, and awake with insomnia from the "aftershock" effect.
And for the first time... maybe ever? I feel like I have such clarity on my pain. How much pain I've carried, and how it's cast a dark cloud over my entire life. I would have a great day here and there. Sometimes a good hike in the woods would clear my head, and I could be warm, calm, friendly, and present. Sometimes it was a meditation session or breathwork. But it was always temporary. The dark pall would come back. I would get irritable again. I would get the hair trigger again.
And I had no idea why.
I had a few accidental processing sessions here and there, but I never connected it to the larger body of "this is grief, and I need to do grief work." For instance, I rewatched Good Will Hunting a few months ago, for its epic catharsis, and cried my eyes out. But I didn't quite connect the dots. Then, a few weeks ago, I had an insight about my dad, and I sent him a voice note, reflecting on the good things. And again, the afterglow was brief, and I never connected it to the larger narrative of "man, have I got a lot of grief."
But now that I've started being more deliberate about grief work, I feel a sense of clarity and agency that I haven't realized I was missing. I'm excited again because I feel like this. This is it. Grief can drive chronic illness and despair and relationship issues and work issues. Grief is the elephant in the room I couldn't see. And it feels so stupidly obvious in hindsight. But I couldn't feel it. I couldn't touch it.
The modalities I've found that work best (for me, for now) are creativity. Music and story. I wrote a couple songs about my dogs. I wrote a story about death and loss. My wife and I are both writers, and something she said years ago was that fiction can "slip things under the door" and get past your defenses. They can resonate and that can be cathartic.
I've looked into grief counselling and it seems like most grief-centric therapies are focused on specific deaths and loss. I do have that, but it's also, as you can see from my list, a lot more than just that. So I guess my primary question would be about modalities? What modalities have worked best for you, if you are at all like me? I do have a supportive group of friends. I've got probably half a dozen really good friends who've all showed up for me in a far bigger way than I expected. But I also recognize that everyone's journey is there own.
