You and I Are Too Old to Believe All Wounds Can Be Magically Healed

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

One simple re-stacked post stirred up a lot of feelings. Let’s talk, shall we?

A few days ago the folks at

Untangled

posted a simple but deeply profound meme which got me right in the heart, gut, soul and yeah, everything else. I re-posted it. Despite my posting two other articles since, that’s what seems to be getting the most attention.

Here it is:

Let’s go large first. So many of us aren’t good at grief. Who is, right? Well, lots of people. They didn’t get that way by avoiding it. They also didn’t get that way by attacking or blaming others for their pain.

Deep grief extracts a terrible cost, which many if not most of us would really like to relieve as soon as possible. Especially the death of a loved one.

That’s one reason why the extraordinary work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was vilified. She wrote, quite accurately, about the five stages of grief. People leapt onto this bandwagon without asking the hardest possible questions, which would have included: are all these steps linear, meaning that we go from one stage to another, and NEVER EVER GO BACK?

Those stages are:

According to the model of the five stages of grief, or the Kübler-Ross model, those experiencing grief go through five emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Although it is in common use, studies have not confirmed these stages, and the model has been criticized as outdated^[1] as well as unhelpful in explaining the grieving process- Wikipedia

Ask anyone who has ever been through any kind of horrific grief, which permanently wounds the soul and leaves us scarred, just how “linear and straightforward” such processes are.

The criticism stems, I think, from how so many people wanted the easy pill of “just do this” for relief from the grief. The work isn’t outdated. What is idiocy is our belief that somehow there’s a pill or a process that will fix the very real pain of loss.

Millions vilified Kübler-Ross for her model rather than do the real work of understand that our humanness, the wounds we collect as the cost of love and of being human above all, are part of life. Most never ever heal. Ever.

We do, however, find gracious ways of coming to terms with how grief has left different kinds of gifts at our doorstop as the result of our having loved so much.

You and I are WAY Too Old to believe that life’s pain can be avoided, or that taking our pain out on others somehow relieves us.

If you’re interested, I strongly recommend investigating what Maria Popova has researched and provided to us in multiple essays on grief in her luminous work in The Marginalian. Here is one worth your attention.

We are, all of us, wounded, some of us from birth long before we know that our life may be cut short because of an illness, severe disabilities, or that we have the genes for terrible diseases which cause us and others who love us terrible grief.

All too many of us are born into dysfunctional families wherein the members take out their anger about their own wounds on us (to this please see the work of

Rebecca C Mandeville LMFT CCTP

). Substack has many others, but this work resonated with me.

The world is full of writing and good people who might help us make sense of how we, a child worthy of love, ended up wounded by incest or blame from a deeply-wounded family in search of a place to offload their pain.

Our pain is ours to carry. OURS. No god or goddess will relieve us of it. They have plenty of their own pain to carry.

It’s our work to look into the source of the pain and embrace it. It’s our work to find what we need to discover at the heart of our pain. While therapy can help, and I highly recommend it, the intimate journey into the heart of what hurts us is ours alone.

This quote from Stephen Colbert (taken from a larger interview) is worth reading. Colbert discusses how his mother was “broken but not bitter” after the loss of his father and brothers and how her example guided his life.

My takeaway from this:

“I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I was raped by four different senior officers when I was 23 and in the Army. One of them took me to a sex party, this was 1976 mind you, no cell phones, and I was the party favor. I thought we were going to a movie.

These events had a devastating effect on me, including four decades of body dysmorphia and eating disorders.

In 2011, after much work and a lot of study, I walked away from the eating disorders for good. While the grief is still there,

I love the thing I most wish had not happened.

Those horrific experiences changed me forever. While it took a long time for me to get on top of them, including my brother’s incest when I was ten, the strength and resilience I have today is rooted in those experiences. The compassion I feel for assault survivors is borne of those experiences.

The pain was mine to carry, explore, understand. It was mine to learn that it wasn’t my fault that other people decided to wound me because of their wounds.

Photo by Noah Holm on Unsplash

All too often I’ve read or heard sermons or spiritual material that promises no more pain, as if.

We’d be dead. Life is full of pain. Some can be alleviated. Much cannot. Some people really cannot take the pain burden they carry, real or percieved, and they give up. My brother was among them.

This is the heart of the matter:

Every time I seek to wound someone else because I have a wound, I damage that person and make my own pain worse.

I become even more wounded out of self-hate and then I strike out even more, in a terrible, horrific cycle. Just look at social media and American politics if you want a couple of petri dishes to examine. So many people are “aggrieved” or feel entitled to be coddled and protected that they are lashing out in all directions.

The perpetrator of the pain wounds themselves even worse than the person they hurt.

I have done this more times than I wish to admit, but I’m also blessed with a dear friend who points out that I am carrying a wound, and need to investigate it. When we’re in terrible pain, we can forget to look inside ourselves first.

That’s why being curious is so important.

When even small things or an imagined slight-that-wasn’t sends us over the edge, that’s a symptom. Being gently and respectfully curious allows us to investigate where we carry pain, and ask of that source what it needs.

Curiosity is life’s superpower.

If we seek to understand, so many things become obvious, including a way forward through the pain, not by avoiding it.

You and I may not like the answer. We may be furious with God (or your Supreme Being) for taking our partner, our daughter, our health. For not giving us what we wanted. For not waking up this morning completely committed to making us happy.

Perhaps what we’re more angry about is that we’ve not yet built the skill of being supremely grateful for the worst life hands us.

Colbert’s mother was extraordinary, in that she never turned her pain into bitterness, thereby ruining her life and that of her child, and poisoning others around her.

That was a terrible, difficult, sacred choice.

Of course it’s hard. No religion can remove all our pain. Faith can help us cope. We can learn how to carry it ourselves, with great grace.

By doing so we give others strength, give them an example worth following, and a way forward through grief, loss, anger and all the detritus that a long and full life inevitably carries.

Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Laureate from India in 1913, wrote a few lines which have lived in my Daytimer for thirty-nine years. This line speaks to this article:

Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them.

To love is to feel grief.

To love deeply is to invite the most terrible of all wounds, loss.

To avoid love in order to avoid grief is to wound ourselves far more deeply than any imaginable loss.

A loveless life lived in fear is far more brutally wounded than a life full of loves that we lost.

This piece on how Buddhism approaches grief has some fascinating observations about society along with ways to think about how we can sit with what has wounded us.

We are born into grief, loss and despair. We are also born into the possibility of rising above such pain to know love at its greatest, and to nurture the ability to love anyway.

We can choose to love more, to love ever more deeply, because we know and accept the cost.

We are built to carry the pain, the wounds and the grief. When we choose to do so, we transform ourselves and those around us.

It’s hard to play when we are wounded.

It’s a superpower to play because we are wounded.

Let’s play.

Photo by Frans Daniels on Unsplash

These are very difficult discussions. Thanks for reading, and I hope this exploration was of value and sent you to some places where your curiosity is well-rewarded. If so please consider

If you know someone in grief, consider whether this article might work. It might not, but that’s your call:

Above all dancing in the rain is what we can do when grief threatens to overwhelm. We are sad but we are still alive. Please dance.

Heartfelt thanks to all the Substack writers whose work on grief also informed this article, there are too many to list. I see you.