When Love Prevails
It may be close to 40 years ago when I was first told by a therapist during a weekend intensive that the work of healing our hearts reverberates through the generations that have come both before us and those that will follow. At that time, I couldn't begin to grasp what this meant. All that I knew was that I was utterly committed to doing everything that I possibly could to protect my sons from the pain that I had experienced growing up and was now trying to heal.
There is much mystery and grace that I have experienced over these many years of ever more deeply understanding, embracing, healing, and transforming generations of trauma that go back farther than anyone in our families can ever possibly know. At the same time, there have also been many obstacles along the way which unknowingly enabled me to stay stuck in many of the old patterns which I was trying to break for myself and my children.
It is truly a difficult journey, indeed a hero's journey, to engage and persist in the embracing and healing of so many layers of ancestral and cultural wounding and trauma. Many start and turn back, or don't start at all. Many also deny or minimize the trauma which they've experienced or the need for healing and help. Others may seek and find other wounded professionals who have not healed their own trauma. They may help to some degree, but they also often cause great harm.
This was my twin brother's experience, who committed suicide at the age of 26 after many years of therapy, which began for John when he was just 14. This compromised and limiting counseling was also what I experienced for many years and what, in part, perpetuated and enabled harm to continue within our whole family. At the time, I couldn't see or understand how my first husband and I and our children continued to suffer from the impacts of trauma. After all, we were sober and in "recovery." Wasn't that enough? No, it was not...
It took me many more years to understand how we were wounded parents and human beings whose deeper pain and trauma went unaddressed. I could not recognize for a long time how instinct injured we were, what a high tolerance that we continued to have for unhealthy behaviors and beliefs and boundaries in ourselves and each other, and how family secrets and silence and shame and separateness persisted for so long after sobriety first began. I just didn't know. And nor did our sons' father.
There is no shame, blame, judgment in this. We were always doing the best we could. We believed that we were getting help. That said, tragically, and in different ways and too often, it was not the help that our family most deeply needed — and painful generational and cultural legacies of trauma persisted.
This is why I throw up red flags and beware signs and accentuate why we — as individuals, families, whole cultures — both need help for addressing and healing trauma and need to discern the quality, experience, wisdom, integrity, and heart of the resources we turn to for help.
No provider, no human being — and no matter the credentials that may follow their names, their large numbers of followers, the churches or auditoriums that they fill, or the best seller status of their books — can bring us any farther than they've first gone themselves. And what I know today is that, on a continuum, we all have trauma.
If those in the helping professions and beyond haven't done their own deep work, if they are indoctrinated into spiritual bypassing, if they are not comfortable with deep grief and a range of emotions, if they want to "fix" us or have us engage in "self-improvement," if they label certain emotions as "negative" or want to medicate or pathologize us, if they are not trauma-informed — Stay Away!
All this said, if we are able to be courageously inspired to root into paths of heart — and if our supports include the guidance of wise and compassionate souls whose own experience is one of depth, compassion, and love — then profound changes can and do happen. We can indeed walk a path of healing for ourselves, our family line, and beyond. And generations of pain can come to be recognized, embraced, healed, and transformed.
It is then that awareness, truth, compassion, and love prevails.
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| My mother, her baby cousin, and my great-grandmother |
Compassion Is What Happens In Us
When Love Connects Deeply
With Suffering
For many years I blamed my mother. I blamed her for my father's compromised immune system and his sudden death at age 60. I blamed her for my brother's tortured life and suicide. I raged against all the devastation, violence, cruelty; addictions and fear and shame; ruptures and rejections and projections; the holidays and birthdays — which even for my young children, not just myself — went unacknowledged by my mother.
And I did what I believed I needed to do — embrace the rage and the grief under it. The counselor I was seeing at that time, both individually and in a women's therapy group (and also in couples counseling with my first husband), had us beating pillows and screaming and raging and sobbing. For years. And there seemed to be no end to the depths of my rage and grief. It felt circular, without any real peace, and even though so many layers had been unearthed. But what now? Where to go now?
Well, I dabbled with a variety of new teachers, perspectives, experiences, beliefs. And some were absolutely helpful. Others led into my foray with spiritual bypassing. Even
though I'd been swept up in Echkart Tolle's Power of Now, and even
after years of sobriety and counseling and more, I unknowingly remained
under the power of then. Past trauma continued to hold power over the
present. (For more on spiritual bypassing, please go here: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2023/02/jeff-brown-on-eckhart-tolle-and-dangers.html.)
All the while I continued to half consciously cling to distractions and addictions (other than alcohol, cigarettes, pot) which perpetuated my lack of presence and deeper connection within myself and with my own heart. This, in turn, impaired my capacity to be more consistently open-hearted and loving, grounded and aware, and compassionate and responsive to the deeper needs of my precious three sons. Which cost them. Which cost us all dearly.
And I also blamed myself. I felt that I should be over not having a mother who was capable of love. My inner critic remained strong and I "shoulded" on myself and was haunted by shame. Again and again I turned to distractions from the deep pain that I continued to carry and didn't know what to do with. Old patterns of repressing, fragmenting, disassociating continued. All this after years of therapy, sobriety, "inner child" work, and on and on. Yet, unknown to me, the depths of the impact of ancestral and cultural trauma persisted. And, unknowingly, our "recovery" family continued to be plagued in the present with buried grief and shame and unaddressed pain that was very old in its origin.
There were many hard, and excruciating lessons to come out of all this confusion, loss, and generational suffering and trauma that continued in me, my sons' father, and our children. When crises arose years into recovery with our sons, I could have hardened my heart. I could have given up. I could have refused to take responsibility for my part in the losses, struggles, pain, and harm. I could have decided to never trust again.
Instead, I persisted. And I grabbed onto these painful and traumatic experiences as something that — with the help that I had always needed but not received — could be used for my growth, for the evolving transformation of fragmenting and disassociation into growing wholeness and presence, and for increasing my capacity for understanding, accountability, compassion, and love.
Which is what I did.
Off and on for many years now, I've been in therapy with someone who has embodied the wisdom, experience, compassion, and love that I have always needed to heal from such deep trauma. That said, I am not placing my therapist on any kind of pedestal. He is human. We all are. It is also true that this is the kind of heartfelt and soulful understanding, consciousness, guidance, and reverence for the healing journey that I believe is a deep need for most of us.
It is also not that skilled and compassionate therapy is the only path to awakening from layers of self-deceptions and generations of trauma. It isn't. And I have certainly been blessed with other loving and supportive friendships and teachers, a deeply loving and supportive partnership with my husband, and a host of other spiritual, heartfelt, and soulful sources of caring, compassion, wisdom, and support.
That said, and in combination with a whole array of grace-filled sources, therapy is for many of us simply and powerfully a gateway to assist us in coming to recognize our blind spots, in learning how to hold ourselves and others with the deepest compassion, and in embracing trauma and grief which would otherwise remain delegated to the recesses out of our conscious awareness.
This is the journey which remained out of reach for so many of our ancestors. This is the journey of opening to love and grace, to vulnerability and trust, and to a fierce compassion — for ourselves, for those who have come before us, and for those who struggle today. As we heal and gradually awaken, we come to recognize that underneath all the generations of ancestral and cultural wounding and trauma is the beauty of our true nature.
While traumatic and intensely painful experiences may have happened that we justifiably label as "evil," there is no evil, no sin, no shame or judgment in our inherent wholeness, in who we were born to be. It is not my belief that any baby is born evil or bearing sin. Instead of judgments which impair our capacity for understanding and compassion and forgiveness, we can come to recognize the truth of how incredibly lost we humans can become when our families and our cultures drop more trauma in our laps then we can possibly handle. For so many of us, it is too much. And we are lost to compassion and truth, beauty and joy, wisdom and love.
This is certainly what happened to my twin brother. And to my mother — prior to the miracle of her partial awakening that began for her at the age of 87. To my father, who died suddenly when he was just 60. And for so many of us, myself included.
It is also true that countless human beings are today engaged in healing ourselves and opening into the beauty of the holy and sacred wholeness of our true selves. And we are coming to recognize the beauty in one another, and even when the deeper truths of who we are is buried under layers of protection — layers that so many of us have unknowingly built around our hearts to protect us from the overwhelm of what has felt unbearable. As we do, as we root with increasing depth into paths of healing our hearts, we gradually come to recognize and experience the sacred thread that is woven through us all. And, over time, our judgments, fears, shame, projections, triggers, and harmful beliefs and actions begin to slip away and lose their hold over us. And as we heal ourselves, we heal the generations that come both before and after us. And we help heal our world.
Today I can look at the above photograph of my mother as a young and only child with her grandmother and cousin — and I can see clearly how my mom was already gone. She had already checked out in order to survive. And there is no more blame. No more seeing her as evil and consumed by demons. What I see instead is the truth of an incredibly traumatized little girl who had to leave her body in order to stay alive. And I grieve for how it was that my mama felt forced from when she was so tiny and vulnerable to erect armor around her precious heart.
And I have been transformed. Today I see that these ruptured bonds, this overwhelming loss and fear and rage and shame, the pervasive addictions and anxiety and depression, and all the walls built around tender, young hearts is a legacy that has been blindly passed on in my family — and in countless other families and communities and cultures — for such a very, very long time.
And I no longer blame my mother. Or her parents or their parents. Or myself. Or my sons' father. Or the therapists we saw all those years ago who were impaired in their capacity to deeply help our hurting and traumatized family. I no longer blame because I understand when Doug Pullin, my therapist today and dharma and meditation teacher, wisely reflects that "compassion is what happens in us when love connects deeply with suffering."
So true. So true.
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| A photograph I recently took of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Compassion |
Compassion and Love Prevail When
We Open and Heal Our Hearts
Speaking the truth is so important to me today. There are such hard and deeply painful lessons that I have learned on my journey of gradual awakening. And I am under no illusion at all that I am unique. So many of us have suffered for years under the weight of unaddressed trauma and unintegrated grief.
In sharing, my experience, strength, and hope today, I offer these glimpses into what prolonged my suffering and that of my beloved family. Again and again, I also return to the awareness that half the solution is first in coming to recognize the problem. These were the missing pieces that I recognize today which served to perpetuate harmful and hurtful generational and cultural patterns for years into my healing journey and that of my family:
- Not having a depth of understanding about trauma — which is why I have gifted 9 copies of The Myth of Normal to 14 friends and family and have recommended this book to many others
- Not having the wise guidance that I needed to dive ever more deeply into the journey of grief and the gifts of its transformation — which is why I so often recommend books on grieving and speak to the power of compassion and love in my writings
As I have personally experienced, and witnessed so many times within myself — and my own family, other families and communities, and our nation and beyond — there is a profound cost to armoring our hearts. This disconnect from within ourselves and all of life, I believe, needs to be illuminated again and again and again. Because it is hard to see the waters within which we swim let alone truly integrate what we are learning in ways which deeply alter the ways that we are in the world.
There can be no solution, no genuine healing and awakening from what are often many layers of self-deception and the generational and cultural trauma that we have experienced and deny or minimize.
Compassion and love prevail when we commit to the journey of opening and healing our hearts.
That said, my experience has been that I have needed to first begin to grasp and simply recognize that I have been shut down, disassociated, or distracted. Integrating this awareness changes us. It is a grace-filled doorway into compassion and love. Ever deepening and expanding compassion and love.
My tears opened that doorway and ushered me into healing and the experience of growing and evolving wholeness and belonging, tenderness and compassion, connection and love.
It is also true that we will only go as deep as the support that we perceive is available to us. The pathway into our holy sacred wholeness is not meant to be done in isolation.
Following this thread of deep healing is, I believe, how we heal ourselves, our family line, our communities, our world.
This blessed and sacred journey of awakening is lifelong. There is no graduation point, no arrival at enlightenment where we are all done with this business of shedding the obstacles we've absorbed which impair our capacity to love, to be who we are, to recognize and live our purpose for being here. And what a beautiful thing it is to surrender into this process of becoming wholly human. Yes, it is not easy. Not at all. Yet, it is more painful to stay asleep, disconnected, disassociated, distracted. At least this has certainly been my experience.
This is where I am drawn to share several quotes from the latest gem I have discovered — Bearing the Unbearable. This book came recommended by a family therapist one of my sons and I will see as we move as a family into greater healing and wholeness, vulnerability and trust, compassion and love. These quotes also shine bright light on many of the vital aspects of my journey and the paths of heart that I have witnessed in so many others, both personally and professionally....
Quotes from Bearing the Unbearable
by Joanne Cacciatore
To bypass grief, we must also bypass love. We, as modern humans, are experts in bypassing grief and trauma, cutting ourselves off from pain. Fear drives bypass — curtailing authentic feelings — and bypass leaves us psychologically imprisoned by our own fear. Then we become too frightened to allow our love to flow out, and we build high walls around our hearts to self-protect. In so doing, though, we cut ourselves off from humanity — our own and everyone else's. Somewhere in our hearts many of us recognize this truth.
Repressed grief ravages individuals and dismantles families; its tragic effects seep like groundwater into communities and societies. And the emotional economics of grief denied its rightful place are grim.
On the other hand, grief also has the potential to bring us closer to the warmth, love, and connection that is within us and between us. When others meet us with nonjudging compassion, we experience a sense of belonging that polishes the rough edges of grief. But when we are pushed by our culture, this cult of pleasure, to heal on a fixed timescale or to somehow "choose happiness" over grief, when we are socially constrained and unable to give expression to our emotions, we feel unsafe, misunderstood, and isolated. And when this happens we may, to the detriment of humanity, retract from the world as we begin to, quite rightly, feel frightened and mistrusting of the way our honest grief will be met.... Such injurious advice often comes from others' unwillingness to bear witness to pain because witnessing pain causes them to feel their own pain and dread."
Trying to avoid or not feel something is, arguably, one of the most maladaptive responses to traumatic grief... In an attempt to not feel, a griever may fall into a state of constant distraction-seeking. Drugs and alcohol, television, food, exercise, sex, gambling, shopping, interpersonal conflict, and even spiritual practice can become unconscious pawns in a chess game with avoidance of our pain. Humans are creative with distractions and the options are myriad. We can use anything to take us away from our feelings. Staying still, just being with world-shattering grief, is simply too threatening without the right kind of support and a feeling of both physical and emotional safety.
After traumatic grief, however, returning to homeostasis requires more support for much longer than many people realize and allow. Traumatic grief is a sustained state of disequilibrium to which the habituation and adaption to threat cannot occur in a society fearful of suffering and pain, one that pathologizes the authentic expression of emotions and lacks appropriate support structures and rituals to remember and honor the dead. Such a society pushes mourners to assign more negative self-judgments and erroneous meaning to their grief reactions. This may include ascribing to ourselves inadequate adjustment ("I should feel better by now."), personal incompetence ("What is wrong with me?"), or even mental illness ("I have major depression.").
Such erroneous beliefs about grieving lead to suppression, distraction, and avoidance of natural grief reactions — in short, they lead to vastly more suffering.
The death-denying, grief-defying Cult of Happiness is propagated by messages and mores that value economics over philosophy, productivity over kindness, joie de vivre over authenticity, arrogance over humility, avarice over meaningful human connection, and the egoistic agendas of self-proclaimed healers over what should be commonplace compassion. This has grim effects for the vulnerable bereaved, further shaming them into hiding.
In seeking to prematurely end justifiable and necessary suffering, we add to it unjustifiable and unnecessary suffering. The danger of trying to bypass grief is that grief then comes out sideways, only now unrecognizable as a legitimate product of loss. In the words of the existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, "The pain is there; when we close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else." Or as the poet Rumi puts it, "Some torn places cannot be patched."
Cutting ourselves off from any genuine feeling in order to pursue or manufacture another feeling denies our humanity.
Sorrow
and contentment, grief and beauty, longing and surrender coexist in the
realm of sameness. This is called the unity of opposites, and it
liberates us from a myopic, dualistic view of our emotions as either/or.
This is grief's most piercing message: There is no way around — the only way is through.
The alternative to repressing grief is to fully inhabit it. When we have learned to fully inhabit our grief, we awaken to the suffering in others. We recognize harm in all relations, human-to-human, human-to-child, human-to-animal, child-to-animal. And then, having awakened to our own suffering and the suffering of others, we can begin to take actions, when and where we can, that serve to diminish suffering rather than amplify it.
When I am teaching leaders in spiritual communities, I often remind them that spirituality is a way into suffering, not the way out of it.
The fundamental feel-good chasing that occurs in religious, social, medical, and educational communities permeates public attitudes toward grief... Mystics in many spiritual traditions see suffering as necessary, essential, the only means toward closeness with God or to existential transcendence. Yet in our medicalized world, normal bereavement and trauma are turned into mental disorders with diagnostic codes, which then become treatable with medications. But if grief is a disease, so too must be love.
We do not experience grief without love, and we cannot experience the love without feeling grief. When we open our hearts to grief, over time, the delineation between the two states deliquesces. Our hearts open, because grief, like love, is a matter of the heart.
In a certain sense, I suspect the bypassing of traumatic grief may be the greatest threat facing humankind today, responsible for immense suffering from addictions and abuse to social disconnection and perhaps even war. When we disconnect from our grief, we disconnect from ourselves. When we disconnect from ourselves, we disconnect from others and from the natural world. It is an insidious cycle of unnecessary suffering that pervades families, communities, cultures, and generations. By trying to circumvent suffering, we magnify it.
And if we bypass long enough, as individuals or families or cultures, we begin to fragment. When this happens, our emotional range contracts and shrinks and — so does our world.
A heart that has been expanded by suffering has the capacity to hold even more love.
In Bringing Home the Dharma, Jack Kornfield wrote that when he arrived at Ajahn Chah's monastery the teacher said, to him, "I hope you're not afraid of suffering." Jack asked him what he meant and explained that he had come to meditate and find peace and happiness.
"There are two kinds of suffering," Ajahn Chah told him, "the suffering we run from because we are unwilling to face the truth of life and the suffering that comes when we're willing to stop running from the sorrows and difficulties of the world. The second kind of suffering will lead you to freedom."
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| Photo by Molly |
Final Wisdom Quotes
There are, of course, countless quotes from wise and deeply compassionate and loving souls that could be shared here. These are just an additional few which may be helpful and illuminating and which I am called to end with:
"Before you can know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing." — Naomi Shihab Nye
"There's no way to benefit anyone unless we start with ourselves." — Pema Chödrön
"Turning toward what you deeply love saves you." — Rumi
"It's typically American to equate healing with doing something. When we have a problem, we fix it, and we prefer to do it quickly. But fixing is not the same as healing; in fact it can easily get in the way of healing... Healing happens not through doing but through feeling." — Elio Frattaroli
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive." — James Baldwin
"To
embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel
what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for
unsentimental compassion and love." — Stephen Batchelor
"Fierce Compassion, which arises from fully experienced grief, helps us awake from our slumber and live more wholeheartedly. It helps us take more responsibility for reaching beyond ourselves and toward other people and the suffering that is haunting them." — Jeffrey B. Rubin
"Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret to redemption lies in remembrance." — Richard Von Weizsäcker
"The cure for the pain is the pain." — Rumi
"To love means to open ourselves to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and thus an intensity of consciousness that before we did not know was possible." — Rollo May
"The work of the mature human is to hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by the two." — Francis Weller
"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." — Elie Wiesel
"The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What will you plant there?" — Jack Kornfield
"Our greatest strength lies in the gentleness and tenderness of our heart." — Rumi
"The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe." — Joanna Macy
"I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being." — Hafiz
"Everything we think, feel, and do has an effect on our ancestors and all future generations and reverberates throughout the Universe. Therefore, our smile helps everyone." — Thích Nhất Hạnh
Heartfelt blessings to us all
on our human journeys,
💗
Molly
* * * * *
Additional suggested reading:
Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and
the Heartbreaking Path of Grief
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness,
and Healing in a Toxic Culture
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal
and the Sacred Work of Grief
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body
in the Healing of Trauma
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