Grief, Loss and EMDR Therapy

Aug 13

The experience of loss

On 9th July 2018 the phone rang. It was the phone call we all dread. The phone call we never want to get. The phone call we don’t even like to think about. My partner on the other end of the phone, “Carla – your Mum has passed away”.

Shock, total shock. I actually asked him, “Is this a joke? What are you talking about?”, not wanting to believe it was true. I wanted to believe anything other then what I was being told. She had only just returned home two weeks prior after visiting me in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand. She had stayed with me for a month and my gosh, did we drive each other crazy, but she was my Mum! I loved her more than anyone else in the world and now she was gone. Gone? No way!

Mum was only 54 years old. She had me at 21, her first born. Then, my sister and two younger brothers followed. My siblings and I often joked that Mum drove us all crazy and - bless her cotton socks - we knew she would live for years and years and drive us crazy for a long, long time. You see, we knew she was going to be around forever, even though it was contradictory to what Mum’s lifestyle might suggest.

Mum smoked cigarettes as much as she could, when she could. She was dependent on prescribed medications of all sorts – pain meds, sleepers - she had a pill for this, a pill for that. She suffered from chronic pain, rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease and that is just to name a few. She had high blood pressure, hypertension, fibromyalgia, GORD, and more.

Most pointedly though, my Mum suffered from Complex-PTSD. She was a complex trauma survivor. She had one of the worst childhoods I have ever heard of, and that’s saying something because I have worked as a psychologist now for 8 years! I would later say, “she literally died of a broken heart”.

When I received that fateful phone call, that’s all I would say. I rang my siblings, hearing myself repeating, “This wasn’t supposed to happen! She was going to drive us mad forever. I don’t understand how this could happen, this wasn’t the plan” . I was devastated and so were they.

Initial days of grief

Once I could think straight I moved on to the next issue. I was in Thailand and needed to get home to Cairns, Australia as soon as possible. The next two weeks were a blur. As the oldest sibling and the ‘second parent’ of the family, I was the one in charge of making all of the arrangements, packing up Mum’s unit, organising her cremation and Celebration Ceremony, all with lots of help of course from my family and friends. I was truly blessed with the amount of support and love we all received throughout that period. I was being guided by God, Higher Power, The Universe, whatever you want to call it, the whole way through the experience.

After two very short weeks at home with my family, I flew back to Chiang Mai, stopping only for 15 hours before boarding a plane to Singapore to attend Level 2 EMDR Therapy Training. Mum was with me when I received the news about this training being approved by my employer. It was so soon to be leaving my family and my home, but I remembered she had been so proud of me and I knew she wouldn’t want me to miss out.

The training was an opportunity of a lifetime, I had to go. Despite this, I was physically sick, completely run down and in the raw, vulnerable, place of grief. I have never felt anything like it.

A therapeutic journey

So, there I was, in Singapore at EMDR Therapy Training. The trainer asked for volunteers. Well, of course I was going to volunteer! My traumatic experience was fresh! I was going to take every opportunity to receive help where I could get it.

Through EMDR Therapy, sitting in front of 20 other mental health professionals, I cried and cried and cried. The specific ‘traumatic memory’ I wanted to work on, the ‘worst part’ of the whole experience, was a picture I had stuck in my mind and couldn’t get past.

It was the image of my dear mother, grabbing her chest, calling the ambulance and then falling to the floor, the floor in her lounge room around 2:30am in the morning and then taking her last breaths and dying alone. My belief: “I should’ve been there”. Mum passed away before the ambulance could reach her.

I had and have so much conditioned guilt around my mother. Not just from her passing, but my whole life relating back to my early years of ambivalent, anxious attachment with her. This is why this was so complex for me. This is why I took on so much guilt.

During one EMDR Therapy session I was able to resolve this memory. It took a while, but an hour later I wasn’t crying anymore. I had processed the image and it had changed. God* had come into that image in my mind. God said to me, “Carla, you were not in control of your mother’s death. This was decided long before your time and she didn’t die alone. She was surrounded by angels”.

You can’t argue with God, right?

The guilt shifted. My distress shifted. I now was able to bring up this image with no distress. I was sad, of course, because I was still grieving. However, I no longer felt guilt consume me and it was no longer blocking my grief from being able to flow through me naturally. I now believed “I did the best I could and my mum knew I always did”. Again, I was truly being guided, guided to EMDR Therapy Training in Singapore! Thank you EMDR!

*When I speak of God, I refer to God as the collective consciousness, the universe, or God in a more spiritual sense rather than a religious meaning.

Life returning to normal?

Following EMDR Therapy Training it was time to return to work at the International Residential Addiction Treatment Centre in Northern Chiang Mai (I was based there for two years). I asked myself, “How do I get my shit together enough to return to work?”

I realised I was caught up in old pathways and patterns of thinking, placing high expectations on myself, and expecting myself to be super human. Thank you, Brené Brown for helping me through this period. One of her quotes which was of particular support to me was, “Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.” I thought, instead of trying to ‘hide’ what I was going through, why not bring it into the room and use my authenticity to inspire others to get in touch with their experiences of grief and loss? So, that’s what I did.

I returned to work and that week I facilitated a group of clients working through grief and loss. I began by sharing my recent experience and “stepped into the arena” again (thanks Brene Brown!). What happened next was truly powerful. Each of my clients stepped into the arena and met me there! Everyone around the room dropped into their vulnerability and shared their grief. Some people had never spoken of these experiences to anyone before. It was truly profound and the epitome of why group therapy can be so transformative. We connected through our pain. It was one of the most powerful groups I have ever facilitated.

I knew I was onto something and I continued with more groups based on subjects and topics I felt passionate about. Because I was connecting with the material on both a personal and professional level, the clients connected with it also.

Grief resources

The following authors really helped me through my grief process:

Kristen Neff on Self-Compassion
Brene Brown & Oprah on Super Soul Sunday – Rising Strong
Neale Donald Walsch
The 5 stages of Grief & Loss by Elizabeth Kubler Ross & David Kessler
Ball in the Box analogy by Herschel

Are you working through grief and loss?

To anyone reading this, if you are going through your own experience of grief, I have the following messages for you:

Seek out therapy.
Go easy on yourself.
There is no ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ when it comes to grief.
Grief is experienced differently by different people.
You will work through grief in your own way in your own time and there are no rules to grief.
Lots of self-care is essential.
It’s important to include in your daily routine things like yoga, meditation, exercise, nutrition and healthy foods, time out, reading, writing, sharing and connecting with others, and time to yourself. Basically, do whatever it is you need to that is nourishing and helpful to you. Then, do more of it.
I like to say, “Take care of yourself physically when you are going through those crazy emotional storms”.
Be there for yourself. Soothe yourself. Talk to yourself.
Reach out to people.
Don’t expect yourself to ‘get straight back into it’ as if nothing happened.
Grief doesn’t go away but it does transform.
We have no control over grief. It can hit when we least expect it and knock us down. However, think of it like the waves of the ocean and believe that it is possible to learn to surf.

“Grief is the form that love takes when someone we love dies.”

M. Katherine Shear, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University

One of the best descriptions I found of grief and loss is the following:

"Lauren Hershal drew a box (square) with a ball (circle) inside. On the left side of box is a red “button.” When the grief is new, she explained, the ball takes up most of the box and is hitting the button, which represents pain, over and over again. The pain is fairly constant. “In the beginning, the ball is huge,” Herschel said in a tweet. “You can’t move the box without the ball hitting the pain button. It rattles around on its own in there and hits the button over and over. You can’t control it – it just keeps hurting. Sometimes it seems unrelenting. “For most people, the ball never really goes away,” she said in another tweet. “It might hit less and less and you have more time to recover between hits, unlike when the ball was still giant. It doesn’t disappear completely and when it hits the pain button, it’s just as intense. It’s better because you can function day to day more easily. But the downside is that the ball randomly hits the button when you least expect it”.

Life as it is now

Today, I am an Australian Registered Psychologist, specialising in EMDR Therapy and Structural Dissociation, Complex PTSD and Trauma, Addiction and Mental Health issues. I am also trained and experienced in DBT, ACT, CBT, MI, Mindfulness and Meditation and IFS. I have just recently started my own private practice.

I know I couldn’t save Mum and God knows I tried, but it wasn’t my job to do so. In her honour, I will continue to help people with Complex Trauma find themselves again, find their true selves again. It’s my Life Purpose, the reason I am here on Earth, the reason I have been through all that I have: to help women reconnect with their “wise woman within” so they can experience a life worth living, and to help men reconnect with their “peaceful warrior” so they can walk forward with a sense of purpose.