Dr. Dan Gottlieb has a weekly blog on The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation website. He will be live in this section every Tuesday from 3-4 p.m. ET. Leave a question or comment anytime for him! Click here to join his blog
Dr. Dan Gottlieb wrote a weekly mental-health column, On Healing, for the Philadelphia Inquirer for 15 years. He has decided to take a break from writing his column, but you can view the entire archive collection here:
ON HEALING:
December 2007
A loved one grieving? Give the gift of simply listening
Monday, December 24, 2007
"Pictures on the nightstand, TV's on in the den
Your house is waiting . . . for you to walk in
But you're missing"
- From "You're Missing"
by Bruce Springsteen
Tomorrow will be Linda's first Christmas without her husband. They had been happily married for 20 years, and their two teenage daughters were doing well. Then, one day in February, she received a call at work: Her apparently healthy 55-year-old husband had just suffered a fatal heart attack.
In the last 10 months, Linda and her daughters went through every stage of grief at least once. They endured the difficulties of first birthdays without Dad, and then first summer vacation. But somehow the first Christmas feels different, more difficult. Before her husband died, the holiday ritual was to spend Christmas Day with Linda's extended family. This year, Linda really doesn't want to do anything for the holidays, but she doesn't want to deprive her daughters. Yet none of them feel very joyous.
Meanwhile, Linda's sisters are telling her she should celebrate the holidays with them just as she did every other year. Maintaining consistency, they say, will be good for everyone. Like most people who feel sad or depressed around the holidays, these well-meaning people trying to do the right thing only make Linda feel more alone.
What should Linda and her daughters do? That's easy. They should each plan to do whatever would give them the most comfort that day. They could choose to stay home and celebrate quietly. They could go to the cemetery, or to her sister's, or they could hang out with friends or volunteer at a hospital. But whatever they do, each one of them should have the option to switch plans whenever she needs to.
And everyone who loves them should be supportive of their plan.
Support does not mean encouragement. It does not mean reassurance or advice. Nor does it mean acting strong when you, too, are hurting.
Support means listening. Support sometimes means tolerating a loved one's suffering in silence. It means being available to the person in grief, even when it hurts to do so.
Support is also about faith - having faith in the resilient spirit of those you love without needing to reassure them that one day they will experience joy again. It means having faith that if you need to cry with them, they will not break.
Everybody thinks pain is the problem when a loved one is grieving. It's not. Pain is a way of feeling connected to those we love. The pain is a combination of feeling love for those we've lost and longing for them to be with us in body. The loving feels good and the longing hurts, but they are often impossible to separate. That's why trying to talk people out of their pain usually makes it worse.
Last summer, my 7-year-old grandson, Sam, asked me how old he would be when I died. He was clearly uncomfortable. He said he was afraid of my dying because he would miss me so badly. When I then asked him what he thought would happen to me after I died, he described his own version of heaven. "Well, Sam," I wondered, "do you believe that I will still love you if I am in heaven?" Sam thought for a minute, and said, "Sure." And he said he would still be loving me, too. Then I wondered if he would be able to feel me loving him after I was gone. He thought about that for a long time before saying that he would. He thought he would always be able to feel my love for him.
d maybe that's why it hurts around the holidays. Maybe it's simply because we can feel the love better.
Dear readers: I am going to take some time off for R & R. I'll be back at the end of February, and we can still stay in touch through my Web site.
Don't let denial go too far
Monday, December 10, 2007
Psychiatrist to Jackie Mason: "We are here to understand your unconscious."
Mason to psychiatrist: "My unconscious is none of my business!"
- From "The World According to Me"
Have you ever noticed a mole on your body that looks like it might have changed? You get that creeping feeling of anxiety, promise yourself to call a doctor, and next thing you know it's a week later and there's that mole all over again. And maybe another, and then one more, until you can no longer deny its unsettling presence.
When we first see that mole, most of us flash ahead to the worst-case scenario: cancer, pain, even death. Too much to deal with, so it goes away.
As comedian Jackie Mason clearly understood, denial serves a purpose: It protects us from being overwhelmed by our emotions. Sometimes it can help us cope with crisis.
My daughter recently required emergency surgery on a disk in her cervical spine. After some initial panic, I found myself in "high function" mode, arranging for transportation, second opinions and everything else while also caring for my frightened child. I didn't look like I was scared half to death, and I wasn't. I was in denial. I felt no fear at all - until the surgery ended successfully and I got home and fell apart.
So in the short term, denial can be a good thing. Effective denial keeps the nightmare at arm's length, and can keep us going through crises.
In the long run, however, denial can be dangerous, even life-threatening. Because buried feelings are buried alive, the longer they are submerged, the bigger they feel and the harder we have to work to keep them at bay. Eventually, much of our life is about running from these emotions.
Last year I saw for consultation a 28-year-old married woman who was beside herself with worry over her family. Her 35-year-old brother was living with their aging parents, and he was out of control with drugs. The parents refused to acknowledge the severity of the problem, saying it wasn't that bad and he would get over it. Then her brother was convicted of burglary and sent to prison. When I saw the parents for the first time, the father was distraught and confused about how this could have happened. The mother just cried as she found herself in the middle of the nightmare she was trying to avoid.
In the case of my daughter's surgery, I was lucky. Once the threat passed, my mind and body felt safe enough to experience all the emotions I had during that time. For others, the threat continues to grow until they are forced to deal with it - the mole that doesn't go away, the son who ends up in prison.
So how do we manage this business of denial? By definition, we cannot know everything that's in our unconscious. But we sure can feel it. A friend once complained she felt like her demons were always nipping at her heels, and she didn't know what to do.
I advised her to just sit down. She had been abused as a child and spent much of her life overcompensating for all the painful emotions that lived inside. Sitting down, quietly, purposefully, was a first step toward being able to simply feel what her body was asking her to feel. It's impossible to deal with our nightmares when we keep them behind our backs.
And then there's Jackie Mason. His denial served him very well. After all, the byproduct of denial can be chronic anxiety and hyper vigilance, and it helped him make a nice living!
Unlike him, however, I think the unconscious is our business. And so are all the emotions it produces - fear, anger, sorrow, and on and on. We can never know everything that's in there, of course, but imagine the freedom of no longer being afraid to find out.
