Grief is a sensitive thing. It feels elusive at times. I don’t grieve well and feel that it can’t be fruitful to sit in something long, or at all.
I’m working through the need to let go of trying to control the amount of medication, or whether I need any medication for my mental mood swings. I want to trust that God will move when and where he wants in spite of the possibility that the medication I take dulls my brain. I’m not even sure if that’s how it works, that it can squelch my thoughts, much less my desires and my wants. But I had a significantly bad experience with lithium so I’m concerned about any medication at all.
I want to hear from God and I want to be listening to God. And my ability to listen to God is directly correlated with my ability to not suppress my emotions and allow them to show me where areas I need to press in are. That’s why I struggle with the medication so much, even though, the medication that I’m on now is ever so slight, I can’t even notice it. But I have fear that it’s suppressing who I’m supposed to be.
At the end of the day, I need to trust those around me that they see who I’m supposed to be, who they know me to be. Even though I want to be happy and that’s a hard thing to quantify. Happiness is fleeting, but I have felt more happy recently than I have in a long time. I was on medication for some of it, off medication for some. So, it’s not easy.
My emotional coach recently told me, I’m wrestling with the question, what does flourishing look like with these different layers in my life:
- The physiological/chemical process in my body
- The medication, because it helps stabilizes some things at home
- Circumstances of a new job, medication, and even, the holiday season being upon me
- Figuring out God – my theology and how does it intersect with mood altering drugs
In cycles of grief there is the anger and the bargaining. Sadness is grieving what was lost. I wasn’t able to identify it in my feelings chart until we talked about other things for a while. I only noticed sadness when my coach asked me what I wanted? I told him I wanted to do fun things. I started talking about how I told my wife I wanted to set my guitar back up in the bedroom and I wanted to play without anyone asking me to do anything for them, or to play for them, or to sing. I just wanted to be alone with my guitar occasionally. I’ve missed that.
I talked about how I wanted to start duck hunting and how we just got a dog and it seemed more fun than other things I’ve been doing.
Then I named sadness as one of the emotions I was feeling. And my coach reminded me that “loss of fun” was a symptom of grief. My relational circuits might seem off.
My wife and I go to desperation mode differently. She “flees”, i.e. goes into flight…tries to go away…and when I’m in desperation mode I go into fight mode because of my sense of duty. As my coach said, I go into “enemy mode”. He mentioned that one things we need to do when we are working through grief and sadness is to find ways to feel more regulated, like myself, through connection with people or things, or both. Appreciation, rest, shalom in my body, which is like a peace to my physical body through meditation, stretching, exercise.
At times it might serve me well to have more in my life to make me feel more regulated, like hobbies.
Over the next few months my coach said we should build a list of resources when my energy is low.
Grief is countered well by looking at your surrounding resources of people and things and letting sadness wash over us. He used an analogy about tears, suggesting that our tears have different shapes based on the type of crying we do. So, tears alone, can be healing.