Tools for Intentional Living – Dr. J. Nickens

Emotional pain can linger much longer than we imagine…

It was a few years later.  He’d done a lot of healing in our therapy sessions, and found a new path for his life that allowed him to move forward even though something inside had broken.  It was more than his heart, more than his hope.  I remember thinking that it wasn’t so much that he’s faced a change in his life, but that the ground beneath him, and inside of him, had shifted, leaving a crack where once it was solid.  Still, he had chosen to end therapy before I thought he was ready.  He said he felt positive about his future, though not exactly optimistic. 

So when he called I thought perhaps some new distressing event or experience had befallen.  It turned out that from time to time, when he didn’t expect it,  he found himself quietly, silently crying to himself – still. 

We spent another year looking backwards, looking forwards and illuminating the present.   The place where he’d broken inside had become a smaller knot, but alas, with “smaller” came an intensity that could practically bring him to his knees.  Quite simply, he still missed her, the wild and unpredictable moments and even the episodic misery she’d brought to his life.  He had thought that he’d moved on, and was reasonably adjusted to his current relationship, but there were moments, still, when he was consumed with thoughts and memories of her.  He didn’t understand why.

I though  perhaps it was more simple than he imagined.  He was feeling true grief.   She had felt like holding onto a thunderstorm, all flashes of searing heat and disturbing rumblings.  The eye of the storms had been tranquil but surreal, knowing the fierceness would return any moment. ” How could I miss that?” he mused.  “How could I want more of that, much less cry for it?”

We began again to work through his grief, and re-discovered his hopes and intentions for a future of gentle rain and balmy winds rather than unendurable storms. 

He terminated therapy, but this time with a decision that it was more of a break from treatment than an actual end.  He would try again to walk toward a new future, and come back for a check-in a few months.  He did that.  And then again.  And each time I could see more ease in his movement and hear more of a smile in his voice.

Grief has its own calendar.  Emily Dickinson’s poem says it so well.

The Soul’s Storm.

 It struck me every day

   The lightning was as new

As if the cloud that instant slit

   And let the fire through.

 It burned me in the night,

   It blistered in my dream;

It sickened fresh upon my sight

   With every morning’s beam.

I thought that storm was brief,–

   The maddest, quickest by;

But Nature lost the date of this,

   And left it in the sky.