understanding (n.)

Shoes and I are trying to find footing again after the past two weeks.  The situation continues to grow in complexity, and as much as out hearts are just broken, we always come back to the same point:  we did not lose each other.  

As you know from my last post, our (Shoes and I) sweet friend, V., died two weeks ago.

I don't really know how to write this post.  It might turn out disjointed and nonsensical.  That might be fitting.

Five and a half  years ago, after Shoes and I had decided that we were serious and moving forward in our relationship, I started to meet his friends.  This was 100%, thoroughly and utterly nerve wracking.  Shoes grew up with the same group of friends, attended undergrad with many of them (lived with them as roommates), and after undergrad, when they split for graduate school and different parts of the world, they stayed as close as they had ever been.  Years upon years upon years of shared history and experience.  They are still an extremely tightly knit group, full of love, encouragement and forgiveness for each other (when you're friends for that long, rifts are bound to happen.)

V. was the wife of Shoes' long time friend S.  The first time we met them, we had gone up to the Northern part of this state to have a long weekend with them and two other couples.   In essence, the entire group was welcoming, loving, enthusiastic and opening.

So very open to having me infiltrate their strong friendships.

V. was there that weekend.  And she, with the other women, was vivacious, loving, curious, affirming.  She was a large part of what made being friends with all of these guys so very easy.

V. is hard to explain.  She was, in a sense, the best part of who you are. Honest and blunt, but without force or aggression.  She was vivacious and loved to laugh and adored making sure you were comfortable.  She was compassionate and tender hearted and tough.  So very strong.  V. came from a very large Laotian family; watching her relationships with her family was a sight to behold.  Loving and loud and boisterous.  Her family were her friends and no matter who you were, V. made you feel like you genuinely, authentically were her best friend.  All of she and S.'s summer barbeques, graduation parties, etc, were packed to the walls with the friends they had accumulated over the years.

This is where it gets a little sad.  That's my grief.  You don't have to keep reading from here.  I would understand.

Everybody - and I mean that quite literally - everybody loved V.   On the day that V. passed away, she had been experiencing strange physical symptoms in the morning.  The events surrounding how she got the hospital are long and complicated, but she did.  She was taken by ambulance to the hospital S. works at, and a medical team who was very familiar with S. worked all day to revive her as she kept crashing.  (That's not exactly quite how it went, but to protect the family's privacy a little, that's how this version goes.)

They were unable to keep her stable, and at one point, after 20 minutes of chest compressions, the medical team had to let her go.   As the medical team filed out, the nurses dissolved into tears and the lead physician crept around the corner, and believing he was unseen, crouched down on the floor, put his head in his hands and started sobbing.

When S. told the children's preschool teacher, she also dissolved into uncontrollable tears.  V. had made friends with her, with the other parents, with the children ... V. was your friend.  Period.  If you knew her, you were loved by  her.

Shoes and I have been rocked to our core with grief.  I realize that sounds melodramatic, but I cannot remember the last time I was this affected by anything.   I have spent hours in tears that sneak up out of nowhere.  Shoes and I have been sad, and irritable, and slightly grouchy with each other.  We have spent hours texting our close friends, emailing them, talking on the phone with them.  The loss of V. creates a giant hole in each of us individually, and in the group as a whole.

Shoes and I just returned from her out of town, Laotian Buddhist memorial service.  Please know my heart - in no way do I want at all to disrespect another person's culture - but the ceremony did not offer the sense of closure we were hoping for.  I think this is because it's just not how we, in our Western thinking, have been accustomed to grieving and the ceremony of saying Goodbye.  We all know that V. would have most definitely wanted a fully Laotian service, though, and for that we were very, very grateful.  Some elements were shocking to us and while I won't mention most of them here, I do want to touch on that final goodbye.

This may be uneasy to read and may be triggering for people who are experiencing grief or have complicated loss / grief in their pasts.  Please feel free to stop reading.

At the conclusion of the memorial service, my husband and his close friends were asked to follow S. with wreaths and lead a processional from the room the service was held in, around the side of the funeral home, to the room with the crematorium.  Shoes and his friends were followed by the monks, who were followed by the nuns, who were followed by V.'s casket (on wheels.)  The rest of the ceremony guests followed this processional as Laotian matriarchs threw coins wrapped in tin foil at us for luck.

Once we arrived at the incinerator at the crematorium, those at the front loaded V. in her casket into the incinerator.  The door was shut and latched.  The incinerator was immediately turned on.

Most people left for the Laotian Buddhist temple at that point.  We lingered to be with our friend as he visited with other funeral guests.  As Shoes and I were getting ready to leave, we looked back at the crematorium roof as smoke started clouding out of the chimney.  Shoes looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, "What did we just do?"

Of course, that's not that.  After that, our close friends went to dinner and stayed up late drinking wine and telling V. stories, grieving in the ways we know how.

Woke up the following day, and still felt sad.

Sad that my friend is gone.  Sad that her two very young children don't have a mother.  Sad that her husband now has his own grief that only he can get through, in his own way.  Sad that when we gather together as a group, her loss will continue to be a large hole in our fabric.  Sad that an entire mess of people miss the woman who  let them know that they were loved.  Accepted.

It doesn't make sense that a 35 year old woman with two very small children four and under woke up one morning, didn't feel well, and by the end of the day, had passed away.  It doesn't make sense that a four year old child now asks their father every day "when mommy is coming home."  It is heartbreaking to watch an even younger child cling to their father and scream when given to somebody else to hold because the entire situation is too confusing, too scary and to devastating on an entirely emotional level.  And while none of it makes sense, I've stopped looking for meaning and just come face to face with this terrible grief and sadness.

The only way through it is through it.

I get that.  But I would totally be lying if I didn't also say that I am looking for the days when it doesn't feel so heavy, so enveloping, so all encompassing.

It's such a terrible cliche, but V. was the best of all of us.
And that's a very hard thing to let go of.

There is no order to this post - random thoughts only.  Apologies for the lack of linear writing.

Of Grief:

Shoes and I are deeply, deeply grieving the very unexpected loss of one of our closest friends.  I have much to say about that, but I cannot organize my thoughts in any coherent fashion.  It felt wrong to continue this post without recognizing that this - the loss - our dear friend - is much more important than the rest of this post.  I don't know what I would give to have her back with us.  With her husband.  With her toddler / preschool sons.

Probably everything.

Of Resistance:

Sometimes I do not have the same experiences with clients that other therapists do.  Sometimes I am given families and literally told, "if they don't get this with you, we're terminating their children."  Sometimes I am told, "you are their last chance."  I hate that.  I'm not a miracle worker.  I can't motivate people to do something they're not ready to do.

And.

Sometimes what looks like resistance is not resistance.   Sometimes what looks like, "F* you" is really "I'm scared and I don't know what to do and I know I don't really have any chances left." Sometimes resistance is really people saying, "What if I reach for you to help and you're not there?"

I am closing with a client soon.  Today this person dissolved into tears and stated, "I don't know what's going to happen when you leave.  We've learned how to be a family again."

Resistant.

Of Promotions:

I received one.  To Lead Therapist.

Don't really know what that means, but am realizing I'm two years post Masters and they said this would happen at about this time.  Don't really know how much low level supervision I'll get to do, as workers keep handing me their most resistant clients.

Sometimes I don't get this life - what happens - the directions we take - why some clients make it and some don't - how we measure success - why some people are taken from us so early - they whys of anything.

Tonight, I think I'm just tired.
That is what it is, I guess.

Oh yoga.

I started yoga in 2007 after I separated from the former spouse.  It was wildly nourishing and challenging and for 90 minutes I could concentrate on something other than some of the worst of human emotions.  I was, and I say this lovingly, and to roughly borrow a phrase from Elizabeth Gilbert, a cliche of an almost divorced 30 year old taking divorced lady classes at the Y.

But whatever.  It was healing in the most healing of ways.

A year later, I managed to sneak restorative yoga into a credit earning part of my graduate school schedule.  And THAT was wildly nourishing in all new ways ... a return to the same, stable quiet sense of self ... the friend that had accompanied my move to an unfamiliar city.

And now, I've returned again, in an effort to have a space in which I am challenged, and clear headed, and letting go.  This has been really humbling, guys.  Turns out when you don't practice regularly, you lose flexibility and balance.  (Or at least, I did.) This has been a process.  Even concentrating on breath work and meditation has been a process - one wandering thought and suddenly I find I'm off rhythm with the Agni-Prasana and completely off kilter.  (Sometimes just being in the moment is the hardest part.)  (Agni Prasana is also called Breath of Fire and involves breathing in and out rhythmically, with the emphasis put on breathing out.  It forces me to concentrate on my abdomen - the drawing in and filling the lungs and the pushing out to exhale.  Other than the pace and emphasis, it's similar in form to the breathing exercises we use in TF-CBT and CPT.)

Last Saturday, in some strange turn of events, I was the only person at my usual morning class.   Slightly awkward, but the instructor kindly took the time to go over my form in a couple of poses that are more challenging for me.

Like this one:

(Image is hyperlinked - thank you, KatieYoga, for this beautiful example.)

I  might mention here that my yoga instructor is 7 months pregnant and did this pose as if it was the easiest thing ever. In the universe.  I, however, have not yet been able to do a headstand.  And, turns out, I am still not be able to do a headstand, but at least now I know a safer, more supported way to enter a headstand.  But here's the humbling part:  as I was trying to come into this pose, I experienced a moment of fear that caused all of my upper back to tense and today, I am still experiencing some pain in my levator scapulae (I'm fairly certain, anyway, that that is the affected muscle.)

My mind took over.  Again.   This is fascinating to me.
The increasing awareness that my thoughts are loud, bossy and somewhat anxious and fearful, and that they interfere with my body, is incredible.

Maybe one day headstand will be more accessible and slightly less intimidating.  Maybe one day my mind will just let my body be.

That's the hope, anyway.

But just the act of carving out time for yourself as a helper is worth it.

I've written about this before.  Some of the advice given to social workers (and other members of the helping professions) regarding self care is just shamefully and wholly inadequate.  In my case, I work as a therapist specializing in family preservation and child trauma.  Taking time to take a bath will not adequately soothe my soul after I have difficult days in which I have witnessed abuse, dysfunction and sometimes, in the absolute worst case scenario, death.

Besides, my bathtub is from the early 1970s, fills as quickly as a dripping faucet can and the water turns cold halfway through.  That sounds ... stressful.

So taking baths and lighting candles is not enough.  It's becoming a joke in our profession, right?  We don't need more baths.  We need better pay, more time off to be able to soothe our souls and rejuvenate, and less working hours (I average about 50 working hours a week, which doesn't take into account the amount of time I am on call and have to respond within 15 minutes. We won't be discussing my pay rate.)  I've written about my deep love of Tara Brach before, as well, and how critical it is that we find a place within ourselves where we accept our complicated feelings about the work we do and avoid punishing ourselves for them.  (Radical Acceptance - one of my favorites, fyi.)

I say all of this, and then in the next breath I tell you:  there is no other work I would rather be doing (and on a bad day if I tell you differently and threaten to become a barista or a librarian or a poet, I am most likely lying).  When social work and therapy clicks, it clicks.  For me, it is spiritual (in a non Joel Osteen type of way - get out of here with that name it and claim it business!) and meaningful and beautiful.  Even the smallest  moments of connection and healing in sessions are sacred, and those moments are part of what sustain me as a worker.  The other day I witnessed a partner be able to tell their partner to "hold on - I have something to say."  Doesn't sound like a lot, right?  It has taken us weeks to get to that point.  Weeks of practice, of debriefing, of homework, of REBT mixed with Narrative Therapy (sometimes that works, turns out ...).  My heart almost burst with pride for both of them.  That's their success.  I was just fortunate enough to witness it.

At the same time, however, the work becomes exhausting.  Balancing work needs with being married with the never ending home remodel with Rosie's training starts to wear on me.  It's been a long few months and I very much neglected taking care of myself (helllllooooo 10 extra pounds and chronic muscle pain!) and got to a point of frustration in which I told Shoes, "What do I have to do, schedule self care in my calendar?"

Cough.

He didn't say anything, because I'm not stupid.  If that's what I have to do, then that's what I have to do. Scheduling time for myself is a feat, you guys, and I don't even have kids.  But between the work schedule, my work contract which details that when I'm open with families I'm always available to them, and the constant revolving door of house contractors, if I don't schedule it in, it's not going to happen, because there will always be something else that will need to be done.  Always.

I talked to my supervisors about the level of stress I had been feeling, and, to my relief, they said, "You need to be asking for more support.  You need to be asking for more time away from your phone.  We have the infrastructure for this."  (And, because this was during my yearly eval, they also said, "We're promoting you to lead therapist and we're going to ask our ED for a raise for you.)  Important note:  social work agencies have widely varying levels of support.  I am thankful every single day for my agency.  They aren't perfect and there are still gaps (did I mention we're not going to be discussing my pay rate, despite the raise?), but they are supportive.  (Because this paragraph has already rabbit trailed into the slightly random, I will also tell you that my yearly eval made it easy to turn down an unexpected recruitment from another local social work agency this week.  Why would I leave already established support, professionalism and integrity?)  Worlds away from last agency, in which I was expected to conduct involuntary psychiatric detainments despite the fact that there were literally no beds, received almost no supervision, and had ongoing therapy clients for which I obtained almost 90% productivity with no time for progress notes).

These things aren't huge, but they've definitely helped:  I've asked Shoes to take over more of the contractor scheduling.  And I've moved around my own personal budget to be able to attend on a fancy yoga studio on a semi regular basis.  (Re entry into yoga is the subject of the next post.)  I'm still not going to take baths in our ridiculous bath tub, and I'm not going to be lighting candles.  But I am going to be dedicating more time and space to my own emotional needs and thinking about what centering and balance means for me personally.   We owe it to ourselves to think about what we really need, (really, really need) on a personal level to be able to continue to do the work.  We owe this to ourselves, foremost.  Our clients.  Our families.  I am a valuable commodity.  You are a valuable commodity.  The use of YOU in the helping profession (as if I need to tell you guys this) is one of the most critical features for client growth.  If we don't believe that we are worth taking care of, how are we going to be able to communicate to our clients, with integrity, that they are worth taking care of?

We are all worth taking care of.

Thoughts?  Frustrations?  Contributions?  Something I missed?  Please feel free to share.

Shoes and I were having a discussion yesterday about marriage:  what we were afraid of, what we like, what's hard.

And I said, "I would say you're probably my best friend, for all intents and purposes."
And he said, "What!  No way.  We are not best friends."

What I know about Shoes is that sometimes a little exploring is necessary - he's incredibly bright.  Not incredibly demonstrative or affective, but sharp.  And this is what Shoes said,

"The marriage relationship is completely separate from a friend relationship.  I don't hang out with my friends all the time - I eventually want them to go home.  I don't take into account their opinion for major life decisions.  I accept support from them ... sometimes, but sometimes I just want to figure it out on my own.  That doesn't describe the relationship we have.  We are here, with each other, in each other's space, for the majority of our time together.  We take into account what the other person feels and thinks all the time.  I run almost everything by you,  because I always care what you think - it always matters.  It's not better or worse than a friendship - it's just an entirely different ball game."

Shoes and I had an in person relationship for 8 months and a long distance relationship for three years.  Right after I graduated with my Master's, I moved to rural E WA and we got married.  Our relationship is different, and it always, always serves to remind  me that all relationships are incredibly different and incredibly filled with idiosyncratic meaning.

I had a couples' counseling session this morning that was incredibly challenging for me as a therapist on almost every level.  Without going into too much detail, I almost gave feedback that was completely off base.  Right before I gave the feedback, one of the partners contributed something that clarified the issue greatly, and I thought to myself, "I had it wrong.  I was assuming, and it was just dead wrong."

We think we know.  We think we know people, we think we know relationships, we think we know behavior and motivation.  We think we know.  We just don't know.  This week has been an excellent reminder in avoiding making assumptions and to ask questions.

People surprise me always.  Even after working with families for 13 years, people always surprise me.  Including clients.  Including my husband.  Including myself.

My friend Nicole has started blogging here,  and if you have any extra time, dear hearts, it will be more than worth your while to stop by.  She is loving, charming, funny, smart and one of the most talented therapists I know.  (I know a lot of therapists.)

Nicole and I met in graduate school when we interned together at a children's community outpatient mental health clinic in NE Portland.  I can't speak for her experience, but having her there was one of the most positive parts of my last year of grad school.  I adored interning with her, Amirah from Lewis and Clark and Joyce from OHSU.  Many positive memories of our intern cubicle, the crazy phone line we shared, group supervision, process recordings, Narrative Therapy, Data/Assessment/Plan, coffee at Black Sheep Bakery ....

Nicole now lives on my side of Washington State, about 2 hours North.  Over here, that's no more than a  daily commute.  We have tentative plans to have coffee in January, and I could not be more excited.  I miss  my friend.  That time in my life (although I thought I hated it then).  The clinic.  That growth.

Glad she's blogging.