“Grief never ends. But it changes. It is a passage not a place. Grief is not a sense of weakness or lack of faith. It is the price of love.” Author unknown
I am writing this is the week of a new moon. A time of beginnings, a time of endings, and a time of darkness. This is the final post in this month’s theme of emotional healing and mental illness. It is not possible to move on the path of recovery without grieving what was lost in due to having a mental illness. Grief represents a constellation of emotions, such as frustration, anger, hurt, and hopelessness. As adults we often struggle with accepting our grief, let alone creating room for it to heal. It is so easy to push our feelings away, trying to rationalize ourselves away from the pain we feel. But grief is a natural response to loss and is meant to be experienced fully.
Grief represents the feelings that come from a loss. It could be a loss of a significant person but also loss of a place, a job, or an aspect of ourselves (such as our hopes and dreams). There is no timeline on grieving. Sometimes grief is short but often grief can last years (even a lifetime).
I like the words from the above quote, “It is a passage not a place.” Grief is a journey, and grief ebbs and flows in your life. What we lose to mental illness, could be things we love or aspire to have in our lives. This post is focused on the grief of having a mental illness and its impact on our lives. It is important to contemplate that our episodes also contribute to our resilience, developing strengths, capacities and gifts that we share with the world. It is a given to me that things we struggle with can make us stronger. However, this argument can’t be used to deny grief, to stop our emotional process, or to make us “move on with life.” This is a contradiction of grief: it causes us to suffer and also creates strength within us.
Like many people with mental illness, I have grief how my mental illness has affected my life. I think of the movie title, “Girl Interrupted,” which was released in 2000. The title speaks to how episodes interrupt the flow of our lives and the loss of our hopes, dreams, and confidence.
My grief for what has been lost because of my episodes is circular. Despite therapy and personal work, it revisits me, and I feel it and experience it again and again. There is no “getting over this.” For me, its more of an acceptance when grief visits, allowing it space to be, the emotions to flow, and opening to the creativity that helps to integrate it into the narrative of my life.
I feel like I have always felt loss around mental illness. Having a parent who has had a tumultuous path with his mental illness and addiction has always made me feel sad. The father who was so engaged when well was hard to lose to the deep depressions and supercharged manias. There are different layers to this grief: grief that I didn’t have a consistently well father, grief that he suffered so much from mental illness, grief at the loss of our home and nuclear family, and grief that I inherited such a difficult illness. While some of the grief was resolved as I was older when my understanding of mental illness and its impact on our lives grew, some of the grief has stayed.
In all my years of being treated for mental illness, the mental health system didn’t acknowledge or recognize grief to the extent needed to help me heal it. The conversation was primarily on symptoms, medications, and containment. I understand in crisis that there is a specific approach used to help stabilize someone; however, there is something not right about not providing specific support for someone who is grieving when it is a significant contributor to an episode.
In my last episode in 2015, after I left my partner and his family, and was unable to work, I felt tremendous grief surfacing amid all sorts of other triggers from the past. I realize it is tricky when someone is in psychosis to provide the therapeutic healing needed. Maybe even impossible. However, the grief is still happening whether it is addressed or not. I don’t have a clear picture of what this could look like when someone is in psychosis, when so much is happening in the mind that is not based in the concrete world. My intuitive sense is that we need trained therapists, like art therapists, who can work with people in psychosis and the complexity of grief that surfaces. More understanding, and more innovative ideas are needed to address emotional pain while in mental health episodes. I undersatand that lack of resources in the mental health system contributes to not being able to provide such specialized supports.
That being said, I received such great support from family and friends. I just wanted to say a very special thank you to my family and friends who were there to hold space for my grief throughout this episode. The value of that support is not something I can express fully in words. It is not easy to support someone who is in psychosis, not so easy to understand what is happening for that person, but nonetheless, those special people in my life found many ways to talk through, bring comfort, and even laughter during that time.❤️❤️❤️
But grief is not just a personal experience. I think about currently how there is collective grief for those of us who are really worried about the world. Our individual mental health is connected to the health of the planet, to the suffering of people, to the fear of discrimination, and the rising of intolerance. There are no easy answers on how to hold this, let alone respond to it. My inclination is that we live a life as close to our values, we advocate for change, and contribute to our communities in the ways that we can. Also, we experience our grief at what is happening in the world, allowing the feelings that arise and find support for this within our own community.
Frances Weller, in his beautiful book, “The Wild Edge of Sorrow,” writes, “We live, however, in a grief-phobic and death-denying society. Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. The shadow is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives. (2015, p. xvii). Weller challenges the notion that wellness means being happy all the time. Instead, he argues that happiness could be defined differently: “Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow (2015, p. xx).
When reflecting on these words and how it relates to mental health recovery, recovery isn’t the absence of our emotions but rather, acknowledging them, accepting them, and creating safety around letting the body experience them. That’s why I like to take my pain to poetry or art because it provides me with what feels like a guide in this process. I feel my grief, or anger, or hopelessness and speak it through my creativity which creates an inner dialogue that helps me hold these complexities and contradictions that Weller speaks of. Also, I speak about it to my loved ones and allow my feelings of grief to be held by their understanding.
Grief sometimes feels like it splits me open. As I move through it, as I wrestle with things I want to understand, that I don’t understand or that I can’t change, grief empties me in a way that allows me to move forward. Grief, which sometimes feels like it destroys us, can also be a healer. While I see many articles on the internet about prolonged grief being determinantal to our wellbeing and mental health, I wonder whether it’s the grief itself that is the issue or that people don’t have the support and guidance through it. We don’t have a lot of rituals built into our society around grief and I believe we don’t talk about it enough.
But art is one way to work with grief. “The Art Therapy Sourcebook” says, “Since early times, humans have used art to make important events such as death special through the creation of visual imagery, and art forms have been part of funeral ceremonies since Neanderthal times. It is clear that art somehow helps human beings cope with loss and that it is a universal human experience to express loss through symbols and to use images to relieve emotional distress” (2007, p. 143).
There are specific ways that I have worked to address my grief through creativity. I have mentioned many times about the importance of journalling and journalling with art. This is my mainstay when it comes to emotional processing. This free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness opens up what is in my heart and allows me to get to the core of what I am feeling.
Also, I have approached grief through art making, such as creating comfort journals, collages, or altars. I have also used a sequence of photos from challenging times in my life, displaying it in my studio. It helped me to remember those times, feel the feelings I felt, and connect some of the dots of my grief.
We all grieve differently. There is no right or wrong way. Creativity can be part of a process, a ritual, and a way to express how you feel or honour who or what you have lost.
When you are grieving aspects of what has been lost to mental illness, it is particularly important to have a process. Recovery, in my experience, depends to an important degree on how well you’ve processed loss in your life. The grief of the reprecussions of your illness on your life may never go away completely but if you can tip the scale in your recovery with new positive experiences, the loss may not be so difficult. We can judge ourselves so harshly for what we consider failings or mistakes, feeling such shame. I’d like to encourage you to find a process to work with this, so it lessens its power over you. I think if you can talk to someone about this kind of grief it can be helpful in developing compassion for yourself.
In reflecting on this month’s theme, I think it is clear that our mental health is linked to our emotional process in complex ways. I believe that by acknowledging and experiencing emotions like grief, you increase your resilience. Our art is a ritual of grief as much as it can be a ritual of joy. Art can be a tool, and an outlet. It is such a versatile healer.
Okay, are you ready to dive into making some art?🎨
Therapeutic Arts Activity
I think it’s important to develop one’s own process for working with grief.
Instructions
This activity involves creating a ritual for grief. Pick something in your life that you are grieving (or is a past loss), and decide what would be meaningful for you in terms of a ritual. Here’s some ideas to include in your ritual but there are so many other things that could be used:
- Reading a poem or inspirational material
- Burning incense
- Creating an altar
- Sitting in meditation
- Developing movements of the body that release grief
- Finding a song
- Planning a trip to nature
Materials Needed
- Materials this week are completely your choice (here are some examples below)
Here is a link to the poem which you can’t read in my image of above: WhenDeathComes-Oliver.pdf
Once you’ve completed this activity, here are some questions as guidelines for your personal explorations:
1. Describe your grief ritual. Was it difficult or easy to create?
2. What elements of your grief ritual do you find the most healing?
3. Can you see a link between how you experience and process your emotions and your mental health?
4. Is there some art you are inspired to create after you complete your grief ritual?
I have been working with grief a lot this past year. I have used letters to myself as ways to offer support when grief has me doubting my choices. These letters have been reread and have helped me have courage to move forward in my path.
One final thought: grief can take us to deeply painful places, please reach out to your supporters when you need them.
❤️❤️❤️With care and kindness, Meegan
In the spirit of creating a community of reflection and art making, your comments are welcome. If you choose to leave a comment, it is important to know I respect your privacy. Your information will not be given, lent, rented, or sold to anyone. However, when making a comment on the site, your IP address and browser user will be collected. Please see full Privacy details on my Privacy Policy Page Privacy Policy. If you are having a mental health emergency, please take care of yourself, and call 911 or take yourself to emergency at your closest hospital.
Sources
Malchoidi, C. (2007). The Art Therapy Sourcebook. McGraw-Hill: New York, New York.
Weller, K. (2015). The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. North Atlantic Books: Berkeley, California.
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You speak of grief like you know it and it knows you. I agree that “it is a passage not a place……that Grief is a journey…that ebbs and flows in your life”. Grief is a verb, a process that if you choose to embrace and go with will eventually bring you closer to your deeper authentic self and will transform you ~ an ally in your ‘becoming’.
Thank you Meegan for bringing light to this immeasurably valuable and yet challenging process. Well done!!
Ru