Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Tuesday, January 25, 2011 -- Mattie died 72 weeks ago today.

Tonight's picture was taken in August of 2003. Mattie was a year old. Two things stand out to me about this picture. The first is the color Mattie was wearing. Mattie was naturally attracted to red. Red is a bold and strong color, and it really fit Mattie's personality. The second thing about the picture to note was what Mattie was holding. Mattie LOVED stackable cups. He had multiple sets, and he could get very creative with his use of them. He loved investigating what to fill them with and of course to see what these things looked like scattered ALL over the floor. He particularly loved filling the cups with rice and dried beans, and honestly I can still find grains of rice in our home today from playtime moments with Mattie.


Quote of the day: If you suppress grief too much it can well redouble. ~ Moliere


I find it ABSOLUTELY fascinating that brilliant minds like Shakespeare and Moliere could be SO perceptive and compassionate about grief. They in MANY ways were ahead of their time. After all, their philosophic thoughts were WAY before the development of the field of grief counseling. These great writers understood the importance of talking, processing, and feeling the loss of a loved one, and in many ways their quotes reveal that if you deny or suppress one's feelings, they will multiple. Brilliant!!!

Why I am highlighting this?!!!!! I am highlighting this because of the OUT of TOUCH article that I recently read in Time magazine (January 24, 2011, pp. 42-46) entitled, Good News About Grief, As the nation mourns those killed in Tucson, a new look at the science of loss shows we're more resilient than we thought. My dad sent me the article, because he knows my interest in reading about this subject matter. As my dad guessed correctly, I have a lot to say about this article. An article that clearly states and feels that "PROCESSING" grief is overrated and actually expressing the loss is just as effective as repressing the feelings. The only reaction I have is ..... OH MY GOD! What century am I in?!!!!

I will be confronting aspects from this article over the course of the next couple of days. So hopefully you will bear with me, as I try to make a point about grief. There is no way as a mental health professional, I can let the premise of this article go and be accepted by the public and certainly by anyone grieving. This is already an area we are not comfortable discussing freely in our society, and though we as professionals continue to make strides, after reading this article, I felt as if we were transported back to the thinking from the 1910s, where the stiff upper lip mentality was considered healthy and the norm.

Before I begin, I freely admit that I am reading this article with a biased lens. I am a trained and licensed mental health professional, and therefore if you are going to claim that my profession is NOT important, you are already going to put me on the defensive. So naturally, I needed to know who on earth wrote this article and learn about her professional background. The author of the article, and of the new book Truth About Grief, is Ruth Davis Konigsberg. Ruth Davis Konigsberg first heard about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages in a high school psychology class. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she began a career in magazine journalism and has worked as a editor for New York and Glamour and written for The New York Observer and ELLE, often about psychology. Konigsberg lives in Pelham, NY, with her husband and two children.

I have typed the first several paragraphs of her article for you, so you can follow along........

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The five stages of grief, are so deeply embedded in our culture that they've become virtually inescapable. Every time we experience loss - whether personal or national - we hear them recited: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They're invoked to explain our emotional reaction to everything from the death of a loved one to the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill to LeBron James' abandoning the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat.

The stages have become axiomatic, divorced from the time and place of their origin. If you were to read Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's On Death and Dying - the book that in 1969 gave the five stages their debut - for the first time today you might be surprised to discover that Kubler-Ross, then a staff psychiatrist at Billings Hospital in Chicago, was actually writing about the experience of facing one's own death, not the death of someone else. It was other practitioners, having found the stages so irresistibly prescriptive, who began applying them to grief, a repurposing that Kubler-Ross encouraged. After all, there was no specific data set to contradict, no research protocols to follow: Kubler-Ross had based her theory on onetime interviews she had conducted with terminally ill patients, but she never asked them specific questions about the stages, because by her own account, she only conceived of them while up late at night after she had already been commissioned to write On Death and Dying.

The book was a surprise best seller, and Kubler-Ross became the fulcrum for the nascent death and dying movement. To her credit, she helped shatter the stoic silence that had surrounded death since World War I, and her ideas certainly raised the standard of care for dying people and their families. But she also ushered in a distinctly secular and psychological approach to death, one in which the focus shifted from the salvation of the decease's soul (or at least its transition to some kind of afterlife) to the quality of his or her last days.

It wasn't long before a solution was put forth to help the bereaved as well, one promoted by an entirely new professional group specializing in the task of mitigating grief's impact. From the 1970s to the 1990s, thousands entered the field, offering individual counseling, setting up healing centers and hosting support groups at hospitals, churches and funeral homes. These counselors introduced their own theories, modifying Kubler-Ross's stages into a series of phases, tasks or needs that required active participation as well as outside professional help. Grief became a "process" or a "journey" to be completed, as well as an opportunity for personal growth. Few questioned the necessity of a large corps of private counselors dedicated to grief, despite the fact that no country other than the US seemed to have one.

Our modern, atomized society has been stripped of religious faith and ritual and no longer provided adequate support for the bereaved. And so a new belief system - call if the American Way of Grief - rose up to help organize the experience. As this system grew more firmly established, it allowed for less variation in how to handle the pain of loss. So while conventions for mourning, such as wearing black armbands or using black bordered stationery, have all but disappeared, they have been replaced by conventions for grief, which are arguably more restrictive in that they dictate not what a person wears or does in public but his or her inner emotional state. Take, for example, the prevailing notion that you must give voice to your loss or else it will fester. "Telling your story often and in detail is primal to the grieving process." Kubler-Ross advised in her final book, On Grief and Grieving, which was published in 2005, a year after her death. "You must get it out. Grief must be witnessed to be healed." This mandate borrows from the psychotherapeutic principle of catharsis, which gives it an empirical gloss, when in fact there is little evidence that "telling your story" helps alleviate suffering.

But that's not the only grief myth to have been debunked recently. In the past decade, researchers using more sophisticated methods of data collection than their predecessors did have overturned our most popular notions about this universal experience.
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I am quite confident that those mental health professionals who work in the area of grief and loss, no longer abide and follow the five stages of death and dying outlined by Kubler-Ross. Instead, I think that the pop culture, media, and lay people tend to turn to this model because it is simple and makes sense. It makes sense because it is presented in a logical manner. However, as most grief professionals know, grief is NOT logical, it doesn't follow linear stages, and trying to confine one's loss to such a framework overall is not helpful. So in that sense, I agree with the author, but disagree with her about the fact that this is a model followed by effectively trained therapists today.

I also do not agree with Kubler-Ross..... grief does NOT have to be witnessed in order for it to be healing. As I have said numerous times, there are aspects to grieving that are very private, and perhaps this is better in the long run, because it is very hard and painful to really listen to the depths of emotions and thoughts expressed by a person who is grieving.

The author eludes to the striping of religion and ritual in the grieving process. As if Konisberg feels that the psychological field has taken over and superseded the works and practice of our spiritual counterparts. I am sure from a historic standpoint she is right, but having lost Mattie, I saw the support or LACK there of I received from the church. In fact, some of you may recall the argument I had over the phone with the rector of the church, who made it virtually impossible to try to find a funeral date. Only after I snapped at him and told him that he was being thoroughly insensitive to the fact that I just lost my son, did he change his tone with me. Unfortunately we live in a society where we do not make the time to truly connect with each other, and this is most definitely reflected in the church as well. The natural support groups that we could turn to in the past (family, friends, religion, etc) as a society have now dwindled and therefore the helping profession has stepped in where others fear to tread.

I will leave it at that for tonight, and will pick up with the author's first myth tomorrow night. The one reflection of my day that I wanted to mention was the time I spent this afternoon with Ann's son, Michael.  Michael was working on his homework when he got home from school, but then as the afternoon wore on, he took a break. I was sitting in another room reading a book, when Michael came up to me and asked if I would play cards with him. Unlike Michael, I am NOT a card player. I never liked playing cards as a kid, and fortunately for me, Mattie did not care for it either. So already I am not the best of play buddies for Michael on that front. Nonetheless, he still wanted to play. We played War. A game, even I remember playing as a kid. You can learn a lot about playing a game with a child, and what I love about Michael is he plays fair. He also likes chatting while playing, which makes the game far more interesting to me. It has been a long time since a child has come up to ask me to play. So in essence, Michael's gesture meant a great deal to me.

I would like to end tonight's posting with a message from Mattie's oncologist and our friend, Kristen, who remembers us each Tuesday. Kristen wrote, "Dear Vicki and Peter- I am thinking of you tonight on this Tuesday, and every day. Much Love."