Learning to Trust again
by Deborah Morris Coryell
Originally published in Divorce Magazine
There are many losses associated with divorce: you're losing a
partner, a relationship, maybe a home, or even children. One of
the most devastating losses is less obvious, though. Divorce can
also kill trust - in relationships, and in life. How can you learn
to trust again in the face of this betrayal?
When I first held Divorce Magazine in my hands, I thought to myself:
" When I'm finished writing my book on grief, I'd love
to write a piece for this magazine on the death of love."
Well, one year later, I'm no longer convinced that divorce always
kills love - although the first sensation might feel like the death
of love. What really begins to die is our trust in love, our trust
in life. Simply put, we feel betrayed by the breakdown of our marriage.
Every divorce is different: I've been divorced twice, and each
was as different from the other as apples and monkey wrenches! But
all divorces represent the death of a relationship, and death smacks
us all in the face with loss, grief, and mourning. Something is
gone from our lives - good, bad, or indifferent.
Experiencing loss
The most potent message our culture puts out about grief and loss
is not to think about it until you absolutely have to! Not only
is it one of the first messages we hear but it is one of the loudest
and most persistent. Not allowing ourselves to think about the possible
losses in our lives makes a monster out of grief. We haven't tried
it on; we haven't developed any flexibility or resourcefulness about
it. We have buried it in our unconscious minds with a heavy top-soil
that screams " Danger - Toxic Material!" And what usually
accompanies such a sign? A skull-and-crossbones - a symbol of death!
This perspective not only inspires a number of unhealthy attitudes
towards loss, but also keeps loss associated with death. Sex, birth,
divorce, death and money have all come out of the closet; topics
that had been taboo in " polite" society have now become,
if not easy, at least accessible topics of conversation. Yet loss
and its attendant, grief, continue to be taboo, shameful and hidden.
Like sex, birth, divorce, death and money, loss is a part of our
daily lives. Yes, daily lives. Is there a day that goes by where
we don't experience a loss of some kind or another? Perhaps we need
to exercise the " muscles" that are used in grieving just
as we need to exercise the muscles in our physical bodies. There
are levels of fitness and wellness we need to achieve in our attitudes
and in our beliefs about this experience called life that can't
be postponed.
Our capacity to let go, to lose, with grace and awareness and honor
comes from having developed certain skills. Each day presents us
with the opportunities to hone those skills. Perhaps it is in the
face of a thought that randomly crosses our minds or a story that
comes to our attention. Perhaps we are reading a newspaper and come
across an account of an accident in which a young man or woman has
been killed in a carjacking. Our thoughts immediately seize on this
story and transpose it into our own lives. And, just as quickly,
we shut it off. No! We won't allow ourselves to think about it!
Why not? Are we afraid of becoming morbidly obsessed with "
bad" things happening? Do " bad" things not happen
because we won't allow ourselves to think about them?
A popular contemporary self-help book is entitled When Bad Things
Happen To Good People . My second reaction to that title was: who
should they happen to? Can we all agree on a group of people we
will call on to carry all the tragedies? My first reaction was:
these are not " bad" things that happen to us. They are
events that happen in the course of life itself. As a popular bumper
sticker puts it: " Shit happens." How we deal
with it is a manifestation of our relative wellness. Loss happens.
Lift those light weights of loss that life brings you regularly
so that you can see where your strengths and weaknesses lie - where
you're perhaps injured and need healing - before you're asked to
lift the heavier and heavier weights.
Tone your grief muscles
When I sit with someone who asks, " Why me?"
I always want to ask, " Why not you?" And if
it's not you right now, it will eventually be you. And if it's not
this loss it will be some other loss. Is it possible to strengthen
those muscles that support us in the face of loss? Absolutely. Strength
comes by practicing with each loss that life brings to us. Daily
practice occurs by noticing how we deal with a lost earring, a broken
leg or a broken date; by examining our fears and resistances as
they arise; by paying attention to the little voices in our minds
that say: I would never be able to deal with ______(fill in the
blank). I couldn't go on living without ________(fill in the blank).
Now, go back and see what it would take to survive that. No judgments.
Don't diminish your particular struggle. Use it as a way into your
mind and the many thoughts that create your belief systems. How
good are you at surrender? At letting go? Notice how you respond
when plans change. When people change. When the weather gets in
your way. When you make a mistake. When you break something. When
you're disappointed. Or when you do the disappointing.
How can we trust our inner wisdom if we have not spent time struggling
with it, listening to it, being taught by it? The time to seek our
inner teacher is not in the face of disaster; it is in the everyday
practice of life and loss. As one of the Hasidic masters reminds
us: " While a tree with strong roots can withstand a harsh
storm, it can hardly hope to grow them once the storm is on the
horizon."
Keeping faith
Loss wears many masks. For some of us, the first mask of loss
we see is that of betrayal. " This wasn't supposed to happen!"
Not only was this loss not in our plans but it is inconceivable
to us. Most losses come at us suddenly, unexpectedly, and even if
we have had time to " prepare" ourselves, as during a
lengthy illness or through a drawn-out process of divorce or relocation,
we still often find the reality paralyzing. We look for someone
to blame: a doctor, a bus driver, a lunatic, God, our spouses, ourselves.
Each is a pitfall since to place blame means that someone could
have done something differently so that there would have been a
different outcome. Our minds scream, " It wasn't meant
to happen like this!" According to whom? The Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda said, " Life is what happens while we're busy
making other plans."
Our thoughts - what we are thinking - not only affect how we feel
but also keep us open or closed to the possibilities inherent in
any situation. Thoughts are physical energy that have been formed
by consciousness. The challenge is to be conscious of those thoughts
so that we are in charge of them rather than having our thoughts
in charge of us. For instance, if someone betrays me, and all I
can think is that she is a bad person and I am a poor victimized
soul, not only will I be blind to all the factors leading up to
the betrayal but I will also be blind to many of the roads leading
away from the betrayal. I will be locked inside a prison of my own
making!
Whatever the circumstances or the degree of the betrayal, every
situation is like an onion skin with many, many layers, and our
task is to stay present as long as it takes to peel away as many
of those layers as possible. In this process there's always a teaching.
It's rarely the one we thought we signed up for and seldom one we
would have chosen. If we can hold onto the idea that every moment
in our lives is potentially teaching us something, and that we always
have some choices in the matter, we can hold ourselves open instead
of collapsing around our pain, suffering and sense of betrayal.
One morning I received, in rapid succession, two letters and a
phone call from three friends whom I had always felt to be trusted
allies and advisors. For twenty years I had held each of them, with
their trials and tribulations, in my heart and mind, available at
any hour of the day or night should they need me. Now I was in need.
Struggling and vulnerable, I had turned to each of them for help.
Each, for their own reasons, turned away from me. A sense of grief
and betrayal threatened to overwhelm me in my already fragile state.
The loss of 20 years of faith and trust that these friends would
be there for me was devastating. Knowing that 60 years of relationship
were crumbling beneath my feet, all I could think was, who could
I trust? What is there left to trust?
The phone rang again. I picked it up. It was a wise woman friend
who received my pain and loss, and said quietly to me: trust includes
betrayal. In the moment she uttered those words, I knew they were
true. I couldn't explain it, even to myself, but I could feel the
wisdom, the truth, of the teaching. Over time I have struggled to
learn about the trust that includes betrayal. To trust completely
is to hold our faith so firmly that even what appears to be and
feels like a betrayal can be included as part of the wholeness of
that faith. What is such a faith? Faith that life is not arbitrarily
singling us out to harass and punish us, to wound us, to torment
us; faith that somewhere along the line the wisdom of this moment
of loss will be revealed to us. Faith that this is part of the plan.
Is betrayal revealed wisdom concealed?
Abraham Heschel wrote, " To have faith is not to capitulate
but to rise to a higher plane of thinking. To have faith is not
to defy human reason but rather to share divine wisdom."
Life in its very nature is unpredictable. There are no guarantees
of what will happen next. The Tibetans say: "Tomorrow or
the next life, which comes first we cannot know." That
very unpredictability holds loss at its center. What we need and
have today might no longer be ours tomorrow. This gives rise to
the question of whether it was " ours" to begin with.
Trust in the ebb and flow of life is essential to our well-being.
We trust that the tides will rise and fall, that the sun will come
up each morning and the seasons will follow each other. Can we trust
that there is meaning and wisdom in the ebb and flow, the gifts
and losses, of our lives? And can we include betrayal in that trust?
Loss brings us to our knees. Faith in our constantly changing fortunes
- trust in our singular life force - raises us up again.
How big can we get in the face of divorce? How big can we open
the lens of our minds and hearts as we look at the devastation that
our lives appear to be? What would it take to keep our hearts and
minds open? Betrayal is a powerful threat to our survival. In the
face of betrayal we think we must bolt all the doors and windows.
We close our hearts and minds at the very moment when we need more
than anything to stay open to let in the love and wisdom that life
also offers in the face of loss.
The seed of trust lies in knowing we didn't lose everything we
had; that nothing can be lost once it's in our hearts and minds.
The healing that the loss brings allows us to stay open in "
good faith." We stand in gale force winds buffeted by the duality
of betrayal and trust. At the center, our hearts stand open being
held by the love which created us. With love, you begin to honor
the life that moves through you and that will enable you to create
a new and different relationship with your ex-spouse.
It won't be easy. Life and love ask everything of us. Ultimately,
they ask us to be willing to trust enough to continue loving in
the face of the betrayal that loss brings.
Letting go
In most situations, we're taught to hold on so tightly to what
we have that any time we lose hold, we suffer - even if what we've
lost was causing us pain. Suffering, grieving, and mourning in the
face of divorce is as much a part of the process as it is in the
face of death. But (and this is a big but) if pain is all that remains,
we've lost more than a lover, a partner, a friend, and a marriage:
we've lost our faith in life. If that feels like too big a leap
- to go from suffering the loss of a love to losing our faith in
life - let's stop for a moment.
Take a deep breath. Let your chest open and expand and fill with
air. Let it out. Take another breath as you think about the blame
and anger that often accompany loss. As you breathe in, consider
the idea that when we're in pain, we need to find the source of
that pain before we know what steps to take to heal. A simple pain
in your side, for example, could signal a life-threatening rupturing
appendix. We don't usually get side-tracked by anger or blame during
a physical crisis. For example, if you were to waste time and energy
figuring out who to blame for your rupturing appendix before taking
the actions necessary for healing - probably surgery and rest in
this case - you'd be dead. Blame and anger are the pitfalls, the
danger zones, of an emotional crisis as well as a physical crisis.
Recently, I found myself thinking about a dear friend who continues
to feel victimized and agitated by her divorce. Although her divorce
became final almost a year ago, we had been struggling together
for years to help her come to terms with her painful marriage. I
picked up the phone and asked her to read with me the section on
" Faith" in my book Good Grief. The next day, she called
with a revelation: "If I let him off the hook by abandoning
my anger and blame," she said, "then I'll be
saying that what he did was OK."
" But in order to get him and keep him on that hook,"
I told her, " you have to stay attached to that hook with
him." The price of blame is staying stuck in pain and
suffering.
I respect the position of anger and blame; they serve their purpose
in the recovery process. But don't stop here: this is not where
you want to spend the rest of your life. Instead, pass through anger
and blame - and even pain - on your way to someplace else. And where
might that someplace else be?
Consider that we are all students in this school of life. We're
all in the process of being taught. Instead of getting snagged on
questions like: " Who is to blame?" " Where can I
direct my anger?" or " What went wrong?" steer towards
the question that asks: " What am I being taught?" To
even ask that question, we must have faith that there is a teaching
taking place, that life is not randomly destroying our happiness.
In order to risk having a relationship again, you might need to
keep your heart open and soft in the face of your loss.
But how can you remain soft in the face of pain - especially when
everyone is telling you to be tough? How do you resist getting lost
in your fear, anger, and betrayal? The first step is to pay attention
to your thoughts. Scientists say that we have several thousand thoughts
per day; how many can you remember? Those same scientists tell us
that thought proceeds action, which means that we're constantly
acting on thoughts of which we are barely aware!
Begin an awareness campaign - just notice the parade of thoughts
going through your mind. Pick a few settings where you're not doing
anything else: stopped at a red light or caught in bumper-to-bumper
traffic; waiting on the phone, in line at the bank or the supermarket
or the movies. Step two is to " tag" certain thoughts
that fill you with anger, pain or fear. Don't " do" anything
with them - just become aware of which thoughts hurt.
When you're ready, the next step is to breathe deeply when these
painful thoughts arise. Don't run away. Don't tighten up, collapse,
or start looking for someone to blame - just breathe. Feel the tightness
in your heart loosen as the breath goes deeper. Just by breathing,
the sharpness of the pain begins to recede. Once you're comfortable
with tagging the thoughts and breathing through them, go to the
next step.
Begin a dialogue between those thoughts and your own " inner
wisdom." If you don't hear the voice of that " inner wisdom"
, find someone you trust and respect - it could be a parent, a friend,
a therapist or a spiritual counselor.
One of my teachers used to say that when we're healing, we sometimes
need to " change the channel." While we're caught up by
the program on one network, we can forget that all the other stations
are simultaneously broadcasting different shows. Imagine that your
mind has several channels, and when you find yourself caught by
the fear channel or the anger channel, remind yourself that there's
other programming available. What is the channel in your part of
the world for the wisdom? Sometimes, all we need to do is to let
the tuner search. Listen as the tuner in your heart and soul searches
for the wisdom station. You will always recognize it because it
will be crystal clear.
When the heart breaks, it can break open. Breaking open allows
us to include more than the loss, more than the pain and betrayal.
It lets us go beyond the limits of who we believed we were. If you
can keep yourself open in spite of the pain, then this loss, this
death, this divorce will become something else. It will transform
from a death to a birth: the birth of your inner wisdom or guide
that you can trust to lead you back onto the playing fields of life
where love and loss go hand in hand.
Helpful hints to move through anger and blame:
Breathe. When you feel anger beginning to take
over and control you, pay attention. Relax your shoulders back and
down. Softly close the lips and inhale through the nose. Take five
deep breaths reaching into the belly. Now, ask yourself how the
anger is " serving" you. Can the energy of the anger be
used constructively? If it can't, continue deepening the breath
as you allow the anger to move through and out of you.
Imagine. During a crisis, we often feel overwhelmed
by helplessness. We need to develop inner resources to keep us from
collapsing under the weight of a crisis. Our imagination can be
a powerful tool. Find an image - it could be the face of a dear
friend, your child, a religious image or even a sunset or a flower
-that brings you peace, calm, strength when you close your eyes
and visualize it. Practice using this image to fortify yourself
against pain.
Practice yoga. The ancient science of yoga teaches
you to surrender: with each exhalation, with each position, with
each admonition to focus the mind instead of letting it wander;
you're asked to surrender the tight hold you have on your body,
your breath, and your mind. Yoga encourages you to let go of the
need to be in charge, to hold on, to direct the show. The more you
try to make things happen the way you want, the less likely you
are to get your way. To ride the horse in the direction it's going
is sometimes the wisest thing to do.
Laugh. No matter how gloomy a situation, there
is always humor: Some researchers suggest that you " fake it
till you make it." Recent studies conclude that if you act
happier - smiling and laughing more, for instance - you can actually
become happier.
Mother Nature. Native cultures have long understood
the healing power of nature. Going for a walk in the park, at the
beach, sitting in a garden or enjoying an intimate time alone in
some wooded area can be a powerful balm for a troubled soul. Consider
going on a " retreat" in an area you love. Let nature
embrace you and be your teacher.
Music, Dance, Journal Writing, Art. These are
all allies at different moments in our journey through loss. Use
them as you re-member your dis-membered self.
The book Good Grief, can help you deal with your loss.
To read about it, click
here.
Reproduced on Hidden Hurt with full permission of the author. Thank
you! http://goodgrief.org/
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