Post by Webmonkey on Jan 29, 2014 14:50:32 GMT -8
Grieving is a process that starts at different points for different people after encountering a tragedy. Some start almost instantaneously, while others lay dormant in shock until the reality of the situation hits home. Either way there is a large part of grieving that is unexpected and unexplained and that occurs long after the conscious mind has 'let go'. It’s the bits that you have to deal with long after the tragedy has taken place. The mental and emotional damage, the suppressed fears, distortions of the mind, all of these things are the post traumatic effects of loss. This unconscious change in us lives and hums and grumbles around within us - within everyone that is suddenly faced with their own mortality, or the death of a friend or loved one - especially if the death was sudden, or the result of violence or suicide. For the science minded, this is the Dark Matter of our mental universe. Scientists can see it's effects easily, but really viewing or measuring it is so far close to impossible.
I would like to write this post to promote the awareness of the after-after effects of loss due to death of a loved one in our community. These are the long term effects that live deep within the sub consciousness and psyche of the mind. It is a beast that we can't always speak to, but it moves within us. It heightens our fears and it makes our emotions more raw than they would otherwise be. That is what grief does. That is what post-traumatic stress does. That is what it's doing to us as a community. This is a real thing and it is happening now.
It is common to hold the view that a tragedy is something that happens, you process and eventually adapt to and ‘get over’. While this is the general path an aggrieved person takes it doesn’t necessarily mean that even after a year or so that person has mended completely and the occurrence no longer has any substantial effect. It is also common for those grieving to believe this is the correct path as they too are unaware of the post traumatic effects it has. It is normal in this situation for the grieved person to feel emotions of guilt for not of having healed. You begin to ask yourself questions such as ‘why am I not over this?”, “am I not strong enough to get over it”, “how come I still feel sad”, “why can’t I move on”, “everyone is sick of hearing about it”, “I must be a bad person if I can’t let this go”. The fact of the matter is that when you have lost someone near and dear or you are confronted with the 'god hammer' of real fuck-your-plans-this-is-actually-happening mortality, you never ‘get over’ the event.
Let me say that again so that it sinks in. You never get over it.
Death and tragedy is not a matter of being torn and repaired but more a matter of learning to incorporate the experience of the event into who you are. You are now someone who has experienced a tragedy. The loss of loosing that special person is an adaptation, not a recovery. You are not ‘broken’ but ‘changed’. It is therefore important to allow people the leeway to find room in their character and personality to incorporate this change.
For all intents and purposes, you have a beast now, and maybe nobody told you.
So this is your wake up call. Look around you now at the state of this community and you can see it's effects. Fear, shame and doubt, triggering fights, flights and fugues. People are angry and judgmental (fight) people are leaving the community, checking out and running away (flight) people are losing their shit and breaking down (fugue). This is the mass profile of the Dark Matter. This is the shadow cast by the Beast.
This is the kind of real trauma that ends friendship, marriages, can result in job loss, depression, bouts of rage and argumentativeness that don't actually make a lot of sense outside of that context. Looked at as a function of a community full of people with beasts now that didn't have them before though, a picture begins to form.
One significant change that can occur related to the after-after effects of grief is a sense of heightened sensitivity to the fragility and insecurity of love and life. People who have suffered loss may feel more compassion for human kind, life is not so concrete. You may become more aware of peoples feelings and feel angry when people are insensitive to each other. Anger is an emotion embedded in loss that dwells long after the event has subsided. It is set off easily and often expresses itself in unexpected ways. It is common to feel angry at the world; as if it has stolen unfairly from you and that it is evil and cruel. Loss provokes questions such as ‘why me?’, ‘why them?” and feelings of “it’s not fair!” and “how could you!”. The griever has to learn where to put these feelings and how to deal with them. On top of this it is also common to feel mad at the person whom you have lost, mad at yourself for feeling mad and mad at the world for letting such a horrible thing occur.
A lot of this anger is hard to express and can often lead to suppression and depression. I think it is important for those who have grieved to go easy on themselves and even more important for those around them to offer their full support. This is not always easy as depressed people are usually unwilling to share, making communication difficult. It is common to feel as though the subject is taboo and that no one wants to hear your story, that it is a burden to the listener and unfair to unload an extreme amount of negative emotions onto the shoulders of a friend. Therefore a lot of people chose to retract emotionally (flight or fugue), allowing unresolved thoughts and feelings to be pushed to the side, or to the bottom of the pile. This can lead to a pattern of suppression as every time those feelings resurface in order to be processed, the mind pushes them back down labeling them ‘bad’ thoughts. This is an incredibly unhealthy cycle as it is the job of the subconscious to ensure these negative energies are released similar to the way the liver cleans your body of toxins. (In my case appletini's and jello shots) Unresolved negative emotions create a build up of negative patterns in the brain along with constant chemical releases that create hormones of anger, guilt, fear, anxiety and stress. (Imagine the beast with a 'clicker' that can inject chemicals into your brain!) These are the long term negative effects I am talking about. Unless dealt with properly, these side effects could go on for years preventing the person from experiencing healthy relationships and closing them off to feelings of love, warmth and support that are just standing around waiting for the giant, toothy, doorman to let them into the party. Often loosing someone puts extreme pressure on all of the coping mechanisms of the body and mind in this way.
All of us have experienced the face of mortality recently, many of us grief, a lot of us shock and most of us have experienced loss with the sudden passing of Adam Johnson. Death is apart of life as life is apart of us. It is important to remember that there is no one way to go about grieving, that everyone does it differently. Be aware that a person who has suffered loss is forever changed and that it is just as hard to understand them as it is for them to understand themselves. It is normal to feel subconsciously afraid, insecure and scared for many years after the event. Some people will always fear losing the ones they love and may feel less likely to let love or friendship in again. So please be patient with those who have lost. Pain of loss is a healing process and a process that is delicate, long term and forever has stuff to teach us about ourselves. There is no manual to coping with loss and it is something that will continually pop up as the grieved learn to bind their old relationships and lives with the new person they have learned to become, but the metaphor of the "Beast" is one that we as geeky gamers might all perhaps understand.
This is not fun. This is in fact, bullshit, and it's ok to be mad about it. I strongly believe that the death of a friend and the associated grief of a hundred people is a major contributing factor to what is currently going on with this community. But while it's ok to be mad, beware the beast, because it coaxes us to rash action, to harsh words, or to taking the words of others more harshly than intended because it is easy to become focused inward on our own very legitimately, yet beast enhanced strong emotions.
This is going to go on awhile. This has changed us. We now need to choose how to incorporate that change into ourselves and into our community. When some random dude acts erratic after a loss from suicide, we logically would think to give them a bit of a break - but most of us don't realize that this is a long term situation. Nobody taught us how to grieve. We have to learn it ourselves, from scratch because it is so, so personal to each and every one of us.
I have learned these hard lessons from my own father's suicide a couple of years ago. I have been in bereavement counseling and therapy counseling over the course of the last few years and gained this knowledge at the cost of relationships, jobs and friendships. I would share my hard fought insights with this community to *maybe* ease this time for the community that I love. I hope that some find some help here in my own insights, because if that is the case, then the sorrow that is in my heart forever at the loss of my dad was worth it, because I can help my friends.
Peace
- Chris Schetzle
I would like to write this post to promote the awareness of the after-after effects of loss due to death of a loved one in our community. These are the long term effects that live deep within the sub consciousness and psyche of the mind. It is a beast that we can't always speak to, but it moves within us. It heightens our fears and it makes our emotions more raw than they would otherwise be. That is what grief does. That is what post-traumatic stress does. That is what it's doing to us as a community. This is a real thing and it is happening now.
It is common to hold the view that a tragedy is something that happens, you process and eventually adapt to and ‘get over’. While this is the general path an aggrieved person takes it doesn’t necessarily mean that even after a year or so that person has mended completely and the occurrence no longer has any substantial effect. It is also common for those grieving to believe this is the correct path as they too are unaware of the post traumatic effects it has. It is normal in this situation for the grieved person to feel emotions of guilt for not of having healed. You begin to ask yourself questions such as ‘why am I not over this?”, “am I not strong enough to get over it”, “how come I still feel sad”, “why can’t I move on”, “everyone is sick of hearing about it”, “I must be a bad person if I can’t let this go”. The fact of the matter is that when you have lost someone near and dear or you are confronted with the 'god hammer' of real fuck-your-plans-this-is-actually-happening mortality, you never ‘get over’ the event.
Let me say that again so that it sinks in. You never get over it.
Death and tragedy is not a matter of being torn and repaired but more a matter of learning to incorporate the experience of the event into who you are. You are now someone who has experienced a tragedy. The loss of loosing that special person is an adaptation, not a recovery. You are not ‘broken’ but ‘changed’. It is therefore important to allow people the leeway to find room in their character and personality to incorporate this change.
For all intents and purposes, you have a beast now, and maybe nobody told you.
So this is your wake up call. Look around you now at the state of this community and you can see it's effects. Fear, shame and doubt, triggering fights, flights and fugues. People are angry and judgmental (fight) people are leaving the community, checking out and running away (flight) people are losing their shit and breaking down (fugue). This is the mass profile of the Dark Matter. This is the shadow cast by the Beast.
This is the kind of real trauma that ends friendship, marriages, can result in job loss, depression, bouts of rage and argumentativeness that don't actually make a lot of sense outside of that context. Looked at as a function of a community full of people with beasts now that didn't have them before though, a picture begins to form.
One significant change that can occur related to the after-after effects of grief is a sense of heightened sensitivity to the fragility and insecurity of love and life. People who have suffered loss may feel more compassion for human kind, life is not so concrete. You may become more aware of peoples feelings and feel angry when people are insensitive to each other. Anger is an emotion embedded in loss that dwells long after the event has subsided. It is set off easily and often expresses itself in unexpected ways. It is common to feel angry at the world; as if it has stolen unfairly from you and that it is evil and cruel. Loss provokes questions such as ‘why me?’, ‘why them?” and feelings of “it’s not fair!” and “how could you!”. The griever has to learn where to put these feelings and how to deal with them. On top of this it is also common to feel mad at the person whom you have lost, mad at yourself for feeling mad and mad at the world for letting such a horrible thing occur.
A lot of this anger is hard to express and can often lead to suppression and depression. I think it is important for those who have grieved to go easy on themselves and even more important for those around them to offer their full support. This is not always easy as depressed people are usually unwilling to share, making communication difficult. It is common to feel as though the subject is taboo and that no one wants to hear your story, that it is a burden to the listener and unfair to unload an extreme amount of negative emotions onto the shoulders of a friend. Therefore a lot of people chose to retract emotionally (flight or fugue), allowing unresolved thoughts and feelings to be pushed to the side, or to the bottom of the pile. This can lead to a pattern of suppression as every time those feelings resurface in order to be processed, the mind pushes them back down labeling them ‘bad’ thoughts. This is an incredibly unhealthy cycle as it is the job of the subconscious to ensure these negative energies are released similar to the way the liver cleans your body of toxins. (In my case appletini's and jello shots) Unresolved negative emotions create a build up of negative patterns in the brain along with constant chemical releases that create hormones of anger, guilt, fear, anxiety and stress. (Imagine the beast with a 'clicker' that can inject chemicals into your brain!) These are the long term negative effects I am talking about. Unless dealt with properly, these side effects could go on for years preventing the person from experiencing healthy relationships and closing them off to feelings of love, warmth and support that are just standing around waiting for the giant, toothy, doorman to let them into the party. Often loosing someone puts extreme pressure on all of the coping mechanisms of the body and mind in this way.
All of us have experienced the face of mortality recently, many of us grief, a lot of us shock and most of us have experienced loss with the sudden passing of Adam Johnson. Death is apart of life as life is apart of us. It is important to remember that there is no one way to go about grieving, that everyone does it differently. Be aware that a person who has suffered loss is forever changed and that it is just as hard to understand them as it is for them to understand themselves. It is normal to feel subconsciously afraid, insecure and scared for many years after the event. Some people will always fear losing the ones they love and may feel less likely to let love or friendship in again. So please be patient with those who have lost. Pain of loss is a healing process and a process that is delicate, long term and forever has stuff to teach us about ourselves. There is no manual to coping with loss and it is something that will continually pop up as the grieved learn to bind their old relationships and lives with the new person they have learned to become, but the metaphor of the "Beast" is one that we as geeky gamers might all perhaps understand.
This is not fun. This is in fact, bullshit, and it's ok to be mad about it. I strongly believe that the death of a friend and the associated grief of a hundred people is a major contributing factor to what is currently going on with this community. But while it's ok to be mad, beware the beast, because it coaxes us to rash action, to harsh words, or to taking the words of others more harshly than intended because it is easy to become focused inward on our own very legitimately, yet beast enhanced strong emotions.
This is going to go on awhile. This has changed us. We now need to choose how to incorporate that change into ourselves and into our community. When some random dude acts erratic after a loss from suicide, we logically would think to give them a bit of a break - but most of us don't realize that this is a long term situation. Nobody taught us how to grieve. We have to learn it ourselves, from scratch because it is so, so personal to each and every one of us.
I have learned these hard lessons from my own father's suicide a couple of years ago. I have been in bereavement counseling and therapy counseling over the course of the last few years and gained this knowledge at the cost of relationships, jobs and friendships. I would share my hard fought insights with this community to *maybe* ease this time for the community that I love. I hope that some find some help here in my own insights, because if that is the case, then the sorrow that is in my heart forever at the loss of my dad was worth it, because I can help my friends.
Peace
- Chris Schetzle
