Removing pain’s barriers to healing

How do we open the window to let the air in?

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

A window sheds light through locked bars into a dusty and dark room,

Denny Müller on Unsplash.

One of the trickiest situations you can encounter if you’re a counsellor is having a client you can’t reach. They sit there in front of you, pain in their eyes, but somehow every approach you make meets with resistance. It’s like trying to touch someone through a closed window – you can see them, but you keep bumping into the glass.

I have two at the moment. One is Cypriot; I’ll call her Androulla, and she scares me rather as she is a doctor and never smiles and knows everything. ‘Yes, I have tried that,’ she says. ‘Yes, I am familiar with that book/ line of thinking/ philosophical method – it hasn’t worked for me.’

And I know that we’ve found the poisonous plant in the heart of her heart and pulled it up by the roots. I am as sure as I can be that she will get better now.

Yet she is dreadfully sad. Her mother died out in Cyprus, and she couldn’t get there in time. Her grief is eating her. She glares at me, desperate to be helped but bristling with gun turrets. Hmm.

Eventually I remember something Jane Goodall said. Jane Goodall is one of the world’s wonderful people… her work with chimpanzees back in the 60s dramatically changed our relationship with animals, and she still travels the world at the age of nearly 90 encouraging young people to take action on climate change. In her lovely Book of Hope she describes how when she’s completely knackered or stuck with something, she sort of hands herself over to an outside power. ‘I just relax and decide to appeal to the source of hidden strength,’ she writes. ‘There’s a wisdom that’s far, far, far greater than my own.’ When she surrenders in this way, she often gives her best lectures she says.

I think I might give it a try with Androulla. As a gradually-learning-to-be-more-trusting Christian, it seems most appropriate to follow in the footsteps of St Francis. So just before our next session I shut my eyes and say, ‘Help Lord, I don’t know what to say to her. Please take over and use me as a channel – she could really do with your peace and grace, and I seem to be in the way’. I’m quite a controlling person normally so I feel a bit reluctant… but if it works for Jane Goodall and for St Francis, I’m not going to argue!

To my surprise, I find myself asking Androulla what her understanding of the word ‘mercy’ might be – not a very usual counselling question. Even more surprising, her eyes fill with tears and suddenly she says that the last time she saw her mother, she told her she hated her, and had a physical fight with her and hurt the skin on her old arms. Crying properly now, the poor woman says she doesn’t deserve forgiveness after that, and I find myself telling her how mercy sees everything with utter clarity and loves and accepts it whatever is deserved or not deserved. And I know that we’ve found the poisonous plant in the heart of her heart and pulled it up by the roots. I am as sure as I can be that she will get better now.

Something compassionate has breathed on these locks, and the stuck windows have suddenly yielded and opened to let the air in.

Then today the same thing happens again – with Bella, my other client who cannot forgive herself, in this case for the fact that her violent alcoholic husband drank even more after she finally left him and died of organ failure in a homeless shelter. We’ve gone over and over her guilt for weeks, and she has remained shiny and brittle and artificially bright and fine. We’ve got nowhere. Until now. ‘Dear Lord,’ I say before I ring her, ‘help me find a way through to her. Let me remove myself and all my assumptions, so that your healing can flow through to her and give her some rest.’ I do my best to relax into our conversation, just to let what wants to come, come. And out of nowhere, I am suddenly inspired to ask her whether she’d feel guilty if her husband had died of some terrible illness like cancer.

‘No,’ she says.

‘Well… you’re a medical secretary. You’ll know better than me that alcoholism is an illness,’ I say.

There’s a very long silence.

‘Doesn’t that mean you’ve both been suffering from this terrible illness?’ I ask eventually. ‘Dave because it drove him crazy and then killed him; you because it blighted your life, and is blighting it still? Isn’t it time you said, “No, enough!” to this pestilence?’

I can see it in my mind’s eye, the alcoholism, like a swarm of red locusts or a scarlet dragon, devouring both Bella and Dave. I don’t feel that’s an image I came up with, it’s just there in my mind. I can feel this lodging in Bella’s mind too… a whole new way of thinking, a great big shift in emphasis, a transfer of responsibility from her to the monster.

I don’t know whether the idea is fully rooted yet, whether we can rely on it to grow and flourish and bear good fruit. But I sense that it is at least planted and watered. A bit more sunshine, some careful tending… and probably a lot more trusting would seem to be the way forward.

It’s not in the training manual, this technique. You won’t hear the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy recommending that therapists hand themselves over to Jane Goodall’s ‘outside power’. But something compassionate has breathed on these locks, and the stuck windows have suddenly yielded and opened to let the air in.

Explainer

Creed

Mental Health

Trauma

17 May 2023

5 min read

Lamenting the losses in life

There are paths through the thicket of loss that mental illness causes. Rachael Newham explores lament.

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist.

A Victorian fisherwoman sits on a beached boat, shoulder slumped.

But O For the Touch of a Vanished Hand, 1888, Walter Langley. The title is taken from the Tennyson poem 'Break Break Break'.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

I am lost. I feel utterly bewildered by my surroundings and my head is beginning to spin under the strip lighting. There are people all around me, but I can’t find my bearings. This place should be familiar, it’s somewhere I’ve been a hundred times before, but I feel the panic rise as I try to find my way.

Before I had known exactly where things were, how to navigate the aisles and reach the things I needed with ease, but in the months I’ve been away, things have changed and I cannot face the thought of finding my way around the new arrangement, so I turn on my heel and leave empty-handed.

I haven’t been away on holiday or gone on a work trip, I’ve been locked inside my own head doing battle with my own mind in the shadowlands of mental illness. Stable now, with the crisis averted, I am trying to rebuild and yet the Co-op rearranging my local store has served as a stark reminder that things have changed in me and around me.

And there is no funeral to grieve what you’ve lost, no ‘closure’ as you’re still living it.

This is the where the conversation about mental health awareness falls silent; the reality of the losses mental illness stacks up like Jenga blocks while you aren’t looking. Serious mental illness doesn’t just take your mind; it takes your ability to enjoy the people you love, the work you find fulfilling, the gloriously mundane school run and the life you once almost took for granted.

And there is no funeral to grieve what you’ve lost, no ‘closure’ as you’re still living it, no five-step process to ‘get over it’. There is simply the loss and the life you’re trying to rebuild.

This loss must be grieved. I would argue that all losses must be grieved if we are to learn to live with them. It is as Michael Rosen’s childhood classic “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” reminds us as the family go on their adventure and encounter the winds and sticky mud: “You can’t go under it, you can’t go over it, oh no! You’ve got to go through it”.

We simply have to let it have its way with us until the raw pain has faded into an ache we can tolerate.

It’s perhaps something the ancient faiths and traditions understood better than we do where there are rituals for grief; whether it be Jewish communities sitting Shi’vah or the Irish keening their songs of mourning, they acknowledge the enormity of grief and the need for communities to come together to process it.

Where the loss is more personal, we can seem to lose access to the healing found in community traditions. When the loss is because of illnesses still so misunderstood and stigmatised, these processes and traditions can feel even further away, still.

And yet.

There are paths through the thicket of loss. William Worden, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association speaks of four tasks of mourning which include accepting the reality of the loss, processing the pain of grief, adjusting to the world afresh and finally finding enduring connection. These tasks were designed with bereavement in mind, but they seem to me to speak to losses in the broadest sense and I have found them to be true in mental illness.

In the Bible we find this prophet Nehemiah, who is tasked with rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem after the Israelites exile in Babylon. They’ve returned home, but home doesn’t look like they imagined to, the place they longed for no longer exists, and they have to accept before they can begin to grieve what has passed. Author Marya Hornbacher writes that

“managing mental illness is mostly about acceptance- of the things you can’t do, and the things you must”

and I see it every day - perhaps you do too - as I take the medication and get the sleep that’s required for some kind of equilibrium to be maintained

Nehemiah grieves and weeps over the city for an estimated four months; but there is no set timescale for such things, we simply have to let it have its way with us until the raw pain has faded into an ache we can tolerate. In the Christian tradition this is called lament; it’s grief directed at God, bringing the pain before him in a way that acknowledges the twin realities of God’s goodness and our grief’s greatness. It is undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it is the gift of honesty. We do not need to put on our Sunday best for God, but can come in our brokenness and mess knowing that we will not be abandoned to it.

And then we begin to adjust to the new normal we find ourselves in. We test the boundaries of what we can do as anyone in recovery does. There is a slow almost imperceptible move towards more of life; a trip to the local shop much like I did during that disorientating visit to the co-op, a visit from a friend or a phone call answered, long avoided. Nehemiah returns to his work for the King - but even then the King asks him why he’s looking so sad. We need not rush in with fake smiles before grief has finished with us, but be honest with those around us - and with God.

We cannot lament our losses without finding a community to be a part of; whether that’s your friends, your local community group or your local church.

The fourth task is that of finding connection. For some it will be found in their friendships, others in their faith communities or peer-led community groups. Whichever way it happens it’s how life grows again around and alongside the loss. Worden I think meant it as a way to continue the connection with a lost loved one, but in the story of Nehemiah we see it as the Israelites first come together to rebuild the wall and then to celebrate it. We cannot lament our losses without finding a community to be a part of; whether that’s your friends, your local community group or your local church, we have to find spaces where we can share ourselves, our stories and know we are not alone. It is perhaps one of our most fundamental needs - it is certainly been mine - to know that I am not alone in my loss and I’m not alone as I survey the wreckage and tentatively begin to rebuild.