What to do when life interupts

Mental Health Week acknowledges the many traumas and interruptions in life, notes clinical psychologist Roger Bretherton - who analyses how we might respond to them.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

A blurred exposure of a person under a hood turning their head to the side.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash.

For over a decade I worked, as a Clinical Psychologist in a service treating people who had suffered trauma. I clocked just under ten thousand hours of clinical contact with people who had been through the worst situations imaginable. One thing I learned during that time is that trauma often occurs to us as an interruption.

Most of us live our lives to some script, a set of assumptions of how we think things should be, our expectations of what is about to happen next - and trauma shatters those assumptions. Over and over again, people who had been through trauma told me how their view of the world had been violated. The narrative that defined their life, the story they thought they were in, changed genre unexpectedly. The romcom became a horror movie; the adventure became a hideous farce. The story called walking home at night turned into another one called being mugged. Driving to the supermarket became, having a crash. A day out at the beach, became delivering CPR. All of them illustrate how trauma sends an earthquake through our view of what we thought our lives were and, if we survive, leaves us in the rubble picking up the pieces.

In one fell swoop it gave an insight into why it is that trauma occurs to us, not just as an event or a set of events, but as an interruption to our whole sense of reality.

Back in the early days of researching AI systems one study illustrated the catastrophic effect that even the mildest contradiction of our expectations can have on our entire view of reality.

In the quaint old days, when Chat GPT was a nightmare for a future generation, an expert system was developed with one simple aim in mind: to identify birds. Such a simple task. The specifications of various species of animal were entered and, by applying a broad array of criteria, the system would indicate whether the said species was a bird (or not). But not all its criteria were accurate. One of the rules of thumb the system developed was: ‘all birds fly’. Which worked fine until it was required to categorize a penguin. In the first attempt it followed its own rules and concluded that penguins were not birds. But when forced by the programmers to categorize a penguin as a bird, the system went into meltdown attempting to reconcile the contradiction with its own criteria. To resolve the anomaly of the penguin being flightless and yet still being a bird, it concluded that no birds could fly. In one fell swoop it gave an insight into why it is that trauma occurs to us, not just as an event or a set of events, but as an interruption to our whole sense of reality.

The nightmares, the flashbacks, the apprehension, irritation and sense of foreboding, the numbing and the terror. All of these are an attempt to make sense of a world that no longer makes sense. Of course, it would be heartless to suggest that the agony of trauma is little more than a glitch in our information processing. Reducing it to a bug in our programming would conveniently trivialise the horrors that can befall human beings. I have no desire to sanitise or diminish the horrors that can haunt us, but trauma is at least this - a hiatus, a shock, an interruption.

The agony that intensifies our fears, depressions and compulsions is often the torturous comparison between who we thought we were and who we have become.

It is not just trauma that interrupts us. Life specialises in throwing wildcards and anomalies into our path. Just when everything seems to be going swimmingly, when we seem to know what we are doing, when the future seems mapped out before us, the unexpected and the unwelcome occurs. The best way to make God laugh, goes the saying, is to hand Him our five-year plan. I’m not sure I have ever spoken to anyone with insight into their own psychological distress who doesn’t to some extent experience their pain as an interruption. The agony that intensifies our fears, depressions and compulsions is often the torturous comparison between who we thought we were and who we have become. Our imaginary ideal self, the person we thought we would be, waltzes away into a future of freedom, light and joy, and leaves us behind in doubt and uncertainty.

Mental Health Week could in some ways be viewed as an acknowledgement of the interruptions in life. I can only imagine what has interrupted you. I can only hazard a guess at what it is or was that derailed the smooth trajectory of your predicted life. Was it bereavement or aging, sickness or betrayal, disappointment or assault, redundancy or financial ruin? Whatever it was, it may not be reversible. This is one of the reasons for the burgeoning of mindfulness practices in mental health treatment. We don’t just need a technology of change to help us get better, we equally need a technology of acceptance to be able to live with what we cannot change.

I’ve lost the ability to firmly believe that the future can be planned out, that the straight line into the next few years cannot be shattered without warning at any moment.

For me, the lockdown was an interruption from which I have never really recovered. I hesitate to say this because I worry I might be the only person who feels this way. I know it’s all supposed to be over. We’re back to work and acting like the world is rational and predictable again. But the great reset just doesn’t work for me. My mind is ready to go, but my heart just hasn’t got the memo. I’ve lost the ability to firmly believe that the future can be planned out, that the straight line into the next few years cannot be shattered without warning at any moment. There is a hesitancy in all my plans, an uncertainty in my ambitions. The solid arrow of time is dotted, if not broken. Experts in trauma call it the sense of a foreshortened future. The disruption of our capacity to self-transcend, to bridge ourselves towards the person we may become. Our once lucid image of a better self flickers and grows dim, no longer compelling or believable.

And if that’s not confession enough, I have another one. One that makes me sound like a rehab resident in a young adult drama. In the midst of the lockdown craziness, I was forced to slowly and reluctantly uncover a gift. Like a treasure buried in a field, or a priceless pearl concealed among the worthless tat of a car boot sale. Something so crashingly obvious and cringeworthily twee that I can hardly bear to put it in writing. Many of my plans and ambitions were imaginary, just plain illusion. I was no happier achieving them than I was pursuing them. But I started to glimpse, that if I could overcome the grief of losing them, I would be better off without them. If I could put words to it, I would say that I came to a deeper appreciation of grace – iit’s not a bad thing just to be. We can be so busy trying to become something that we fail to notice that we were before we even began. This has now become a daily contemplative practice for me. I call it being present to The Presence in the present. Somehow, I came to a deep inner settlement that I no longer needed to work to justify my existence, but could work out of a present moment in which my existence was already justified. I came to accept acceptance.

Article

Change

Mental Health

18 April 2024

7 min read

Love is easy to say but hard to live

Love is not a one-time event. It is a practice.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A man stands and looks at a neon sign reading 'need love and... '

Chester Wade on Unsplash.

Over Easter, Christians contemplate the love that the cross represents. But what does love mean now, in the world as it is – and how do we live it?

Love is one of those words that feels easy to say but hard to live. Like interdependence, like justice, like forgiveness. It is a word that can quickly get bent out of shape – mistaken for romance, twisted into desire, flattened into niceness, reduced to an emotion or a feeling. Still, we reach for it, or an approximation of it. We know we need it; we know it is a good and important thing. And yet for something so important we are never taught how to do it. Author and critic bell hooks (sic) said, “schools for love do not exist. Everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively.”

The times we live in, though, are calling out for people who know how to love – for people who love well and who love much and who love like it has the power to heal and guide us – because the times we live in ask a lot. The forces and systems and ways of being that we’re so entangled with now are, I think, strengthened by lovelessness. Never-enough consumption, divisive politics, ruthless economics are all bolstered by lovelessness — by loneliness and othering and fear and greed. Still, like hooks, I think we “yearn to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society.” She goes on: “To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice…”

Sometimes though, it seems Christians are as clueless about how to love as anyone.

Christians should know something of love in theory and in practice. In the Bible, love is a command, love overcomes death, love serves, love lays down its life, love is God. Love is the cornerstone of all of it. Jesus calls another world into being when he tells his followers to not only love their neighbours, but to love their enemies too. He was consistently community-oriented in his teaching and living and loving, demonstrating love for his closest companions as well as for strangers and social outcasts. Love in the gospel is practical, unromantic, beautiful.

Sometimes though, it seems Christians are as clueless about how to love as anyone. If non-believers see judgement, infighting, division, or other signs of lovelessness when they look at the church and its members — when we Christians feel these things ourselves — then we know there is work to do. There is of course always work to do, even when we love well, because love is not a one-time event; it must keep flowing, it is a way of being, it is a practice.

A couple of the churches I went to early on in my Christian journey made me feel unwelcome. They were glossy, wealthy – not necessarily bad things in themselves, but here they felt like a silent sifter of belonging. Once, someone only half-jokingly corrected me for cutting the ‘nose’ off a wedge of cheese at a church event. I never felt relaxed, never myself. This was partly me, too – I realise lately that I have declined many invitations to belong. But the church we go to now is what I think perhaps an ideal church looks like. It’s an eclectic, scrappy group of people who tolerate some big differences in opinion and belief because they believe that love is bigger than those differences. There is no cancel culture, no shutting people out, though often it would be easier to do that than to stay, to keep coming back. A few weeks ago, I gave a sermon and in it, referenced the fact that over 30,000 people had been killed in Gaza, 70 per cent of whom were women and children. I said that if we were led by love – which is not selective, which is not reserved only for people we like the look of, which is never on the side of war and oppression – perhaps we might be doing what we could to make this dying stop: rage, protest, petition, pray. As I expected, the Minister had a complaint – that church shouldn’t be political, that I had been one sided, and so on. This is not an essay about that topic, but the reason I share this is because I knew some people would disagree with me, and I knew that would make me furious, and yet I also knew that our church holds the space for all this. I knew we would still all keep showing up, keep living alongside each other, keep encountering each other and being together in our unity, even when we infuriate each other.

In the age of the individual, healing and development has become a personal mission, peddled as products by distant companies that do not really care about our hearts and souls and lives.

There are other fault lines in our church – political, theological, economic, creative. But, just as fault lines on the Earth cause violent earthquakes yet still enable the plates to move and exist alongside each other, shaping and reshaping and evolving this one shared planet, so I think do the fault lines in church, in community, in the world. Perhaps they provide edges along which we can encounter each other, along which we can shape and reshape humanity. Fault lines can bring quakes and tremors, but they can also bring new shapes, new realities, if we’re willing to do the work. Rather than turn away, perhaps these fault lines offer the chance to choose to stay, to be curious, to encounter, to listen — to practice love.

bell hooks again – she speaks so thoughtfully on the topic of love – said: “I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.” I am struck by this too — in the age of the individual, healing and development has become a personal mission, peddled as products by distant companies that do not really care about our hearts and souls and lives. In our church though, and in the similarly infuriating and beautiful town it is in, I see – not always but often – how love blazes brightest in the context of relationships and community. It is a commitment, a deeply practical virtue that fosters togetherness, even along fault lines if we believe it can. Love lives in relationships that nurture us and challenge us, that shape us. And I think that is how the kingdom comes — not through grand gestures and money and tech, but person-by-person, through the everyday and lifetime work of love.

Love asks – no, demands – that we root it in practice. It demands that we really see each other, that we encounter each other even along our messy and many fault lines. It demands that we listen, make space for dialogue and difference, seek to understand and be compassionate. This feels countercultural in a time when it can be easier to turn away than to stay. Love demands that we coexist together in our differences so that we are better able to see and unite against our real adversary — lovelessness, and all of its friends. This is holy work, I think, in the sense that it is about wholeness and that it really is work.

At Easter, the cross we reflect on is a symbol of love, and it is also a critique of lovelessness, of empire, of religion that pretends to be about God and love. It is a looking glass, showing us who we are, and who we could yet be if we sought to embody the radical love that Jesus demonstrated even in his final moments, praying for his crucifiers “father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Love, I think, wants us to let it take more weight than we do – to trust it, to use it, to wield it like others wield weapons and hatred and judgement. This Easter and beyond, I am reflecting on what love really means in the world right now, and I am praying that we open ourselves more fully to its reality, its concreteness, its demands, its power, its practice. Finally, I am reading again the familiar but ever-challenging verses in St Paul's letter to a church in Corinth:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.