Spirit Women Coaching
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Dedicated to promoting inner peace, passion, purpose and prosperity!
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Women in Transition
By Carolyn D. Townes, S.F.O.
When a trial has fallen upon you, you enter a dark night of the soul. More often than not, that dark night lasts many, many nights. You go through your public mourning, then your private grief. But mourning is usually a socially accepted event, whereas grief is a process – a messy, timeless process. A process you cannot hurry or alter. You can attempt to halt the process, minimize the process, or even derail the process – but I guarantee it will not stop until it has run its course.
So you have gone through a divorce and you are devastated. Of sure, you wear the mask of happiness but deep down inside you are shaken to the core and want the world to just go away. The world you once knew no longer exists although everything and everyone still looks the same. Nonetheless, the world has altered. And it is not the people and places around you, it is you. You are the one who has changed, so of course, the way you now see and experience the world and the people in it will be totally different. In order to adjust to this new world, you must allow the change to happen. Tragedy changes you; and you cannot help but be changed by it. A trial, a tragedy, a trauma, a setback – all have ways of shifting your priorities, making you realize that the things that were once so important are now somewhat meaningless.
I once met a woman whose mother had died. Of course this not only affected her, but her sixteen year-old son, who was very close to his grandmother. She shared with me that he no longer wanted to be around his friends doing the things he had always done as a sixteen year-old. I said to her that grief matures the bereaved. Her son’s priorities had shifted. He could no longer be concerned with the menial happenings of an adolescent, he was now pondering eternal things. He had come face to face with death and death changed him. And though he was still a sixteen year-old and still had to think of the things that concerned him, I suspect that his thinking would become much more deeper, more reflective, more cautious.
After the death of my beloved, I could care less about what my hair and nails looked like. Once upon a time those things were very important to me. After that, I was lucky to just be able to get out of bed everyday. When we are concerned with illness and job loss, worrying about the latest mascara hardly compares.
So, it has been two weeks and the dust has begun to settle as you begin life as a single woman. You are still in a fog and everyone else around you is wondering – out loud, I might add – “What is wrong with you? Haven’t you gotten over it yet? You need to get out and do things, meet new people and stop this moping around.” Sound familiar?
Any loss is a shock to the system causing the grieving mechanism to kick in. And if you are to come through the shock, you must go through a period of grief; the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross model is: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
When a trial has fallen upon you, you enter a dark night of the soul. More often than not, that dark night lasts many, many nights. You go through your public mourning, then your private grief. But mourning is usually a socially accepted event, whereas grief is a process – a messy, timeless process. A process you cannot hurry or alter. You can attempt to halt the process, minimize the process, or even derail the process – but I guarantee it will not stop until it has run its course.
So you have gone through a divorce and you are devastated. Of sure, you wear the mask of happiness but deep down inside you are shaken to the core and want the world to just go away. The world you once knew no longer exists although everything and everyone still looks the same. Nonetheless, the world has altered. And it is not the people and places around you, it is you. You are the one who has changed, so of course, the way you now see and experience the world and the people in it will be totally different. In order to adjust to this new world, you must allow the change to happen. Tragedy changes you; and you cannot help but be changed by it. A trial, a tragedy, a trauma, a setback – all have ways of shifting your priorities, making you realize that the things that were once so important are now somewhat meaningless.
I once met a woman whose mother had died. Of course this not only affected her, but her sixteen year-old son, who was very close to his grandmother. She shared with me that he no longer wanted to be around his friends doing the things he had always done as a sixteen year-old. I said to her that grief matures the bereaved. Her son’s priorities had shifted. He could no longer be concerned with the menial happenings of an adolescent, he was now pondering eternal things. He had come face to face with death and death changed him. And though he was still a sixteen year-old and still had to think of the things that concerned him, I suspect that his thinking would become much more deeper, more reflective, more cautious.
After the death of my beloved, I could care less about what my hair and nails looked like. Once upon a time those things were very important to me. After that, I was lucky to just be able to get out of bed everyday. When we are concerned with illness and job loss, worrying about the latest mascara hardly compares.
So, it has been two weeks and the dust has begun to settle as you begin life as a single woman. You are still in a fog and everyone else around you is wondering – out loud, I might add – “What is wrong with you? Haven’t you gotten over it yet? You need to get out and do things, meet new people and stop this moping around.” Sound familiar?
Any loss is a shock to the system causing the grieving mechanism to kick in. And if you are to come through the shock, you must go through a period of grief; the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross model is: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
- Denial – this isn't happening to me!
- Anger – why is this happening to me?
- Bargaining – I promise I'll be a better person if...
- Depression – I don't care anymore
- Acceptance – I'm ready for whatever comes
I have added a few of my own to the mix: shock and numbness, disorientation
This is also when so-called friends begin to drift away. They no longer want to hear the story. Their lives are fine and intact. But you are still dealing with a shattered reality. I strongly recommend support groups or one-to-one counseling here. You are dealing with the initial loss, but also a secondary loss of the friends abandoning you or limiting their presence. Support groups offer a non-judgmental, safe space to tell you story as long as you need to tell it. I once heard that we need to tell our story again and again and again until it isn’t our story anymore. This is very true. When my beloved died, I had to tell the story of everything leading up to it, the entire hospital experience, the death and funeral. It wasn’t real otherwise. I always had it in the back of my mind that he
would return. Author Joan Didion writes in her memoir of husband John Gregory Dunne’s death, The Year of Magical Thinking, of keeping his shoes because he would need them when he came home. Telling the story helps to eliminates that expectation which will only become another future grief.
Disorientation and forgetfulness are also a part of the grief experience. You feel as if you are in a time warp, with no real sense of time or place. I would often find myself walking and not having a destination because I could not remember where I needed to be or where I was going. I began wearing my keys around my neck because I would constantly mislay them. I wrote down everything because I could not rely on my memory anymore. These feelings can lead you to think
that you are going crazy. Rest assured, you are not. You are in the throws of grief.
Then there is transcendence. This is when you don't cry as much anymore, when you don't have a meltdown every five minutes, when you can really laugh again -- and mean it. This is the stage when you can see all this tragedy and sadness as a gift to then use to lift up another during their dark nights of the soul. Many reach this stage, most do not. Why? Because grief and loss are a very hard process, and many people don't want to walk through it. It is easier to stay in a state of denial, or to just "get over it."
Spirit Women comes from a place of transcendence. I had my dark nights, months of the soul and transcended. Now it is time for me to accompany someone else on this very dark and difficult journey. I know all the back roads, hidden rocks, and secret passages. If you allow the journey to happen, I will take your hand and walk with you.
“I saw grief drinking a cup
of sorrow and called out,
It tastes sweet, does it not?
‘You've caught me,’ grief answered,
‘and you've ruined my business.
How can I sell sorrow,
when you know it's a blessing?’
~ Rumi
Carolyn D. Townes, S.F.O. is a Spiritual Life and Leadership Coach and Spiritual Grief Counselor working with women in transition bringing them from a place of pain and adversity to a life of inner peace, passion, and purpose. She can be reached at carolynsfo@spirit-women.org.
ph: 917.415.2341
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