Anxiety- The Missing Stage of Grief
Page 1
Copyright
Note: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. This book is intended only as an informative guide for those wishing to know more about health issues. In no way is this book intended to replace, countermand, or conflict with the advice given to you by your own physician. The ultimate decision concerning care should be made between you and your doctor. We strongly recommend you follow his or her advice. Information in this book is general and is offered with no guarantees on the part of the authors or Da Capo Press. The authors and publisher disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book. The names and identifying details of people associated with events described in this book have been changed. Any similarity to actual persons is coincidental.
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Copyright © 2018 by Claire Bidwell Smith
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First Edition: September 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smith, Claire Bidwell, author.
Title: Anxiety, the missing stage of grief : a revolutionary approach to understanding and healing the impact of loss / by Claire Bidwell Smith.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Da Capo Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010553| ISBN 9780738234779 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780738234762 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Grief. | Anxiety. | Loss (Psychology)
Classification: LCC BF575.G7 S5826 2018 | DDC 155.9/3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010553
ISBNs: 978-0-7382-3477-9 (hardcover), 978-0-7382-3476-2 (ebook)
E3-20180824-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
1 What Is Anxiety?
2 What Is Grief?
3 Understanding Your Story of Loss
4 Making Amends
5 Taking Charge
6 Taking Inventory
7 The Power of Writing
8 Retraining Your Brain
9 Being Present
10 Something to Believe In
11 Death Planning
12 Death Is Not the End of Love
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Claire Bidwell Smith
Praise for Claire Bidwell Smith
Resources
References
Index
To everyone who has ever lost a loved one… and lost themselves a little in the process. You are not alone.
Introduction
I F YOU ARE READING THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW, IT’S PROBABLY SAFE to say that you or someone you love is struggling with anxiety. Not only that, but maybe you are just now connecting the dots to see that this anxiety may stem from a loss you’ve experienced in your life.
That loss can be recent or decades old. Your anxiety could be severe… or just enough to make your life uncomfortable. Anxiety is a tricky emotion, and I’m guessing that you’re more than ready to figure out how to get a grip on it and learn how to feel good again. That’s exactly what this book is designed to help you do.
Anxiety that stems from loss is more common than most people realize. When someone we love dies, our world turns upside down on multiple levels. The shock of everything that comes with losing someone significant is a powerful catalyst for all the feelings of fear and dread that constitute anxiety. So I want to start by acknowledging that you are not alone in experiencing anxiety after loss.
Your loss could have happened just months ago, or you could still be grappling with the effects of a loss that occurred years earlier. Losing someone we love is an experience that stays with us all our lives, and the broader implications of a significant loss can manifest in all manner of life changes and behavioral and emotional triggers. This book is designed to speak to those who are in the first stages of processing their grief and also to those may no longer be actively grieving but are experiencing the long-term effects of that initial grief, specifically anxiety.
I’ve written this book to help you understand how to diminish and release that anxiety, while at the same time processing the loss that brought it on in the first place. I understand that simply acknowledging your anxiety can make you feel anxious, so I promise we’re going to do this in a safe, comfortable, and compassionate way.
In this book I’m going to lead you step by step on a path to healing. It’s the same path I took when I worked through my own anxiety following the deaths of my parents, and it’s the same path down which I have led hundreds of clients in my work as a grief therapist. Know that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that by reading these pages, you are taking the first steps toward healing your anxious heart.
In my work as a grief therapist, I openly share my past with my clients. Because grief and anxiety are such particular experiences, I know it helps others feel more comfortable when they know that I have truly walked in their shoes. While I am going to share many stories of how my clients overcame their own grief-related anxiety in later chapters, I want to begin by telling you a little of my story.
I was eighteen years old when I had my first panic attack. I was on a road trip with my high school boyfriend, Jordan. We had just graduated, and it was the summer between our senior year of high school and our freshman year of college. We were headed to separate schools in New England that fall and had decided to take a trip to visit each other’s colleges, hoping to remain connected even after the summer.
The trip had gone well—we saw each other’s campuses, held hands as we walked across commons, and whispered vows of faithfulness in the face of distance. As we drove the two-day drive home to Georgia, we talked endlessly about all that was ahead of us. I stared out at the highway rushing before us, the future looming large, my sneakers propped on the dashboard, and my hair blowing in the breeze from the open window. The future seemed exciting, but also a little scary.
As I gazed out at the road, my heart suddenly did a little flip-flop. And then a bigger flip-flop. I yanked my feet off the dashboard and sat forward, breathing in deeply. My heart was racing and I felt dizzy. “What’s wrong?” Jordan asked. But I couldn’t answer him—I was too panicked to speak. Was I having a heart attack? The thought made me even
dizzier. I felt as though there were a giant weight on my chest, and I couldn’t breathe.
I shook my head at him, wide-eyed. “Something’s wrong,” I finally managed to say. Not knowing what else to do, Jordan followed highway signs to the nearest hospital emergency room and walked me through the double doors.
Several hours and multiple tests later, the doctor concluded that I’d had a series of heart palpitations but that I was otherwise young and healthy, and he sent us on our way.
From that day on, I lived in fear of having another episode like the one in the car. And in fact, I began to have them quite frequently. Chest pounding, heart racing and palpitating, severe dizziness. It was an awful problem, one that I quickly began to feel imprisoned by.
Looking back on that initial visit to the emergency room, I so wish that the doctor had probed more into my psychology. If he had asked even just a few personal questions, he would have learned that I was in an extremely anxiety-provoking phase of life: I was about to move away from home for the first time, and both of my parents were battling cancer.
Unfortunately, I was too young to correlate such events, and the attacks continued to plague me. The deceiving thing about anxiety is that it can manifest in such real physical symptoms that most people do not realize that anxiety is the source of their problem.
In fact, it would take me many years to learn this for myself, but when I finally did I was able to begin climbing out of this anxious phase of my life. I now help countless other people do the same, but it is the road on which I got here that taught me everything I know today about the affliction that is anxiety—and how unresolved grief is inextricably woven into it.
I was fourteen when both of my parents got cancer at the same time. I was an only child, and the prospect of losing my family was something that loomed over me constantly throughout my adolescence. While my father’s prostate cancer was treated easily and he quickly went into remission, my mother’s late-stage colon cancer took our small family on a roller coaster of hospitals and doctors and seemingly endless treatments.
My parents were wonderful people. They’d met and married late in life, both of them each other’s third marriage. My father was an engineer and a World War II prisoner of war. My mother was a glamorous artist living in Manhattan. She was forty and he was fifty-seven when I was born, and even though my father had three grown children from his first marriage, my mother had always wanted one of her own. I was born in 1978 in Atlanta, and for a long time our lives were good.
But by the time I headed off to college, my father was in his seventies and my mother’s cancer had begun to win the five-year battle she’d been fighting. She died midway through my freshman year at a small liberal arts school in Vermont. I didn’t make it in time to be by her side during her final moments.
My mother’s death rocked me. I was absolutely floored by it. Nothing could have prepared me for it. Not the five years we’d spent helping her combat her illness, not the talks my father had with me about her potential demise, not the school guidance counselor’s sessions. The truth was I never believed she would actually die, because Mothers don’t die. Bad things don’t actually happen.
I now understand that the dismantling of those beliefs became the catalyst for my anxiety. When my mother’s death disproved those two beliefs I’d so fervently held on to, the whole floor dropped out. If my mother could die, anything, absolutely anything, could happen.
I took a hiatus from school and went back home to Georgia to help my father pack up and move out of our house. I got a job as a waitress, and I struggled to relate to my old friends from high school who came around to check on me. No one I knew had experienced so significant a loss. Everyone was sympathetic, but nonetheless I felt very alone in my grief.
The anxiety attacks continued to surface and even worsen. I lived in fear of having them, and I navigated a constant undercurrent of panic. I worried that my father was going to die at any moment. I worried that I would die. And less concrete than those fears, I simply felt a yawing dizziness at the idea that life was completely out of my control.
I turned to alcohol to quell the anxiety, and I attached myself to a young man who had also recently lost a family member and was deep in the throes of his own grief. Together we made our way to New York City, and it was there, in a college psychology class, where I realized for the first time what had happened all those years ago on the road trip with my high school boyfriend: I’d had a panic attack.
Understanding this was the first step in my healing process. Recognizing that I had anxiety as a result of my mother’s death actually helped me to better face the loss and enter into my grief. Losing someone we love is so deeply painful that we often turn away from the feelings rather than letting them course through us. But when we choose to push away difficult emotions, they don’t just disappear; they simply fester beneath the surface, causing anger, frustration, and… anxiety.
But just because I finally understood what was happening didn’t simply make it go away. The anxiety lingered, and the panic attacks continued to surface now and then. When I brought up the idea of seeing a therapist, both my father and my boyfriend encouraged me to just push through and not to indulge further my feelings—which is what they thought would happen were I to enter into therapy. I now understand that the opposite would have been true. Grappling with anxiety is like driving a car on an icy road. When the car begins to skid, you need to turn with it in order to gain control rather than trying to veer away.
But at age twenty, that’s exactly what I was doing, veering away, pushing myself deeper into my studies and also into my relationship with alcohol. The anxiety continued to simmer. When I watched the Twin Towers fall from the roof of my East Village apartment building in 2001, my anxiety reached an all-time high. It was no longer just my little microcosm that was at the mercy of mortality, but the world at large.
I moved to Los Angeles after I graduated college in New York, intent on being a writer. My father was living in Southern California by then, and I got a job as an assistant at a glossy magazine and spent my free time driving my elderly father to doctor appointments. His cancer had returned, this time in his bones.
He eventually grew so ill that I quit my job and moved in to care for him during his final days. I was twenty-five years old. His passing was much more peaceful than my mother’s had been. He spent considerable effort facing and accepting his death, which enabled me to do so as well.
But then he was gone, and I was very much alone in the world. I moved to an apartment by the beach and contemplated what to do with the rest of my life. Following the loss of my father, I felt an aching loneliness and an existential doubt about the purpose of life. While most of my peers were in the throes of their postgrad jobs, concentrating on their careers and partying on the weekends, I was hurtling into a deep depression.
At the urging of a friend, I finally entered therapy, and it was there, in the therapist’s office, with the whole last decade of my life splayed out before the both of us, that I was finally able to see that I’d had a hard run of it. I began to understand that I had been forced to confront mortality and loss much earlier than most. And because we live in a society that is fearful of death, I’d been encouraged to push away my grief rather than process it.
Therapy proved an invaluable experience. Reviewing and understanding my losses greatly served to calm my anxiety, and I learned coping strategies for facing my pain and fear and also gathered tools for further self-evaluation and exploration. In fact, therapy left such a positive impression on me that three years after my father’s death, I decided to get a master’s degree in clinical psychology and become a therapist myself.
When I graduated from my master’s program, there was no question what field I wanted to work in: death and dying. I had already seen how few of my fellow clinicians were comfortable with death, most of them citing it as the one issue they would not want to work with. But if there was one subject I was up for exploring, it was
death.
I chose to work as a grief counselor in hospice because of the hospice team who cared for my father. One of the reasons his death was so peaceful was that his hospice team had created an environment that made it possible.
The nurses, chaplain, home health aides, social workers, and bereavement counselor on my father’s team were some of the most caring and compassionate people I had ever met. At a time in my life when I felt overwhelmed and scared, they showed me great compassion and patience and support. I will be forever grateful for that experience, for it set me on the path I am on today.
I moved to Chicago after I finished graduate school, and that was where I worked as a hospice bereavement counselor for four snowy years. I spent my days driving around the Illinois suburbs, holding the hands of patients in nursing homes, sitting at kitchen counters with people who were caring for their dying family members, and facilitating grief groups for a wide range of people who had lost their loved ones through our hospice.
Everything I thought I knew about grief changed during those hospice years. Loss went from being a very singular personal experience to a much more three-dimensional one. I truly did know grief before I began that job as a bereavement counselor at age thirty, but when I walked into a room to meet with a grieving family, they would take in my youthfulness and scoff. Who was I to help them through the loss of a close family member?
The funny thing was that as soon as I disclosed that even just one of my parents had died, I would see their shoulders drop, their countenance soften. Grief is a very isolating experience. Until you’ve actually lost someone close to you, there is no way to comprehend the enormity of the experience. So by my telling them about my parents, they immediately knew that I understood something about them in a way that most others did not.