I’m a Psychologist. After My Brother’s Suicide, I Realized I Had Completely Misunderstood Grief.

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Dad’s prognosis was not good. Sitting vigil at his hospice bedside, my family and I watched the cancer take hold of him. As my dad got sick, my brother Dave got sick too. His depression and addiction to alcohol worsened; he was in and out of treatment. He mysteriously deteriorated along with my father.

When Dad died, Dave’s mental illness turned fatal. My little brother died by suicide, six months after we lost our father.

I knew Dave was gone when I saw my mom’s series of missed calls. I knew it before she spoke. I fell to the ground, my body overwhelmed by memories of Dave as a kid on the slide in the park, the punk phase of him with dyed hair. I felt dizzy, caught up in a crazy fairground ride. When I regained the ability to stand up, I focused all my brain power on blaming myself, a trained mental health professional, for my own brother’s death by suicide.

Sometimes I think I shouldn’t be a psychologist anymore.

My job is to help people who feel hopeless. Why couldn’t I “save” my little brother? I read all the books and passed all the tests but my stupid PhD. he did nothing to help me with the one person i most desperately wanted to help. My ego wants the assurance that I am not a failure. Can I still be competent at my job and also be a part of the tragedy of Dave’s death?

Before my own grief, I had the ability to compartmentalize in emotionally complex conversations with patients about the abuse they had suffered or the guilt of surviving the war. But when I sought out my own grief therapy, I found that much of what I had done as a professional turned out to be wrong for me as a patient. I realized that all of us, but especially mental health professionals, have been grieving wrong.

Too often, therapy treats any loss (divorce, unemployment, death) as an internal challenge that plays out in a predictable order. Many of my clients expect to struggle through stages, from impact to acceptance, like levels in a video game. Fifty years ago, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross mapped out five stages of mourning, originally thought of as sequential, and which have left permanent imprints in popular culture ever since (although as a set of steps, they have largely been discredited).

I am very grateful to Kübler-Ross for his early studies, but I made mistakes under this thinking, too focused on language and cognition, largely ignoring the body. I confess that I, too, viewed grief as linear, expecting an intense emotional reaction to occur at first, and then naturally subsiding over time. If he did not follow this process, the duel became a problem or a disorder to be treated. Long-lasting effects often include acute loneliness, which can also be misinterpreted. Traditional therapy, which I assumed was correct, was based on this idea: People get caught up in grief because they feel alone because they have lost someone close to them. The treatments focused mainly on the relationship with the deceased person. I wasn’t prepared for a community crisis involving people who are still alive.

Everything changed after my own loss.

In my early pain, the term distress it became literal. Going to work and raising my children became physical challenges. it hurt. Even years later, unexpected triggers can still reopen the wound. I no longer believe the pain will go away completely. I now know that I will live in pain, in some form, for the rest of my life. Talk therapy helped, but it wasn’t enough.

What helped was physical; I found healing in movement, throwing myself into a hobby that only I had dabbled in before, circus arts. Spinning on silks and flying on the trapeze freed my mind from overthinking.

And I realized that I needed to repair my relationships with the living.

While my dad was sick, my husband, Rob, managed the kids’ schedules. I flew to hospitals out of state, visited my father, and then my brother. Rob and I were married and living parallel lives in the same house. When Dad and Dave died, Rob thought he was finally “back.” I had just lost my family and, strangely, my part-time job as a caregiver. I spent months cleaning up blood, figuratively and sometimes literally. I didn’t know how to be “back”.

I was deeply ashamed of my messy family that Rob had married into. Grief often comes with the shame of not being about it for now, which isolates, especially if significant others or children are going through a very different kind of grief. Rob and I needed couples therapy to learn how to support each other. We needed new tools and a new language.

My pain was also a spiritual crisis. Because Dave committed suicide, ideas about fate, power, choice, and free will consumed me. Growing up in the church, I struggled with the idea of ​​heaven and the presence of God.

In my quest to resolve this, I worked with a highly trained therapist who used MDMA, an amphetamine-like compound. This is a treatment protocol that could be approved by the FDA as soon as 2023. (I had to travel outside of the US.) It’s still not mainstream, but it’s not fringe science either. Psychedelic therapy eased the anxiety of my big questions. I got no answers, but I felt at peace. (There is a research team at John’s Hopkins that has been treating terminally ill patients with psychedelic-supported psychotherapy for many years. They have found that this type of intervention significantly alleviated existential anxiety and depression in people facing the end of their lives).

Three years later, I am still re-examining my practice, unlearning much of what I studied in graduate school. I have released my firm grip on the theoretical frameworks that once dictated my clinical conceptualizations and actions. I have a deeper understanding of how grief lives in the body and seeps into every relationship. Instead of just asking what’s going on inside of youI also ask, what is happening around you? What is happening in your body?

We now know that pain lives in the body. Mary Frances O’Conner discovered that pain changes our brains, interrupting pattern recognition. Years of memories suggest that our lost loved ones could be walking through the front door at any moment. We grieve as we wait for a new reality to form. he’s never coming back. I think you can help build that reality, carving new neural pathways and muscle memories, a new pattern.

Now, I encourage clients to incorporate movement and hobbies into therapy in a way that brings them joy. One client, a photographer, takes a daily photo walk as part of her healing. Another, an avid skier, took a year off from work to become a ski instructor. Clients tell me that these tangible assignments are a huge relief. Nothing is simple during grief, but physical activity is achievable and empowering, a welcome relief from the existential questions and sharp emotional pain that comes with loss. Movement engages different aspects of the brain, distracting from critical thinking and shifting the focus to spatial reasoning. The diversification of neural connections fosters resilience and promotes healing from the inside out.

Surviving friends and family are an essential part of my conversations with new clients. We get stuck in our grief, not just because we miss our loved ones, but because the loss makes it difficult to preserve relationships. In couples or family therapy, it is helpful to discuss how various approaches to grief can affect its dynamics. One person may be stoic, another expressive. One wants to talk about the person who died, the other can barely form the name in his mouth.

These conversations ease shame, normalize pain, and build bridges between our relationships in the past and how they will be in the future. Therapy is not accessible or desirable for everyone, but you can also gain a strong sense of community in grief groups, church groups, and volunteer organizations. One thing is certain: anguish cannot be calmed in isolation.

I also encourage my clients to address the big existential questions in a way that suits their journey. A spiritual process can also mean prayer, meditation, mindfulness, or a writing exercise. It may mean reading philosophy to explore various worldviews or working with a clergy member or spiritual director. And now I’m a strong advocate of psychedelic-assisted therapy.

I’m not the same psychologist I used to be. I had to forgive myself. First, as a therapist, for not “saving” Dave from an illness as serious as our father’s cancer. And as a grieving sister, for not “recovering” quickly, or not recovering at all. You do not recover from the duel. you integrate it Will not let you. It absorbs into you until it’s part of what makes you whole.

​​If you need to talk, or if you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, send a text to crisis text line at 741-741 or call or text 988 to reach the Crisis and Suicide Lifeline.

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