Grieving What Didn't Happen
Not a lot of people know this, but my undergraduate degree is in dance performance. In my sophomore year, I was involved in a car accident that left me with a broken pelvis and back, requiring several surgeries at first and years of complications afterwards. The grief related to the accident wasn’t necessarily one of a dance career that was sidelined; I was never the best dancer and would likely never perform professionally. I pivoted into more of a choreography and anatomy focus, I discovered Pilates as an ongoing form of rehabilitation, and ended up teaching it for almost 20 years before pivoting again to become a therapist.
The grief was more about needing to quickly pivot and not having much say in the matter. I see this all the time in my practice, where a sudden life change occurs, we get through it because we have to, people tell you how strong you are, and then that becomes part of your identity. It was years before I allowed myself to feel the mental fatigue and toll that time period had on me. Once I did, I felt almost sunburned, where I was extra sensitive to pain both physically and mentally. Through therapy, I had to relearn how to trust my pain signals, not shut down and dissociate anytime something was challenging out of fear that the pain might be too intense to do anything but push through. This was a long process, and it was, well, painful!
I understand now how to work with those who have had to make similar, body-focused changes in their lives. In my experience, physical pain is something that we are more likely to pay attention to, especially when it is limiting and disruptive to your life. It’s less ambiguous and shapeless than mental pain can be. People on the outside also understand it more easily- you break your leg, you get a cast, you heal, cast removed, end of story. And to some degree, it is much more straightforward than mental pain that doesn't get crutches to signal to the world that you’re in pain and might need help. But what could have happened had the injury not happened can be devastating to consider after the fact. That’s where therapy can help start to disentangle your identity from your injury, from how strong and brave you were and the expectations that you or others placed on yourself.
I wouldn’t be me without what happened to me, none of us would. But, we are more than what happened to us and therapy can help us understand ourselves outside of and despite our trauma.
