Just before she died, my grandmother finally began to tell her “take to the grave” stories -- the ones she’d lived with the shame of forever, and had vowed to herself never to reveal to a soul. And with the sharing of those stories, Grandma opened the doorway to healing -- her own, my mother’s, and mine.
She told of the day when she was 16 and took the shotgun out to the old stump behind the house, planning to kill herself because she couldn’t live with the trauma and disgust of incest any longer. She told of how, while my grandpa was a good man, she’d never been in love with him, and married him in a desperate attempt to get out of her father’s house. She revealed some of the traumas behind her lifelong struggle with manic depression.
I was there at Grandma’s that night, and I was able to hear her tell some of the funny stories, like when my mom’s date would fall asleep on the couch waiting for her to get ready. Or when Grandma would go hunting or fishing with the men and come home with the biggest animal, the heaviest stringer of fish. It was from my grandma that I learned how to carry my fly rod so it doesn’t get tangled up in the tree branches ahead of me. She was there when I caught my first Rainbow trout using just a stick and 4 feet of fishing line (while, apropos of Grandma, the men and boys came home from their day with nada). My grandma was the best there was. But she was carrying pain she never had any way to heal. And now, 20-some years later, the stories she told that night have helped me understand and overcome some of my own fears and self-destructive patterns.
It was after I’d gone to bed that night that grandma began to tell the deeply, deeply shameful stories. And, rather than Mom thinking less of Grandma, as we so often expect will happen, it helped my mother begin to understand why her own mom had always been so sad. It helped my mother begin to see that Grandma’s pain had not been her fault. There is unaccountable healing available in that one shift in awareness.
So many of us -- I see it in my practice daily -- are holding these painful stories inside. Incest, rape, abortion, men and women both, carrying stories of events our culture tells us are so shameful we’re better off taking them to the grave with us than admitting to or giving ourselves permission to overcome. We carry these traumas so fiercely locked away that they can’t ever get out, can’t breathe, can’t heal. And yet they show up in disguise -- you know them when they do. They show up as addictions to “bad boys” or “psycho bitches” or drugs or shopping, as insomnia, as weight you can’t gain or lose, as failures in love or business, as a cavern in your heart that will not be touched.
Our bodies go to great lengths to protect us from the things we can’t deal with. In my work, these traumas, these old stories, feel like “energy cysts” sitting in your lower back, your heart chakra, your hips, your throat. And they don’t dissolve all at once. They peel away like layers of an onion, allowing you to adjust to the openness a little at a time.
We can heal. We don’t have to carry the unnameable pain of these traumas forever. But in my experience, we have to get to where they are in our bodies. And meet them with compassion, acceptance, self-forgiveness, love. Our bodies want to heal. Our Divinity wants us to experience joy.
Sometimes I wonder what Grandma could’ve been if she’d been able to heal all that. In ways, the work I do is dedicated to her. As is every fish I catch.
With love,