Feeling Our Way Along

"In general, the more emotionally demanding the work, the more empathic and supportive the leader needs to be.  Leaders drive the service climate and thus the predisposition of employees to satisfy customers."  Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, Primal Leadership, page 17.

I have been reflecting on the need for self-empathy in the grieving experience.  That self-empathy is the primary path toward "help" in the grieving experience.  

If I cannot have some measure of empathy for myself, I will not seek the help I need to move forward.  I will see myself as weak, worthless and wanting in every way.  I will continue to punish myself and descend deeper into the darkness of despair.

If I cannot have some measure of empathy for myself, I will be unable to give any help to others who are suffering, because I won't be able to imaginatively enter the emotional world of that other.  If I cannot offer help, I will deprive myself of a primary source of healing.  And I will deprive the other of a primary source of support.

Grieving is the most emotionally demanding work I can imagine.  So the words from Primal Leadership take on, for me, a meaning the authors certainly did not intend.  They are, however, quite right in their description.  The deeper my grief, the more I need to find ways to step back in order to move forward--to develop some caring distance in order to embrace my grieving more fully.

For me, the secret was to find people who didn't limit my identity to my loss.  I needed to see something in the face in front of me that went beyond the "you poor man" look.  My emotional system was so open and vulnerable that I simply absorbed whatever I saw--at least in the early days.  When I could find those few people who interacted with me as "me," then I felt somewhat better.  That meant not spending as much time with people who knew me well.  And that was very confusing for everyone.

I imagine that for others, going right back to work might fulfill some of that function.  I wonder sometimes if I would have done much better had I done that.  I have troubling imagining that I would have functioned at all--as broken as I was.  But perhaps the input of others working on a common task with importance beyond any individual would have been good medicine.

This reminds me that as I write I am not recommending the path I took to anyone else who has lost someone.  My journey has been mine, not yours.  I am so glad to be at the place I am.  So I wouldn't ask for a different path than the one I took.  But I do know that doing different things produces different results.  We all need to do what will work best for our real healing and hope.