What is cellular grief? How can it affect you and not even be aware that is what you might be experiencing?
So what is cellular grief? Our body on a cellular level remembers loss. Anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays can be a difficult time because your body is aware of the loss and grief, so you can start to feel over-emotional, depressed, and anxious. Dr. Maureen Malin, a geriatric psychiatrist with Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, in an article, Grief Can Hurt in More Ways Than One, (Harvard Health Publishing, Feb. 1, 2019) talks about how grief has a physical side effect that can affect our health. Body fatigue, headaches, and digestive problems are some examples of physical side effects but are not exclusive to only those mentioned. Every relationship is unique and our responses are different for each. If deep pain or traumatic loss is left undealt with, it can prolong the grief and pain which can result in more health issues.
I experienced cellular grief over the holidays. It started with extreme
anxiousness. I felt it physically. My throat felt like it was closing up, I was not sleeping and I was overeating. Ugh! I felt like I was going over the edge and out of control emotionally. I could not figure out what was causing such extreme feelings. It was awful! The last time I felt like that was after my mom had passed away which is what gave me a clue that I needed to graph out a timeline of my past year. Most of you have gone through the grief recovery program so you know the graph I am always referring to. Graphs can be an amazing tool to help you make discoveries.
So I made a timeline of all positive and negative activities and events throughout the year. On my timeline or graph, I realized how many family members and friends had died this past year. There were several triggers happening. First was the loss of my father-in-law. It triggered the ending of a parental relationship, leaving me with the feeling of being left alone. Secondly, on a cellular level, my body was starting to remember that the anniversary of my parents’ and grandparents’ deaths was approaching. I was so busy dealing with my current losses that I was not paying attention to this anniversary, but my body was. Even though I had done a lot of grief work on my loved ones, my body still remembered how I grieved those losses. Compounded with present moment losses, internally I was feeling the impact.
After making my first graph, I soon realized that I needed to make a second graph. My first graph led me to realize that these losses had affected my health, just as stated by Dr. Malin. So the second graph was on my health. While working on my health graph I connected some of my health issues that had emotional incompleteness with people. For example, while in the hospital recovering from a hysterectomy, I had a traumatic experience with a nurse that left me feeling vulnerable and unsafe. That experience also triggered memories of my mom experiencing the same type of experience. I used to minimize what happened to her which led to feelings of regret. Those memories in conjunction with what had been happening with my health, made me discover some things that I had left unsaid.
I needed to apologize to my mom for not being very compassionate to her during her illness. With my grandfather, I apologized for lying to him about my teenage pregnancy. For my father-in-law, I wish I had told him that he was the example of a father that I always wished I had.
I took the time to acknowledge my grief over the loss of my mother, father-in-law, and grandparents. I wrote each of them a letter sharing what I loved and missed about them. I wrote what was incomplete in me and what I needed to apologize for. By discovering what felt incomplete and writing and reading it out loud helped my heart feel heard, and helped give me a sense of emotional completion.
Our bodies keep score, it remembers, so we need to learn to listen to our bodies and give our body a voice.
Practical Tip
Here is a practical tip that can help you through those times when you are experiencing grief, loss, anxiety, and stress:
- Creating timelines and graphs can help you discover what might trigger anxious feelings or frustration. You can start small by making a timeline of your day, week, month, and year. There is always a root cause to what is making you feel anxious.
- What did you do?
- Who did you talk to?
- What events took place both negatively and positively?
- Expectations unfulfilled
- Write down any anniversary of any type of losses:
- Person, Pet
- Job
- Health
- Etc..
