15/40: Unclinging

This week has had a taste of goodbyes, letting go of the suffering of clinging to what and whom has been dearly loved and cherished

Sent you rilke
By hand
Hoping you would understand

I tend as a human to have trouble with goodbyes, either in the present or impending ones. My way is to cling, to seek a way around the goodbye. Bargaining of course is one human way to cope with loss.

I’ve only recently come to understand there are at least 6 trauma responses. We’ve known for some time about fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. But there are also fine and faint.

Yesterday was a lot of fine energy for me. Not that I was being traumatised. On the outside it was a typical Thursday of the busy sort with this meeting, that phone call, the other meeting, and in between checking in with my husband before dashing out to another meeting (which didn’t occur), meditation, practising the flute, and finally choir practice.

The fine response is unlike the others we’ve discussed, as it is not something we do during a traumatic experience, but something we might engage in in the aftermath.

In the fine response, you might experience denial about your trauma. You might play it down, question whether it happened, or pretend it didn’t. This often happens because the trauma is too big for your brain to process, or because of social pressure to appear to be okay.

Even though you might seem happy and calm on the outside, you might be experiencing anger, frustration, and anxiety.

If you have ever seen anyone in ‘fine’ mode, it looks truly bizarre from the outside.

Perhaps they have just lost their beloved spouse while everyone else is totally ignoring their needs, like the protagonist of Mum.

Cathy is utterly alone in her grief whilst having various members of her family charge in and out of her home centring their wants and needs and oblivious to hers, though she is the grieving widow.

This may be one of the most brilliant modern portrayals of ‘fine’ I have seen. Cathy spends a surprising amount of time saying, "Okay!” or “Right” brightly in a normal sounding voice when everything is very far from okay, and no one, not even the only person who is trying hardest to care and to be considerate of her as opposed to just banging on all the time about their lives, is really listening to her or fully tuning into the magnitude of how deeply not fine she is.

I highly recommend watching all 3 series of Mum if you haven’t yet seen it. Absolute genius.

Fine, like freeze, fawn, or faint, is a seemingly passive response. Fight and flight, in an activist extrovert-friendly society, make more sense if something feels difficult to deal with. Fight that cancer! Shoot that home invader! Flee from the rapist!

When you’re ‘fine’, your pain is undetectible to the casual gaze. Cathy almost never cries or looks sad in front of others. She is a stellar example of British stiff upper lip. Not letting the side down. Pip, pip, and all that. In the worst weeks of her life, she focuses exclusively on the members of her family who are constantly clamouring for attention. What a good mum.

I only began to cry at the very end of the day when I was finally in bed. And now, the tears feel that they wish to fall. But there’s a lot to do! Time to get on with it.