Sitting with It

“Sit with the pain until it passes, and you will be calmer for the next one.”

– Naval Ravikant

I started seeing a new therapist in the spring of 2009. I initially went to him in the hopes of fixing something I thought was broken but repairable. More specifically, I had felt that something wasn’t right in the relationship I was in with the person I thought I was going to marry. Radek and I had been together for almost 3 years by that point, engaged for 6 months. Instead of feeling more confident, more secure in our relationship as we faced what should have meant even deeper commitment, I was struggling more than ever, and even though I was planning to marry this man, I didn’t trust him anymore. Radek’s sister, Hana, had died, tragically and unexpectedly, the year before, and in the months following her death, something had shifted in him as he processed the loss of his sister – something seismic and lasting. He was no longer the same man he had been before. But, really, how could he be? And while our relationship probably shifted then, too, in a way that would ultimately lead to our demise, at the time I couldn’t see it. All I could fixate on then was trying to help Radek through his loss, trying to be enough to somehow fill the hole that now gaped inside of him. There had been incidents leading up to that moment in the spring of 2009 to feed my building sense of fear and suspicion, incidents he was always able to explain away, pointing to my insecurities as their cause. Why couldn’t I feel secure and safe in my relationship? What was wrong with me? So I went to this new therapist with the assumption that there was something damaged in me, something I thought therapy might help me fix. I believed if I could just change this thing about myself, I could save this relationship that was slowly but steadily imploding.

What started that spring as once-every-other-week appointments soon became twice-a-week appointments when, following a moment of clarity in which I suggested we take a step back from our relationship, it was revealed that Radek had been involved in a relationship with another woman throughout the entirety of our engagement. As I faced the loss of our relationship and the loss of our future together, the resulting grief and pain merged with the all of the grief and pain of my past losses, and all of the feelings I had been pushing away and cramming into my emotional “closet” for years and years suddenly came crashing in on me. I was left feeling completely broken. I turned to my therapist for what I had hoped would be a remedy for my pain, something to soothe my broken heart, to put the pieces of me back together.

My appointments with Jeffrey often felt awkward. I’d rush in, out of breath and often sweating from the harried commute from my office in Washington, DC’s Foggy Bottom to his office in Dupont Circle. I’d sit in the chair across from Jeffrey and wait for him to start our session. But he’d usually just sit there with a serene smile on his face, always quiet, his gaze kind but expectant, forcing me to speak first. I’ve never been one to feel comfortable with silence, so I’d start rambling, sometimes saying things I had never intended to speak out loud. And as I did, all of those feelings that I was trying to hold back, to push away, would force themselves out into the open. 

When I started really grappling with the awful feelings of regret, shame, humiliation, betrayal, anger, and sadness that came up during these sessions, I didn’t know what to do with them. I can remember at one point almost pleading with Jeffrey, “Please, just tell me what I need to do. I’ll do it! Whatever I need to do to get through these feelings, I’ll do it. Just tell me what it is.” I’ve been a life-long rule-follower, what Gretchin Rubin calls “an upholder.” If a doctor, a teacher, or a coach has told me there’s something I can do to get better, you can best believe I’ll do it. Give me the guidelines, the rules, the game plan – I will follow it to a T. This is what I expected from my therapist. I was ready to do whatever homework he gave me. 

“Caroline,” he said gently, “I think you’ve spent most of your life ‘doing’ your way out of feelings. Unfortunately, you’re just going to have to feel these ones.”

This was neither the answer that I wanted nor the one I expected. I thought I was feeling these feelings. I mean, they felt terrible! I had cried more tears than I thought one body could produce, and my eyes felt permanently swollen. I had gotten angry and raged at Radek for what he had done, at myself for what I had accepted. My journal was filled with words describing all of the awful feelings I felt. What more was I supposed to do?!

Jeffrey told me that I needed to sit with my feelings, but I had no idea what that meant. He explained that I needed to let my feelings wash over me, to face them head on, to stop trying to distract myself from them. He asked me to think of all of the ways I normally faced my feelings, and it became clear that I did a lot of things to not feel negative emotions when they arose. Often (even now) when emotions have threatened to overtake me, I have let my mind take over: I might get nostalgic and think about how things were in the past, or I’d rue over how they could have been, if only I’d done something differently. I might try to imagine, in great detail, what the future would look like, how it could be different. I would certainly look for ways to take my mind off of the hard feelings. Sometimes, those were fairly healthy activities, like reading a book, watching a movie, or doing a puzzle. Other times they were more unhealthy distractions, like alcohol, drugs, or emotional eating to soften the hard edges of my pain and shut my mind off to the most uncomfortable emotions. Sometimes, I even did really big, bold things to deal with my emotions, like traveling far from home or uprooting myself completely and moving to a new place. I could see, in retrospect, that the planning of those big trips or moves served as an immediate distraction from the feelings, and the trip or move themselves could serve as a slightly more long-term fix; but since I wasn’t actually feeling them, it meant those emotions would always still be there waiting for me. 

So, Jeffrey forced me to see, I had to find some way to actually stay in the feelings and feel them rather than doing or thinking my way around them. But what did that actually look like? For me, it meant finding ways to stay in the present moment, no matter how painful it felt. When the worst pain started to bear down on me, I’d force myself to remain present, not to think about the past, not to imagine the future. No turning away, no finding distractions, no numbing. Just the painful rush of the feelings washing over me and through me, no matter what. In quiet moments alone, when there was a break in my work day or as I was walking home from the metro after a day of busy-ness (and distractions), I’d feel my sadness, my shame, my panic begin to well up. And though my instinct was to run – to find something to relieve the pain, something to distract from how very broken I felt, something else to think about, something to DO – I started to force myself to get rooted in that present moment and feel whatever it was that was rushing over me right then.

I had a few ways of doing that.

Often, on my lunch break, I’d leave my office on E Street to walk over to Constitution Gardens at the National Mall. There was a wooden foot bridge to a small island in the middle of the pond there, and I’d cross it to sit on an empty bench and feed the ducks. I’d force myself to notice the trees around me: the dripping branches of the giant weeping willow, the wide and graceful trunk and drooping leaves of the large American elm, the bright pop of pink from the few remaining blooms of the Japanese cherry blossom trees in the distance. I’d remind myself to take in the color of the sky – a bright, azure blue on a cloudless summer day – and to soak up the warmth of the sun on my shoulders. Sometimes, I’d even take off my shoes and run my feet through the damp grass, gently reminding myself to enjoy the sensation of the soft blades between my bare toes. I’d watch the ducks waddling down to the water, chasing the pieces of bread I’d flung moments before (ok, honestly, they were actually old croutons from the little packs that come with fast food salads that I found sitting in my desk drawer; but you get the idea). As I did all of this, I would breathe in and out, softly and slowly, noticing the feelings in my body, and reminding myself that each of these feelings would eventually pass. And when my mind started to wander, started to hone in on the past or tried to predict the future, I’d chant the little mantra I’d once practiced when learning to meditate: “I am not this thought; I am not this thought thinking I’m not this thought; I am not any thought at all.”

In the evenings after work, it was a 15-minute walk from the Clarendon metro station in Arlington, VA, to my apartment on the other side of Lee Highway. My normal route home was peppered with visual reminders of what I had just lost: the restaurant where Radek and I had often eaten dinner together, the Whole Foods where we’d shopped every week, the gym where we had worked out together every day after work, the cafe where we’d sat on the patio and had drinks and talked about our future plans. Seeing these sites, remembering when things had felt normal, even happy, would bring a wave of emotion, and often panic, bubbling up from within me. I dreaded those walks home each day. And so, I found a different route to walk, sometimes even skipping the metro altogether and walking all the way from my office in DC, crossing over the Potomac, and trudging up the steep hill from the river into Arlington. As I walked, I’d force myself to pay attention to the feel of the ground beneath my feet with each step, my heel striking first and then my toes spreading as my weight shifted and I rolled onto the ball of my foot. I’d hold in my head the words that had first come to me on a grueling 3-day hike through the mountains and grasslands of Guatemala a few years before, once again a reminder to stay present, that I only had to handle what was right in from of me in that moment: “One foot in front of the other. Nothing more, nothing less.”

On the weekends, when time seemed to stretch before me, empty and lonely, I’d try to spend at least a little time with my feelings. I’d go for long runs along the Custis Trail that snaked behind my apartment building or through Rock Creek Park on the other side of the river. I’d force myself to skip the headphones, letting my mind go quiet and blank as I focused on my breathing and the passing scenery. While I had first discovered the power of physical movement as a way to sit with my uncomfortable feelings back on that hike in Guatemala, running soon became one of the very best tools I had at my disposal for embracing the present and staying rooted in the moment. When I was running, as I noticed my feet hitting the pavement in an even rhythm and focused on my breath, as I felt the air swirling around me and took in the trees, the buildings, the cars that I passed, I was reminded that the present moment has an immense power over the painful feelings that are so often rooted in our past pain or worries of the future. Even today, running remains one of my most valued and important forms of self-care and mental health maintenance.

Throughout this time, largely with the help of Jeffrey, my therapist, I also learned that giving voice to my darkest feelings, honestly and openly with others, helped me to face them head on in a way I had never really done before. Acknowledging, out loud, these emotions that I was afraid of or ashamed of helped me to release some of their power over me, giving me a greater sense of my own strength and resilience. 

To be clear, these were all things I did some of the time in an attempt to sit with my grief and to feel all of its attendant emotions. There were still numerous times that I just couldn’t sit with them, couldn’t bear to feel another thing. There were moments that I couldn’t stop myself from ruminating on the past and dissecting each and every detail of what had gotten me to where I was. There were pages and pages of my journal dedicated to this particular distraction, filled with my regrets, my what-ifs, my overwrought analysis of the feelings that I was so desperately trying to avoid. There were days when I kept myself distracted with a flurry of activities, meetings, social gatherings, or events, things that kept me too busy to feel anything too deeply. There were evenings when I drank an entire bottle of wine (sometimes even two) by myself in order to numb the feelings that kept bombarding me as I struggled through this freshest loss. There were nights when I spent hours scrolling through social media, comparing my life to the versions others had carefully curated for public display. And, employing my go-to strategy for coping with big pain, I spent the next few months throwing myself into applying for a Fulbright Award – a US government grant to conduct research in a foreign country – planning out my research proposal and imagining a future far away and far beyond my present pain. I remained a master at distraction. 

But in the moments when I could stop myself and remember that I also needed to feel the emotions I was so desperately trying to push away, I found that walking, running, talking honestly about my feelings, even just sitting, surrounded by nature, helped me to feel centered in my physical body and, as such, firmly rooted in the present. And while none of these things took away the hurt I was experiencing, they allowed me to move through some of those darkest emotions as they arose.

I didn’t do it perfectly or completely. I’m not sure we really ever do. But when I did force myself to stop doing and start feeling, when I rooted myself in the present and let myself really feel the pain rather than run from it, I noticed the effect that letting the emotion complete its cycle within me – letting the wave crash on me and then subside rather than trying to out-swim it or fight against it – was one of relief. Yes, the wave felt awful while I was in it, but it didn’t last forever. If I allowed it to wash over me, eventually it receded, and I was able to break through the surface of the water and breathe again. And over time, it felt as if that particular wave lost some of its strength. So while I didn’t become an expert at sitting with my pain, I did learn what worked for me, and I began to file that information away. 

Now, so many years after I first began to experiment with “sitting with” my grief, I think I am finally beginning to really integrate those lessons, all that I learned about feeling my way through pain rather than doing my way around it. As with anything, I think practice makes us better, and I am getting better at practicing what Eckhart Tolle has called “the power of your own conscious presence.” I am learning to pause and pay attention when I start to feel myself looking for distractions from whatever uncomfortable or painful emotion may be rising to the surface. If it’s anxiety or panic that I sense, I’ll take time to notice my physical surroundings – the colors I see, the smells in the air, the feel of the fabrics on my skin or under my hands. Doing these things not only grounds me in the present, they also help to alleviate some of the anxiety and panic. If it’s anger or sadness or despair that I’m feeling, I’ll try to do something physical that keeps me rooted in the present moment and keeps me from spiraling into my thoughts. And no matter what the feelings are, I am trying my best to continually give voice to them as honestly and authentically as I can, recognizing there is power in bringing our darkest feelings out into the light.

I’m beginning to notice a shift in me as I start to integrate all that I’ve learned about feeling my grief. I really noticed it this past year when the anniversary of my sister, Cathy’s, death approached. Every year since she died nearly 20 years ago, I have felt my anxiety, irritability, and deep sadness increase in the weeks leading up to December 3rd, the day she died in 2001. It’s usually as if, even without my being conscious of it, my body – the body which has held onto my grief and stored it away in my cells – reawakens those somewhat dormant feelings, releasing torrents of emotions that I have, for the most part, successfully tucked away during the rest of the year. And although I have, over the years, gotten better about preparing myself for the tidal wave of grief that always seems to build just before Thanksgiving every year, the emotions always have a way of catching me off guard a little bit. I’ll notice that I’ve been especially short with my children or that I’ve been picking fights with my husband. And suddenly it will dawn on me: oh yeah, it’s that time of year; this is my grief backing up on me again. This past December, however, it felt a little different. I didn’t feel my grief backing up on me as it always had. I felt a sense of peace I’m not sure I’ve ever felt around her death before. Perhaps it’s because I am beginning to find a sense of meaning in it, as I work through these feelings and share them through my writing. I had started writing in earnest about Cathy and my feelings around her death earlier in the year, forcing myself to look closely at some of my most difficult memories, some of my most unbearable emotions.  As I continued writing, as those deeply uncomfortable feelings began to resurface again and again, I’d remember to take the time to feel them, to sit with them like I did back in the spring and summer of 2009. And, just as they had back then, those crushing waves of emotions, though incredibly painful, eventually receded and even lost some of their power. They began to feel less overwhelming, less intimidating, and I have begun to look for ways to sit with my grief and pain before it even roils to the surface and threatens to overtake me. I am not scared to face those dark feelings like I once was. More importantly, I am finding a way to remember my sister, to remember all of it, not just the easy memories, in a way that feels real, authentic, and complete. And because I can sit with the grief more peacefully than before, back when every memory of Cathy felt wrenching, like a punch to the gut, I can now look on my memories with my sister with a greater sense of joy.

I know now that I was never broken, never needed fixing in the first place. I simply needed to forget all of the ways I had learned to think, do, and distract my way around pain. I needed to relearn what it means to truly feel. And in opening myself up to my grief – sitting with my pain, my sadness, my fear, and my shame – I have opened myself up to feeling my joy more profoundly, more completely. Once again, I am realizing that I can hold both my grief and my joy at the same time, in the present moment. They don’t cancel each other out; one doesn’t replace the other. Instead, I am finding they simply sit with each other, side by side. And seeing that makes me realize that I can sit with both of them, too, calmly and at peace.