Broken Stories, Healing Communities

When we seek help, we may indirectly be saying: "My story feels broken. Can it be fixed?" says Howard Brody, a physician-philosopher colleague. We seek others help or advice when we can't keep our life story running smoothly. Sometimes out of fear or in pain, sometimes from frustration, we ask "Is my story hopelessly ruined? Is it still worth living?"

When we experience a trauma, when a significant change alters our relationships, when the causes we embrace fall short of their goals or when our everyday lives are radically altered by illness or injury, we may believe that our life story is broken or has lost its meaning. Our attachments, beliefs, our anchors to our past aren't stable anymore. Our lives may feel shattered, transformed into a living nightmare while within our community lies the seeds of new life, awaiting our emergence from a long dark winter.

At times when the path before us is no longer clear or predictable, we need to draw on others in our healing community. We need someone to hold our hope for us when we cannot. When life as we have known it seems over, we must rely on the wisdom and love of others who believe the core of our being remains. When our current reality fills with lonely, helpless, empty and loveless times, we need to know someone believes we are lovable, competent, capable. When our energy falters, our mission seems futile, we need others to temporarily carry the torch.

Paradoxically, we can also feel such internal rifts when we are successful beyond our wildest dreams. Our accomplishments, love or luck dazes us. It seems too good to be true--and it is too good to last forever. Still, mastery, loving attachments and fortune can create discontinuity with our past. We may have fame, possessions, pleasure, wealth, love and security we never dreamed possible. We hope we've been delivered from our old selves--the parts of us that had to struggle, experienced pain, doubted our strengths, felt vulnerable to the whims of others, wondered if we'd ever find love. We feel elevated above our pasts, our old friends and colleagues. A part of us may yearn for those old connections--the old self with less expectations and less need to maintain an image of complete competence and never-ending success. We may feel independent, free from the limits of our old story, while wanting our healing community to celebrate the joy of a new chapter with us.

Our responses to success and to loss are examples of what transformation is all about. The word "transformation" means that a significant alteration in the form of something has taken place--a moving across or beyond the old form to something unknown or unknowable before the change began. In its healthiest sense, transformation is opening to a larger reality than the one our personal ego could admit previously.

During the process of transformation, we experience being broken or of splitting with the past with an eventual sense of freedom and a deepened, internalized feeling of connection. When grief is transformative, sadness and joy are companions, often inseparable ying and yang. Perhaps that is why sometimes we cry at weddings or times of peak experiences, or why we can laugh during difficult and painful times. Healing that begins with validating change is an important part of the somber and joyful transformative journey we often call grief.

Grief involves a three part discovery process: what we have lost; what remains or can be restored and what is now possible. The grieving process profits from a spiritual guide, one who aids us in mending the breaks in our stories, sees beyond the seduction of successes and the despair of pain to ways to integrate the shattered, awkwardly jagged parts--that blends the good and the bad, forgives admitted human weakness and enjoys the experience of being aware of our wholeness--deeply attached and capable of loving in ways more encompassing than we were realized before.

We don't outgrow our spiritual guides or our healing communities, but we may alter our relationship to them. Healing communities sustain us when we fear we've lost a significant part of ourselves--our best self--along with everything else. Grief empowers our creativity and resourcefulness, grants us the grace to face disappointment or failure and the courage to renew our devotion to our cause, knowing we have already faced worse nightmares and fears. When others hold our hope until we can embrace it, so can we then become a spiritual guide as well. As May Sarton noted, "I am the sum of many difficult acts of grace". Then we may become one source of grace for others.

Any life change contains an element of loss. We don't start something new without relinquishing something old. Unless we grieve such losses, our shaken dreams and bending stories cannot find new ways of expression. We cannot move forward without acknowledging both our gains and our losses.

Chaos theory suggests that change that exceeds known boundaries for adaptation is full of potential for mutation of form and energy. From the moment we experience such change, life's potential can begin its transformation into a new energy form. It may take time, perhaps a lifetime or several for the full extent of that transformation to be realized. We are living in process along the way.

A story without an audience is like a tree falling in the woods. Does it make a sound if there is no one to hear? Do we leave a mark if no one knows or listens? Does our loss exist if no one validates it? What gets us past simple coping and survival is the presence of those who care--of a healing community.

Sometimes our resources for healing are incomplete. Sometimes we have resources that can help us celebrate and challenge, but lack ones which comfort and validate. We have "fair weather friends" who we can play and enjoy, but disappear when the going gets rough. It's as if they only want to hear the stories with the happily-ever-after endings.

On the other hand, we sadly have some who can only help, or can only be available for the hard times but not the good. Out of fear or from depression, some will "rain on our parade" and lose interest when things are going too well. The only stories they listen to are the tragic ones.

We need both to have a personal healing community. In the fabric of our lives, we are strengthened by the threads of joy and sorrow that weave through it. Each story is important, neither diminished nor enhanced by comparison to other's stories. One story can build on another, inspire, lend caution. Not all stories have happy endings. Not all tragedies remain so.

Simone Roach talks about the five components of a caring relationship--commitment, conscience, confidence, competence and compassion. One way to examine whether we have a healing community is to determine whether these terms apply to the people and the place in which we live during critical times. Will the relationships endure tough times? Will our awareness and intention be honored? Do those who hold our hold truly believe in our capacity to become whole once again? Do the skills to validate, to challenge, to create safety actually exist? Do we sense that others know about our grief and our suffering even if they are not experiencing it?

Augmenting Roach's five is courage. Not necessarily the courage it takes to run into a burning house to save a child, but everyday acts of courage that allow us to ask how another is feeling and be open to the response. Such small actions mean not taking the easy way of always being "too busy", of taking that deep breath and calling a friend whose husband has recently committed suicide, of admitting how much it hurts to have lost the battle to save a wetlands area or to have been unable to alleviate the suffering of a person in our care.

We profit from community that contains those who witness and those who act: story-tellers and listeners, musicians, dancers and receptive, involved audiences. Such a community believes the best self in all of us is part of a collective consciousness--together we are more than the sum of these wondrous parts. Together we strive to maintain that consciousness of ourselves, the world and universe we inhabit. We help each other find safety nets when taking risks. We need comfort in pain, validation when things are as bad as they seem, challenge when we get too comfortable with the status quo and celebration when life is good.

Healing community gives us access to what Larry Dossey calls the "non-localized mind"--that intent, consciousness, prayer and meditation can affect grief, nurture what currently cannot be internally sustained. We are empowered by someone holding of our hope. A healing community is entrusted with sustaining hope when it seems unreasonable, with a belief in the miraculous, It entertains the possibility of grace, admits that awareness can be both painful and healing, that wisdom can paradoxically hide in despair, that our imagination exists to create possibilities and enhance our flexibility. A healing community makes palpable the gossamer thread that weaves its way through our lives --an unbreakable thread that interlaces our story with others in the fabric of our family, community, cause and culture.