Have You Ever Lost Your Identity?

When my daughter Katie was stillborn in 1987, I immediately identified myself as a grieving mother. I lived with this identity for years. It went underground when my twins were born and I became very busy with their day to day care.

However, when they became teenagers and didn't need me so much, and in fact, rejected the fact that they even had a mother, my old identity of a grieving mother came back full force.

The rejection of my teenagers and them moving on to bigger and better things in their world triggered the loss of my first baby big time.

When Katie first died, I immersed myself in the work of healing the grief. I did this by going to a support group and then later running a branch of this group in Santa Monica. But after three years or so, I really wasn't identifying so much with the grieving mothers anymore. In fact, my two good friends from this original group had also given birth to their babies and were themselves busy caring for their infants.

We slowly and eventually lost touch with one another and I didn't give it much thought until the grief was triggered again 14 years later. Once again my IDENTITY became one of a broken person who had LOST a child.

It was through this second period of grief that I finished my book. Finishing the book and then publishing it was brutal. It took me two years to actually write the last little bit. Why? Because my identity was once again tied up in the loss of this baby and if I completed the book, then I wouldn't be identified anymore with this process, because clearly it was time to "move on."

I must clarify something here. When I say "clearly it was time to move on", it's not that there's a specific time that we grieve and then we must move on and "get over it already." For me, I realized that something wasn't quite right. I felt that I was some how energetically stuck in this identity that really didn't fit anymore. I was holding on to this identity and it was comforting to me to do so.

It does sound kind of weird, that our identity of these losses can be comforting and we often don't want to let this comfort go. As my friend Dana said, "Moving on is like having another loss."

For me, moving on and letting go of my grief with Katie felt enormous. What I did not realize at the time was that my identification with the loss of the baby felt comforting because I didn't have to deal with the real loss that was happening in my life - that of losing my young children to adulthood and all the losses that engendered. I was familiar with the loss of Katie and this gave me some stability, whereas, all the feelings I was experiencing around my kids growing up, felt chaotic and dangerous.

I prefer to use the term "moving forward" rather than "moving on." Moving on has a hidden implication of "forgetting and getting away from." Moving forward implies taking what has happened with us, and stepping forward as the new person we have become from this experience.

Dana wrote to me and said that she notices a lot of friends and family members of those bereaved often say, "You have to Move On!", as if to say, "Get over it!"

I wrote about some of this in my book, "The Silent Loss," where I noted there is a bittersweetness about the grieving process. When someone, or something, or some identity is gone and no longer exists, we have a difficult time with that. It makes us feel so alone, sad, and all kinds of other emotions. As time goes on, having the memory of this past grieving process is like having something, but it's more of a bittersweet experience.

It's both a bitter, sad, despairing feeling and also a memory of the fact that there was a person or identity back then. It's difficult to describe in words for me, but the one word that keeps coming to me is "bittersweet."

There is so much to be said about this subject, and so many opinions and experiences that I am humbled by the enormity of even bringing this topic up. Dana and I are considering hosting a teleclass on "moving forward" after a loss in order to open up this rather touchy subject.

As always, remember, "Don't judge yourself, EVER, for your emotions, but instead, relax and move toward them in order to stop the resistance. You will then be able to feel them in the moment and in this way, you can truly feel better."