The Hypnotic State of Ruminating on Grief, Loss, and Family Dysfunction at Christmas

Much of the last several weeks have been busy.  I came up with ideas to write about but could not develop them until I went Christmas shopping with my wife this past Friday night at the mall.

Yes, I wanted to write more about grief and loss over those we loved who have passed.  I thought about the service of memories I went to where my church remembered the 22 people who had died during 2016.  I thought about continuing about reflecting on my continued life without my father who died Labor Day 2015.  But I found myself engaging in my different coping methods aka working on my other writing project and being busy at work.

When our life is not about family matters we are fine, but our mind turns sour when we think about family.  Well, back to Friday night, a time where I was slowing down and thinking about family and Christmas. 

It was pretty frustrating looking for a Christmas gift for some avoidant family members. They rarely call. They are controlling as to when they come.  They do not invite us to their house and so I have not talked with them in about two years.  I do not know what they currently like or are interested in. I was trying to show loving thoughtfulness and I found myself feeling frustrated for most of the shopping trip.  

Two posts ago, I wrote about avoidant family members.  Yes, their avoidance is best not taken personally, but this experience of walking through shopping malls going from store to store brought to mind how consumed we can get in emotion thinking about them.  Depending on how much power the avoidant family members have, we can find ourselves ruminating hours upon hours upon the sad, sorry state of our relationships or our losses.

Ruminating is one of those hypnotic states we can get sucked into until we decide to stop.  Ruminating can go on for hours or days.   Ruminating seems to be easier with higher levels of sadness and anger. Ruminating is also easier when there is nothing else going on.  As we ruminate upon issues that are never going to be resolved we unknowingly compound our emotions.

Despite any elegant analysis or description of such situation, the compounded emotion when ruminating is brutal and robs us of both time and energy.   When we ruminate it can be like diving into a pool of emotion and it is hard to get out of the pool because the water is warmer than the air temperature. 

The Challenge

The obvious coping skill with ruminating is to stop it.  It is a matter of not thinking about the painful subject matter, or at least getting our minds off of things that we cannot solve.  At least for Christmas, it is helpful to read or watch movies, or the old classic--go volunteer somewhere. 

Such painful subjects are indeed tough to put out of our minds. We may have to play a head game with ourselves that it is not doing any good to dwell on the dysfunctional family members or the people who are no longer with us.   The first line of defense is recognizing that ruminating about emotional topics can make us get into a hypnotic state of emotion if we them let them.

Deprivation and Sorrow

                The late Furman Bisher (1918-2012) wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2008 about his austere Christmases in Georgia as a child.  Everyone was poor in his community and they got oranges as treats at Christmas.  Bisher wrote that his wife had just bought him a little red bicycle for Christmas so he would not be the only one to have not gotten one.   Cute, but I wonder whether that gesture really healed any hurt or filled any hole in his psyche.

Many of us, if not all of us can point to some form of deprivation that we have suffered in our lives.  Deprivation often has a physical connotation, but if we were to look at Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we may have all had some kind of deprivation of our emotional needs, and it probably bugs some of us on a recurring basis. 

Deprivation is the lack or denial of something considered to be a necessity.   It seems likely that not all the deprivation that we have experienced bugs us, but a few things that really mattered rear their ugly heads at one time or another.  When it bugs us, it is more than grief—it is chronic sorrow because it comes up again and again.   The holidays are one of those times when it comes up again and again.

Not everything that we have been deprived of holds the same weight, and hopefully we do not dwell on it all the time, but some of this deprivation was a significant enough hut that we have some moments of deep sadness and re-living of pain.  If it is not sadness, we relive the anger.

There are family members who may have deprived us of traditions and recognition.  They may have not invited us to weddings or they treat us like family secrets.  They may never invite us over to their house and avoid us.   They demonstrate by actions that they treat other family members as favored and us as the red-headed step-child.

Peers from school days may have deprived us of the respect that we needed. Maybe we were picked on, teased and bullied, and they did not realize that they were hurting us instead of being funny. It still amazes me that a 73-year-old South Dakota man shot his high school bully dead in 2012 over a jock-strap prank from over 50 years earlier.  Some people do hold onto the pain and sorrow from such deprivation and go to such extremes.

Employers may have deprived us of raises and promotions and recognitions.  The average employee who has been with an employer for a long time has typically felt unappreciated by the employer (https://www.eremedia.com/tlnt/heres-why-your-employees-are-just-not-that-into-you/). Promotions are being given to younger yes-men and yes-women who play the political game versus those who have done good work and have been faithful employees.

Churches also tend to betray and disrespect a number of members by not supporting them in times of trouble and by failing to recognize special events and graduations.  Pastors did not come when you needed them.  Churches put your graduation as an “omitted degree” instead of recognizing you like others in the Sunday morning worship.  Some of this disrespect is ignorance and some of it is blatant politics.   Many people leave churches because they felt deprived of the meeting of those necessary emotional needs (telling the music minister how mad you are at him tends to be worthless and leaving is just easier to get away from the pain).

Colleges and Universities may change their policy and deprive graduates of traditions that have been going on and on for previous years.  Certain degrees may not recognized in commencement because of some agenda to down play the president’s idiocy in handling a controversy over allowing a guy who attended less than a semester to be granted a Ph.D.

At the holidays the sorrow over deprivations can be more acute.  Christmas tends to bring out the inner child in each of us in good and bad ways.  Yes, our inner child will sing along with silly Christmas songs.  But the inner child hurts with the rumination of the deprivation we have suffered because the real world has kicked our butts and made us cynical.

I don’t have any easy answers but to say other than for many of us, the pain of current and past deprivation at Christmas is real. The chronic sorrow over deprivations from childhood and deprivations in more recent years does happen.  I suppose that we have to recognize it when it happens and try to get our minds off of it as best as we can, but after awhile it tends to be worthless to talk about it with family and spouses because they are tired of you talking about it and tell you to let it go.  

                We live in the present, and sometimes it is a struggle, especially during the holidays.