Sheltering in Place and the Existential Crisis of Grieving
Hello and welcome. I have only a brief moment to capture your attention, so let me begin. I am in graduate school to become a clinical mental health professional. As such, I’m studying material accrediting bodies believe is necessary for me to know to provide therapeutic counsel to people or in short, to be a therapist. Many counseling programs across the country have very specific areas of focus. My program is a generalist program, which means I get exposed to a bevy of theories and modalities with the hope that I will naturally gravitate toward the theoretical orientation that speaks to me. With this newfound orientation in hand, the idea is that I will complete more specialized training post graduation if I choose.
This term theoretical orientation is somewhat of a buzz phrase for our profession. A theoretical orientation can function like a quiet through-line in a counseling session. It’s like a faint heartbeat or a touchstone the practitioner keeps coming back to whether you realize it or not. For an emerging counselor, being asked about your theoretical orientation feels like a big deal. It’s something akin to a gender reveal party for those who engage in that practice.
Our natural way of being in the world; I believe theoretical orientations find, call and summon the practitioner. For the counselor, they can answer questions from childhood when we wouldn’t stop asking them. They resonate deeply with a therapist’s personality and they end up being the way you’ve been your entire life.
My first quarter as a graduate counseling student, I was exposed to many theories that resonated with me. One that caught my attention in particular was existential philosophy. Existentialism is a discipline that offers us a way to grapple with everything most dear to us and the wild ways they intersect. I was drawn to thinkers that rose out of the Holocaust who wrote about life, values, anxiety, freedom and even death. These philosophers seemed to understand acutely, what my friend Yvette says: No one is making it out of here alive! And to her phrase, I’ve added, now what. I read Victor Frankl and professor emeritus’ Irvin Yalom’s (Stanford) texts with fervor. My first paper in Counseling Theories held my twenty-five long, overachieving pages on existentialist theory.
Being a black emerging counselor, holding many intersectional and marginalized identities, I had found my first deep sigh of relief in graduate school. The existentialist tenet, ‘Life Is Absurd’ holds true in so many facets of our world, past and current. Now what.
Returning to academia at forty-three, having volunteered for hospice and trained as a hospital chaplain, I got to know intimately ways that life really is absurd. I also saw quite honestly that it can be beautiful and that it also ends. I got to be among people who had language for grief and loss. I felt like these philosophers were speaking a foreign tongue but somehow I was intuitively able to understand all the parts of their speech.
In some way, Black folks have been the embodiment of now what for generations. Moreover, this global pandemic has all of our vulnerabilities exposed. You know the ones that were hiding in plain site — food, housing and neighborhood insecurities (through gentrification) were always present. The ability to code-switch on a dime pairs well with the particular tolerance of ambiguity required in navigating workplaces and all white spaces. Together with the precarity of living from paycheck to paycheck many face when rent is coming due, has allowed what is everyday tribulation for us to go viral.
Still, liberation and resilience are born of the ways people move on from now what. They are the building blocks of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ risability my people know good and well. We are the feathered ones, ever rising from ash and ember.
Being wholly unpracticed in the way of sitting with ourselves, this forced moratorium on ripping and running, as my mother would call it, has brought to us an unexpected opportunity. Should we accept, we can now sit down with an old friend — our grief. Grief is the friend that waits patiently in the corner of the dusty room of our hearts. We attempt to distract it with new, bright and shiny objects and constant motion. Fueled by habits and systems that don’t serve us and that tell us we are not enough; we actually believe we are only as good as what we produce.
Sure, there is grief belying changing and uncertain times, much like we experienced after 9/11. In addition to the grief itself, in this particular moment in history, we are also present to the grief in the time it took to get back to our old friend to whom we promised we’d return. Maybe it was losing a loved one, a relationship, a job, or a home. Maybe we lost a friend or family member through estrangement, addiction or suicide. Or in the times we told ourselves we’d begin again and never did. Maybe it’s in the feeling of loneliness, rejection or undesirability we carry with us everyday. Swipes left will catch up to you.
Our own alienated sorrow is bound up in the heart hollering grief we’ve placed on a shelf one too many times. It’s tucked away in the five years of tears that have been welling up inside of us. A broken heart remains from the many times you’ve picked yourself up and dusted yourself off too soon. The effort I will extend to avoid my own broken heart is mighty and endless.
The existential hazard of sitting is seeing. So, what if in our collective sitting we posed the question now what, to ourselves? What if we stayed seated with ourselves and literally sheltered in place? What would arise? What would we see? Do we know the name of our old friend we quietly banished to the corner of our hearts? How can we make space, an altar, or a seat at the table for our forgotten friend? Our repressed collection of grief shut up in our bones wants to be expressed like pus from deep wounds and years of uncried tears.
Fortunately, this work is far from unrewarding and it may prove helpful in planning the next virtual sensation you’ve tasked yourself to create in our quarantines and social distancing.
I have digressed and I really intended this to be a letter of sorts. Every year, the American Counseling Association holds an annual conference and of course given the current global circumstance, it was cancelled. I had attended last year and this year I helped organize members of my cohort to come along in the way of professional development. One of the reasons I was excited to go was because professor emeritus, Irvin Yalom, who is now our profession’s leader on how to move existential thought into the counseling space was to be the keynote speaker. I was so disappointed at the loss of the opportunity to sit with and learn from him. I made shelter in place. I sat with now what, and out poured this writing.
I hope you have found something useful here. Now and in the days to come, please accept tending to your personal and our collective grief as a strategy for liberation. I appreciate the opportunity to reflect in your witness.
May you be deeply well,
Michelle Phillips
Liberation Strategist
Mental & Spiritual Wellness Practitioner
Seattle, WA
I would like to offer a deep well of spaciousness for the collective mourning specific to families who are unable to grieve their loved ones’ deaths and transitions in hospitals or have public memorials and ritual, group comfort and care due to COVID-19 precautions and social distancing. If you would like support in your process, please contact my dear friend and death doula, Yvette D. Murrell, here.
