By Lissa Carter, LCMHCS
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
Helene Aftermath: Real Work
Many of my friends and clients have been sharing that, as the recovery efforts here in Western North Carolina progress, they are feeling guilt, sadness, and a sense that their contributions are not “real”.
“I’m just grieving and crying, I haven’t been able to volunteer.”
“I’ve only been hosting families in my properties, I haven’t been able to get on the ground and help.”
“I’m only able to volunteer one shift a week.”
“I keep donating money but that’s all I’m doing.”
“I’m only now getting my head around the losses and realizing how I can contribute.”
“I’m only contributing as a parent/a therapist/a barista/a lawyer/a cook/a teacher…other people are doing the REAL work.”
We all know, cognitively, that there are people suffering in the world. But when the reality of it is so starkly visible, when we can SEE the contrast between the relative ease of our own lives and the struggles of others, something has to change in us to make sense of it.
One obvious danger is that we might, to relieve the cognitive dissonance, other the people we see hurting to make ourselves more comfortable with their pain. This might sound like inner dialogue along the lines of that would never happen to me because I am in the right political party/ make the right choices about how I spend my money or time/ don’t treat other people the way they do. In a sense, our brains are wired to form in-groups and out-groups, so we have to be extremely mindful of our own values and, when we notice this happening, gently name it as othering and remind ourselves how we want to show up instead.
The terrible, uncomfortable truth is that no one is immune to disaster, no matter how loving we are, or how carefully we prepare, or how much we meditate or pray. When our brains try to make others wrong to alleviate the pain of this knowledge, it’s important to notice this and to lean into compassion. This disaster has shown us how very interconnected we all are, how deeply we all rely upon each other. The wellbeing of others IS your wellbeing.
Another, more subtle danger is that we begin to other ourselves. That’s what I’m noticing in these “real work” conversations. There is a difference between a genuine desire to learn a new skill, to channel your energy toward helping by learning wilderness first aid or community organizing or carpentry— and the impulse to denigrate the power of your own actions or the relative value of your selfhood. When you diminish the importance of the actions you are taking, you remove yourself just as thoroughly from the interdependence conversation as if you had othered someone else.
We are all facing the reality that there are limits to our time, our energy, our courage—and no one of us could possibly do everything it will take to collectively heal. We can’t do this alone, we need each other. All of us.
It can be easy to quail in the face of what is needed and either work ourselves into burnout or decide not to act at all because who we are, what we have to offer, is not enough. We can’t afford either.
Wendell Berry has this to say about Real Work:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Bertolt Brecht famously wrote: Grub before ethics. If you are hungry, tired, grief-stricken, that’s your work. Eat. Rest. Grieve.
If you are feeling a sense of guilt or an impulse to action, and your basic needs are met, take a moment to gently contact that feeling. Your real work is the work that is closest to the center of who you genuinely are and how you truly want to show up. Stay close to yourself. The thing impeding you is likely impeding others. Clear it away for yourself, clear it away for someone near you, and let’s go from there.
May we find our way forward together, singing around the obstacles.
Join us this Tuesday—here in Asheville or online from anywhere in the world—for an evening of story in benefit of BeLoved Asheville.
Helene Aftermath: The Other Side of Apocalypse
For When People Ask
I want a word that means
okay and not okay,
a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all, all at once.
The heart is not like a songbird
singing only one note at a time,
more like a Tuvan throat singer
able to sing both a drone
and simultaneously
two or three harmonics high above it—
a sound, the Tuvans say,
that gives the impression
of wind swirling among rocks.
The heart understands the swirl,
how the churning of opposite feelings
weaves through us like an insistent breeze,
leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,
blesses us with paradox
so we might walk more openly
into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy.
-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
There’s a paradox here that many of us are experiencing. Within the deep grief, within the losses and anger and exhaustion, there are glimmers of beauty that we are not ready to walk away from. Devastation and joy walk arm-in-arm through the streets of Marshall and Swannanoa.
As my executive function slowly returns, I’ve been able to pick up Michael Meade’s book Why The World Doesn’t End. It’s well-loved; nearly every page is scrawled over with notes I made when I used it to navigate the COVID pandemic. He writes that the term apocalyse comes from the Greek apokalyptein, meaning to uncover, disclose, or reveal.
Apocalypse doesn’t bring the disaster. It reveals that we are standing on a thin veil beneath which seethes at all times the possibility of loss, grief, calamity. It’s always there. During times of apocalypse, the veil tears and we experience that second layer of life directly.
In his book Meade suggests that there is yet a third layer beneath this terrifying reality of what the world can do to us. In this third layer we find all of the treasures we’ve been experiencing here in the mountains amid the loss and grief: the generosity, the authenticity, the beauty in ourselves and those around us.
We don’t have a choice, in times of apocalypse—the veil tears. But we can choose, continue to choose, not to repair the veil. We can continue to choose not to turn away from that terrible second layer of life, to journey through and with it to that third layer where we find the truth of what we are capable of. We don’t have to climb back up onto the thin crust of what we had called normalcy and agree to keep our lives that thin. We can choose to bear the second layer as a way of accessing the third.
In alchemy, they call this stage solve et coagula.
The hardest part is facing the solve, the dissolution. It’s so hard not to choose comfort when comfort is available—even if, cognitively, we know that we cannot be comfortable and transform at the same time. But in times of apocalypse, solve is chosen for us. Comfort is not on the table. We are all flung into that second layer whether we will or no.
And now, we can choose: do we climb back up to the thin crust of “the way things were before”? Or do we stay—do we hold the tension here, the old way dissolved, waiting to discern what it is that we want to crystallize around? Do we take this moment to discern what we wish to send away with the solvent, and what we wish to keep? Do we keep sinking through this experience until life rests in that third layer?
We have a moment of opportunity. The solve has happened. What shall we crystallize into?
Don’t hurry into what’s next. If we are patient, if we ask the right questions, we can take this moment to re-form ourselves into shapes that are closer to the ones we wanted to be all along.
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
-Mary Oliver
Our next depth storytelling event, a benefit for BeLoved Asheville, will be taking place October 29th. Come and be held by story—sometimes the back of an old story is broad enough to carry what is too heavy for us alone. Join us from anywhere in the world—a recording will be provided for registrants who can’t attend live.
Helene Aftermath: Guilt, gilt, and gold
Have you been feeling guilty?
Guilty when you enjoy the sense of community and camaraderie in your neighborhood? Guilty when you find a way to get to a neighboring town and take a warm shower? Guilty when you cook a hot meal in your own kitchen?
I haven’t spoken with a single person since Helene that hasn’t mentioned some kind of guilt. The scope of your loss doesn’t seem to matter—in the aftermath of a disaster, you will likely feel guilty.
Which indicates to me that this feeling isn’t personal. And yet—guilt is such a terrible feeling that it’s almost impossible NOT to take it personally. The intensity of the awful feeling seems to suggest that in order for it to feel this bad, it must mean there is something equally awful about you. Doesn’t the feeling of guilt mean that there is something you need to change about yourself? Isn’t the whole function of guilt to get you to change behaviors that aren’t in alignment with your integrity?
I would propose that survivor’s guilt has a different function altogether. We live in a devastated community. The web of our social ecology has been destroyed. It would be easy—understandable, even—for us to turn away from that devastation and tend just to ourselves and to our families.
But survivor’s guilt ensures that we do not. It’s about restoring the web of the community, not about something you’ve done or not done.
It’s not yours. It’s bigger than you. It’s not about you. It belongs to the collective.
Here’s the rub:
If you take the guilty feelings personally, you might find yourself comparing yourself to others, undermining your own wellbeing with critical thoughts, or beating up on yourself for your luck or privilege. You might find yourself trying to change behaviors —like resting or taking time for self care—that are actually helpful to you. Unfortunately, these responses will harm your health, and they won’t repair the community.
If you take the feeling of guilt personally and try to escape the suffering by numbing it out, pushing it away, or distracting yourself, that’s not going to help either (as a mentor once told me: uncomfortable feelings don’t go away when you sidestep them. They do pushups.)
I think of those two responses as gilt guilt. It might look right on the surface, but doesn’t go all the way down. It doesn’t address what needs to be addressed.
Gilt responses to guilt are completely understandable because guilt feels so bad. In hedonic terms (pleasure, comfort) guilt is an awful sensation.
But in eudaimonic terms (from the greek eu, pleasure, and daimon, spirit—the pleasure of the spirit) guilt itself can be both helpful and good. Aside from the discomfort of the feeling, what it is trying to do is call your attention to something that matters.
Because guilt has gold in it, too. It can be what they call an “FGO”—an F’ing Growth Opportunity. Feels bad, is good. If you can attend to the feeling of guilt without using it to shame or judge yourself, guilt will tell you how to act on what matters.
Guilt + your values = gold.
For example: If I am feeling survivor’s guilt because I just sat with a client who lost her home and I have a completely intact home to return to tonight, I could try to push that feeling away. I could use it to belittle myself and feel shame about my own experience. Or, I can ask myself: what does this feeling of guilt want me to know about what matters to me? What could it tell me about my place in rebuilding the community web?
When I consult my own values, I know that whatever we rebuild, I want it to be more equitable, more resilient, more creative, more inclusive than it was before. Then, the feeling of guilt turns me toward the problem instead of against myself. It causes me to get curious about actions I can take in my community that are equitable, resilient, creative, compassionate, and inclusive.
When I sit with these values instead of taking the guilty feeling personally, I can recognize that my intact home is a resource for the community. I can shelter friends, family, and responders there—which will help me lean into inclusivity. I can cook nourishing meals there— leaning into resilience and compassion. I can host gatherings to build a sense of community, creativity, and equitability.
This doesn’t mean that I should be spending every moment in a frenzy of positive engagement. There will be mornings of crying, days of staring into space, times of connecting with family and friends and taking care of myself.
But it does mean that if I am suffering with painful feelings of survivor’s guilt, I don’t have to take it personally. Instead, I can use it to clarify my values and direct my feet toward what I would like to happen next.
In a former lifetime I heard Michael Meade say that when the kingdom falls ill, the answers come from the edge. Every person finds their thread, and they carry that thread back from the edge to the center, and the center is rewoven.
It takes all of us to stitch the web back together. Your guilt does not belong to you—don’t take it personally. No single one of us could ever do everything that needs to be done.
But there is gold in the guilt. It might just be the gentle nudge that helps you find your own thread, the thread that will weave you back home.
Our next depth storytelling event, a benefit for BeLoved Asheville, will be taking place October 29th. Come and be held by story—sometimes the back of an old story is broad enough to carry what is too heavy for us alone. Join us from anywhere in the world—a recording will be provided for registrants who can’t attend live.
Helene Aftermath: Accept Help
Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that the best way to make a friend was to request a favor. There is something about the vulnerability of requesting help that touches the human heart.
And yet so many of us seem to struggle with accepting help. Whether it is a fear of inconveniencing another person or social conditioning rooted in extreme individualism, we seem to have difficulty allowing others to give us what we need.
We are in a moment right now, in the aftermath of Helene, that some trauma response models call the Heroic Phase. In the heroic phase, we are capable of extreme efforts, both physically and emotionally, as we respond to disaster and trauma.
From the Institute for Collective Trauma and Growth