Being Human When Life Falls Apart
Dear Colorado. Boulder. Louisville. Superior. Our beloved Front Range Community:
There are no words to accurately define the grief that we have been wading through as a community. I apologize in advance that these words will likely fall short.
When the shooting at King Soopers happened in March of 2021, I was, like most people, shocked. I was left reeling from the senseless loss of life, the lack of answers, and the upheaval of a sense of safety that I didn’t know I valued until it was gone. Much in the same way we value the breath in our lungs. If we did not lose someone directly, we know someone who did. Or knew someone who was there. I attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and used to amble through that particular King Soopers late on Sunday nights. I said it myself and heard it from nearly every client I work with: “I could see myself there.”
When you can easily place yourself in the scene of a traumatic event, it stirs something in you. The grief is more palpable. The search for understanding is heavier. The desperate desire to regain a sense of safety within your home is murkier.
In the weeks following, many of my clients asked me, “How are YOU? How are you managing all of this?” And to be honest, I did not know how to answer. Witnessing the pain of my clients is something that has always deeply touched my own humanity. In those following weeks, I shed tears with clients, and I questioned myself. “Am I ok to be holding space for others?” I wrestled with the ineffable and did everything I knew how to do to care for myself. As it turns out, I am human, and ultimately decided that my clients needed a human to witness their pain more than they needed a stoic wielder of self-help tips and tricks.
I let myself be changed by the experience, and I am grateful I did.
Time passed and our community moved forward heartachingly beautifully. Climate crisis concerns crept their way into my therapy sessions more and more, as the Front Range suffered an endless barrage of snowless Southern California temperatures in the middle of December. And then our community once again made national news because we were enduring another trauma. Many of us were evacuated and watched as the Marshall Fire destroyed 1,084 homes and damaged 149 more.
Yet again, I mentally ran through the names of my clients, knowing they lived in or near the evacuated zone, and hoped they were safe. Here we were, just beginning to get our heads above water as another tidal wave broke over top. We were left ringing in the new year in shock. Wondering “why?” Again. With our sense of safety lost. Again.
Once more, the question came, “How do I talk about these things all day and experience the trauma myself, too?”
At the end of the day, I often felt like a well that never had enough water in it. As a therapist, it is deeply uncomfortable to sit with so much suffering and desperately want to ease it, knowing that therapy may ease some pain, but that it is a drop in an ocean of loss.
Sometimes the only way out is through, and even though I know in my bones this is true, I loathe that truth as much as my clients do sometimes. As therapists, we know we are not wizards who snap and banish the darkness, but damn do we wish we could in times like these!
My clients continue to tell me that it was all too much. The weight of the world feels unbearable to a community who has had to wade through too much. I wonder how we rise from such loss while still facing climate crisis, school violence, and inequality and injustice for our BIPOC and LGBTQIA communities? Sometimes my hands feel tied when I look at the world and allow myself to bear witness to it all.
Maybe it is not reassuring to hear that your therapist is human and wrestles with the same existential questions as you do. But frankly, I do not know how else to do this job. The ironic thing is it’s only by feeling the sticky, complicated emotions we most hate to feel, that we find our way through.
I see my clients face the realities of the world and it is probably the most beautiful thing I will ever witness. I see people rise to help one another and I see a community come together to figure out how we will wake up and face another day. When we ask one another if we are “ok,” perhaps it is just time we answer in truth: We are absolutely not ok. Also, we are indeed ok. Or moving towards it slowly.
Humans are far more resilient than we imagine, and that does not minimize the burdens of living in an unpredictable world that sometimes brings loss to our doorstep. But here we are, weathering the seasons of an ever-evolving world. Even when it feels impossible. Even when we ache physically and emotionally.
The thing that I have continually discovered is that it serves us much more to be honest about the mess of emotions within us—with a therapist, but also with friends and family. I can assure you that no one came to my couch in the last year and told me how exceptional they are doing. They did tell me how much they are struggling and how they do not want to burden anyone else with that.
But if we are all struggling, perhaps it would benefit us to come together in that vulnerability. Our community has experienced multiple traumas, and I believe deeply that we will be ok. How quickly we will be ok, or how long the ok-ness will last, I do not know (I am sadly not said wizard). But it is a perk of being a therapist to watch the resiliency of the human soul, even when all feels lost. I trust that resiliency innately. That does not mean I see people “getting over it” (whatever that means). I see people struggling and striving through the darkest of times and somehow finding their way.
My hope for our community, and our world for that matter, is that we allow ourselves to share the burden of these times with one another. You do not need to be ok. No one expects you to be superhuman—just human. In the mess of waking to face these days is the salve of living brokenhearted, grieving, and yet striving for hope, together.
Per aspera, ad astra,
Julie