Today we experience death.
I know not all of my readers or followers are Christians, but I ask you to sit with me this weekend. The story of the death, ascension, and resurrection of Christ may have some truth for you even if you don’t have faith in it.
Today is the day we experience death. Staying home has caused many of us with trauma to lose a lot of our coping mechanisms, tools, resources, and distractions. What we are left with is the internal screaming of our trauma as it is surfacing, triggered, or just waving at us from across the room reminding us it’s there.
Many of us are reliving abuse, abandonments, terror, shame, rejection, and some of us are experiencing walking through death itself.
This is where I find myself today. Sitting with the reminder that I am not as far in my healing journey as I would like. There are still many dark places in story. There are still so many caverns left unlit. There is still so much anger, rage, fear, and shame swelling up internally.
Today I feel the death that Good Friday represents for me.
I got this cross tattoo in college when I was searching for hope. When I was looking for Sunday.
13 years later it’s no longer a symbol of hope for me.
It’s a daily reminder that death is art of the process.
I recognize that I am but human and I do not have the faith courage, grace, or mercy to cry out, “My God, My God! Forgive them! They know now what they do!”
Because earth side… I know they did know to some extent what they were doing to me. Not fully. But my anger wants to point the finger and scream, “YOU DID THIS TO ME.”
I feel the death of my biological family today. The concept that we were a family and then that family was put to death. Not once, but twice. Of what was and no longer.
I feel the death of my innocence as my sexual abuser took their misplaced anger out on my body. Of the before innocence and the after.
I feel the death of rejection as over and over I have been deemed unlovable, too much, too unpredictable, to unstable, and unworthy over and over and over again. Of the repeated blows we want to stop, but come to expect.
Cathy Loerzel of the Allender Center created a tool called the U Diagram. And it uses the imagery of this holy weekend, in conjunction with brain science, to walk each of us through our stories.
Today is the day we experience the death. We revisit the trauma. We acknowledge its occurrence. We feel the pain.
Today as many of us are forced to sit with our trauma, we are feeling the experience of death.
And this is the first step. Death. Who knew that healing could happen in such excruciating pain and death?
We don’t have to think about the next step. We don’t have to think about tomorrow or the Sunday of resurrection, that seems so far away…
Today we just sit.
And we hold onto the dirt at the bottom of the roughhewn wooden cross and we smear ourselves with it. We wear our pajamas as we shelter in place, and we cry out. Internally or out loud.
And we mourn.
And we grieve.
Today we cry out, “My God! My God! Why have though forsaken me!”
References and resources:
Adam Young, LCSW : The Place We Find Ourselves Podcast, Episode 24: How Healing Happens
https://adamyoungcounseling.com/2019/10/09/how-healing-happens-part-1/
Andie.ink 
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