Tag Archives: language

Leaning in…

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I was listening to a Hazelden webinar on adolescent suicide.  The presenter talked about the importance of engaging the suicidal teen, encouraging them to talk.  She identified the three most important words to say when you’re the one being told, “Sometimes I feel like killing myself.”  What were the words she thought had such power to connect? “Tell me more.”  Three small words with the potential to change the course of a person’s life.

“Tell me more.”  Three words that invite someone to share their pain and confusion.  Why are those words so often left unspoken?  Perhaps because encouraging someone to hand us their pain may be the right thing to do, but it is rarely the easy thing to do.   In fact the willingness to stand and hold another’s pain often leaves us facing our own discomfort.

“Tell me more.”  I replayed those three words as I went about my day.  I thought about how they fit other situations.  How powerful those words could be with those who grieve.  How in the midst of grief we long for someone to ask us to tell them more about who and what we have lost.  How holding the pain of someone else’s loss feels uncertain and uncomfortable, and so we hold back.

I was still chewing on the benefit and difficulty of “Tell me more”, when my weekly dose of Modern Family came on.  It is Phil Dunphy’s favorite day, leap day.  He has big plans to do something out of the ordinary to celebrate.  But as the day continues, things begin to fall apart.  Phil pulls the two boys, Luke and Manny aside in an attempt to salvage their celebration.  He leans toward them and says in a low, somber voice, “I have a plan.”  The boys just stand there.  Phil adds, “It’s kind of traditional to lean in when someone says they have a plan.”  Both boys immediately lean into the circle.  No hesitation. Focused.

That’s when it came to me.  What Phil Dunphy had to say was important.  And when someone has something important to say, we need to lean in.  To lean in and embrace what is being said, giving the words, the feelings, and the person our presence. Perhaps no territory feels more uncertain and overwhelming than the landscape of grief and loss.  When we find ourselves in the presence of wounded travelers and their story, needing to lean in, our first impulse may be to just stand there.  Sometimes we even step away.

Forty five years ago, John Drakeford wrote a book titled, The Awesome Power of the Listening Ear.  It was a book about the “power of simply listening to others”.  I think Drakeford’s intent was to help us push past discomfort to a place of leaning in.  A place of inviting others to tell us their stories.  What if in the presence of grief and loss, we begin to lean in, and quietly say “Tell me more.”

“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.” ~ George Eliot

Singing my ABCs…

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I want to say big thank you to Debbie at Two Minutes of Grace, for sharing the ABC award with me. The time it has taken me to respond is no indication of how much I appreciate being thought of by Debbie.

The ABC instructions are:

Add the logo to your site.
Pass the ABC award on to other bloggers.
Use the alphabet to make a list of words describing you so readers will learn more about you.

I am pleased to pass the ABC award along to these wonderful bloggers:

bethechangenyc

The Reinvented Lass

Carol Wiebe Wonders Out Loud

Slowmoto.Me

grandfathersky

for the love of Nike

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally, and often far more, worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” ~ C.S. Lewis 

Debbie, I borrowed your C.S. Lewis quote to introduce my ABC list, not of words, but of children’s books I love.  Some are from my own childhood, some from my daughters, and some I have enjoyed reading to my grandchildren.  I have used many of them in my therapy practice with people of all ages.

An Alphabet of Children’s Books

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day – Judith Viorst
Angelina Ballerina – Katharine Holabird
Are You My Mother? – Phillip D. Eastman

Best Friends for Frances – Russell Hoban

Corduroy – Don Freeman, Calamity – Camilla Ashworth

Dinosaur’s Divorce – Marc Brown

Ella the Elegant Elephant – Carmela & Steven D’Amico

Franklin in the Dark – Paulette Bourgeois

Giving Tree, The – Shel Silverstein
Guess How Much I Love You – Sam McBratney

Horatio’s Bed – Camilla Ashforth

I Promise I’ll Find You – Heather Patricia Ward
I Was So Mad – Mercer Mayer

Just Like You – Jean Fearnley
Just Go to Bed – Mercer Mayer

Kissing Hand, The – Aubrey Penn

Llama, llama, Red Pajama – Anna Dewdney

Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane – Kate DiCamillo 
Midnight Farm, The – Reeve Lindbergh

Not A Box – Laura Vacaro Seeger

Oh The Places You’ll Go – Dr. Seuss
On The Night You Were Born – Nancy Tillan

Polar Express, The – Chris Van Allsburg

Quiet Book, The – Deborah Underwood

Ride a Purple Pelican  – Jack Prelutsky

Stellaluna – Janell Cannon
Snowy Day, The – Ezra Jack Keats

Talking Like the Rain – X.J. & Dorothy M. Kennedy

Up and Down – Oliver Jeffers

Velveteen Rabbit, The – Margery Williams

Whale’s Song, The – Dyan Sheldon

Pooh’s Xylophone Book,  closest I could come to get an “X”. 

You and Me, Little Bear – Martin Waddell 

Zoo for Mr. Muster, A – Arnold Lobel

How many of you have found yourselves singing the ABC song in your head, maybe even under your breath, when trying to put something in alphabetical order?  Please tell me I’m not the only one.

The language of loss

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There are a handful of books in my library that I decided to buy before I knew much about the contents, because the title was intriguing.  One of those is Steve DeShazer’s Words Were Originally Magic.  I thought of the title again when I decided to write about “the language of loss”.  I discovered that DeShazer’s title was inspired by these words.

“Words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power. By words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair.”     Sigmund Freud

I don’t know that the language of loss is magical, but it is powerful.  It has the power to heal, to offer respite, to comfort.  It also has the power to confuse, to limit, and at its worst to harm.  Language is at the center of the things we tell ourselves, how we think out loud with others, how we experience this life. The words and phrases we use are like the weft and warp on a loom that determine the pattern and texture of the fabric.  I wonder how the fabric of our grief might look if we wove it with a different language.  Would it comfort us to know that our experience and expression of grief is not a sign of craziness, but a richly woven fabric of our common journey?

I have sat with many people over the years in moments of grief, but I can only speak with certainty from my own.  I can’t say “closure” or “saying good-bye” are a help to me if they mean I will come to an end of grief, that I will be done with who I lost.  If my job in grieving is to finish, and to finish means to end the relationship,…well, I’m going to avoid that finish line at all costs.  I have no intention of being done with those I’ve lost.  But what if our relationships are not bound by time and space.  What if our grief is not about the end of relationship, but about how relationships change when death comes.

In the movie Shenandoah, Charlie Anderson, played by Jimmy Stewart, is a widower trying to keep family and home together in the midst of the Civil War.  Charlie often visits the family gravesite to talk with his dead wife Martha.  He tells her about the children and the war.  He asks her questions and shares his thoughts.  These private, intimate moments between Charlie and Martha assure us that our relationships continue beyond death.  In the midst of the sadness and pain of loss, Charlie Anderson also finds comfort and the strength to continue.  Even in death, Martha remains his partner for the journey.

When we don’t talk about death, we are at risk of believing that our experience of death is not only unique, but may be evidence that we’re crazy.  We may worry that our ongoing involvement with our loved one means we’re “stuck” in our grief.  We may also worry about what it means when some of our memory seems to be slipping away.  Sometimes we can remember details of a person’s hands, can hear their voice, can see them moving, but their face begins to fade.  I don’t know what it means that we can often call to mind so much about someone we love, while their face becomes a blurry, veiled image.  If our eyes are windows to our soul, perhaps a face that fades in our mind is a reminder that our relationship is no longer defined by a physical body, but now fills the universe.

If we are going to discuss death, we need language.  But experiencing loss and death is not the same thing as the language we use to describe it.  Language can be concrete and limiting.  Loss continues to remind us that it will not be bound by a word.  That it is often gray and messy.  Don’t be afraid of the language of loss.  It’s the willingness to speak our loss into words that creates a language of possibility rather than limitation.

“We’re fascinated by the words–but where we meet is in the silence behind them”
                                                                                                                 -Ram Dass

The Essential Conversation

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I love books.  My idea of a great time is going from section to section in a bookstore, the bigger the better, looking for titles and covers that spark my curiosity or speak to an interest or need.  I have been known to buy a book because a title caught my eye and I trusted the contents to be just as interesting.  “The ESSENTIAL Conversation:  What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other”, by sociologist, teacher, and parent, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot was one of my best “title” purchases.  If the title hadn’t caught me, the introduction would have sold the book.  The author wrote:

“I believe that for parents there is no more dreaded moment, no arena where they feel more exposed than at the ritual conferences that are typically scheduled twice a year–once in the fall and once in the spring–in schools. . . it is also the arena in which they [teachers] feel most uncertain, exposed, and defensive, and the place where they feel their competence and professionalism most directly challenged.”

After a quick read, the book went on a shelf until a few months ago.  As school came to a close I thought back over nine months of encounters with students, parents, and teachers.  I explored ways to make those times more helpful, more effective.  I found myself thinking of how our interactions as parents and teachers are occasionally like angry ex spouses, anxious and defensive.  We know that children often get lost and compromised in the crossfire of divorce.  I began wondering how often children are also hurt by our failure to work together as families and schools, parents and teachers.

Parents and teachers are two tremendous resources with the power to impact our children and society.  The times I have watched adults step past their anxiety and uncertainty to talk to each other in a parent/teacher conference in order to help a child succeed in school have excited me. Unfortunately we often avoid the encounter completely.   Or we approach our meeting as adversaries, becoming defensive and territorial in ways that rob us of the very thing we want, to be a part of preparing our children for a healthy, successful adulthood.

I thought of “The ESSENTIAL Conversation”, and what an appropriate, meaningful title it is.  I pulled the book off the shelf and began to read again, more thoughtfully this time.  I reviewed my own school experience trying to imagine my parent’s “conversations” with teachers.  I recalled sitting in the parent chair across from teachers as we discussed my children’s performance and progress.  I wondered if both the teachers and I were worried that we would be “blamed” for the problems and would have to give up all credit for the successes.  I took some comfort in Lawrence-Lightfoot’s thoughts:

“From my point of view there is no more complex and tender geography than the borderlands between families and schools.”

“. . . my own hard-earned wisdom as an educator and social scientist concerned about these matters did not prepare me for the depth of emotion and drama I felt in parent conferences.”   “I always suspected that other parents were experiencing some version of my anguish, but that they too were struggling alone and making it up as they went along.”

“I could also tell that teachers had their own deep concerns,  their own sense of exposure and vulnerability.  And I knew that most of them had not been adequately prepared in their professional training programs to build relationships with families as a central part of their work. . .”

We are less than one month into a new school year.  How can we take advantage of all our family/school encounters in ways that encourage our children to learn and enhance their learning environment?

Whether you are teacher, parent, or both:

  • Remember this “conversation” isn’t about you, it’s about your children.  Learn to calm your own anxiety so it doesn’t get in the way of working together.
  • Believe that sharing your observations with that other adult will allow you both to discover solutions to problems and will magnify the celebration of success.
  • Recognize each other’s efforts.  Kudos help us know we “did good” and motivate us to do more.
  • Be willing to start the conversation and to keep it going even when you disagree.  Tolerate the discomfort for growth.

For schools:

  • When you say parents are welcome at school, really mean it.
  • Encourage family involvement and look for creative ways to make that possible.

For families:

  • Be present in your child’s school experience.
  • Know their teachers and their curriculum.
  • Attend school activities.
  • Communicate with teachers in person, by phone, and in writing.

“The ESSENTIAL Conversation” considers “how the tiny drama of parent-teacher conferences is an expression of a larger cultural narrative.”  For me it is a reminder that the “tiny drama” of parent/teacher conferences isn’t so tiny after all.   You be the one that begins the conversation.