By Anne Harbison
"To fashion an inner story of our pain carries us into the heart of it, which is where rebirth
inevitability occurs." - Sue Monk Kidd
You'd know that I grew up in Kentucky, I was a national speech competitor in college, and my first job was at Procter & Gamble. I received my doctorate researching leadership development. I've been married to my college sweetheart, Steve, for over twenty years. We love being parents.
Pretty basic stuff, which makes it a tame (and lame) icebreaker in the retreats I facilitate for leadership teams. But conversations like these get more interesting when we start telling the stories behind the stories. So...
Before joining P&G, I spent a year with a music group that traveled around the world. We were in Eastern Europe when the Berlin Wall came down, performing in the shipyards of GdaĆsk where Poland was invaded at the start of WW2.
After P&G, I joined an...
Remember Alexander and the Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? Maybe you’ve had one or two of those lately. Some (bad hair) days are truly atrocious, but often we use “catastrophe” language as a dramatic default.
I could just kill her…
That was literally the worst thing that could have happen…
Never in a million years did I see that coming…
I would die if that happened to me…
She’ll never recover...
And those were simply reactions to when Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt broke up. Seriously, I have said ridiculous, exaggerated statements over articles in Entertainment Weekly. For you, it may be when the sports star misses the tie-breaking shot, your favoriteTV series is canceled, some juicy gossip gets unleashed, a friendship betrayed. Of course, it’s hyperbole. But still, words and mind-sets matter.
Yesterday I shared my victory story of embracing Joy and Sorrow (literally). I hope you let both the simplicity and the...
When someone we love is in pain, we long to relieve their suffering. We have an impulse to jump in, fix the problem, cheer them up, get enraged over the injustice they’ve experienced, or offer up “everything happens for a reason” platitudes.
I can tell you as someone who has experienced deep grief that I understand, and am even grateful for these responses. The other person is vicariously experiencing the pain of my loss, and like me, feels helpless over their inability to make it go away. Like the person suffering, they want nothing more than for life to go back to what once was.
I can also tell you from experience that these responses are not ultimately helpful, even though they are well intentioned. After our son died we were showered with gracious care and support. But every now and then, the intensity of someone's attempt to make me feel better actually shut me down, and in a few cases caused resentment. Several times I felt like I was comforting...
There’s a saying when you’ve lost someone very close to you that the second year is worst that the first. After we lost our son, that sounded like a cruel joke. How could anything be worse than the devastating pain we were living during that year of “firsts” without Ben - the first birthday, holiday, plane ride, school pick up, hockey game, etc.?
I’m not sure that “worse” captures what I experienced, but the pain of year two (and the years since then) definitely shifted. I was in a constant state of disbelief in the first year. Even months after his death I’d be going about my day and in an instant it would hit me, as if for the first time, that he was gone. It felt like a cosmic punch in the stomach. I would actually feel dizzy over an inability to compute what had happened. I now know how common, and even necessary, that disbelieving shock is. At some level we simply cannot bear the new reality, so our minds shut down to give our...
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