Having had a little less work this month after the end of the massive 6 month rainforest project, I have put my free time to good use, gardening, bobbing in the sea, and doing some reading / research / studying which I have had on my to-do list for a while. I decided to finally tackle the pile of books about grief and dying, which I have been only making cursory forways into up till now. (I took myself and a bag of books to Aberystwyth for a reading weekend. It was lovely. If you’re curious, the list of books is at the bottom of my /now page.)
I have been looking into addressing grief as a part of organisational change for a little while now.Whenever there is a change, even a positive one we are excited about, we have to let go of something to make space for the new. As organisations we focus on logistical processes, systems and governance, but we don’t generally make the space for people’s emotions; we assume they’ll muddle through eventually, and the responsibility tends to be left with the individual. But I believe we should, collectively, attend to the process of letting go and grieving, as part of the care for our teams of staff and/or volunteers – including our senior leaders. This does not happen anywhere near enough.
So I’ve been sourcing some reading materials about dying and grief, to learn in what ways they could inform organisational learning, change and development. I will come back to talk about this more as my models and thinking consolidate. But for now, I want to share a personal part of the journey of learning that I’ve been going through.
Doing all the reading led to doing all the self-reflection.And coincidentally (but are there any coincidences?!) the fiction (well, autobiographical memoir, really, but non-work reading) that I was reading and the series (very much non-work watching) that I was watching also added nuggets of insights at just the right moments. As they do.
I have spoken about this now with a handful of people, but it’s quite something else putting it in writing. It’s very much pointing out a tender place that is still raw and healing. (Please don’t poke it just for fun.) And there are all sorts of social constructs around sharing this sort of narrative, especially being this transparent in a place where I talk about my work. (It’s connected and it’s significant but it’s still scary to be this revealing.) And while some of the people involved are still around. You know, alive. While it’s unlikely, it’s possible that they could read this.
Anyway. Enough prevaricating. (I hide behind big words when I’m stressed.)
My childhood was not the worst, but it was also not the best. I grew up in a stable nuclear family of 3, with lots of structure and with my physical and educational needs very well taken care of. However, it didn’t always feel safe, and it often lacked emotional connection and support. I had occasionally mentioned the emotional remoteness to my therapist, but this year I also started talking about the physical violence.
Why have I never talked about it before? Partly because you don’t air your dirty laundry in public (oh boy didn’t I learn this lesson well). Partly because doesn’t every family have similar happenings behind closed doors? (It turns out, actually, no.) Partly because you owe respect to your parents, and you don’t speak ill of your elders and betters. You certainly don’t complain about the people who put food on the table and clothes on your back and care about you doing well at school so that you can secure a bright future. That would be ungrateful, which is very much frowned upon. And partly because other reasons which are a tangle of cultural norms, the costs of having conversations about bad events long past, and the lack of emotional connection and support which makes talking about the lack of emotional connection and support a very impossible meta thing indeed.
I also verbalised for the first time that while one caregiver was prone to violent outbursts, the other rarely intervened. So in a nutshell I didn’t grow up well supported by the two main adults in my life. As a result I don’t have a great relationship with my remaining parent (the other having died when I was 24), and I am an extremely self-reliant individual – I mean extremely in the sense of taking this to extremes.
Sharing this aspect of my history first with my therapist, then with extended family members and a handful of close friends, felt like a sort of coming out. I guess coming out as a person with a not-great childhood.Sharing a part of my identity which I had kept hidden from others, which I am learning to accept as being a part of me, and one not to be ashamed of.
It’s a funny thing, shame (funny weird not funny haha). As a child you think it is all your fault of course, if only you could be a better and somehow less bad child then they wouldn’t be so angry all the time.
In the series North of North, Elisapee tells Siaja: “It’s really hard to be a good mum when you didn’t get to see yours.” Jeanette Winterson’s autobiographical memoir “Why be happy when you could be normal?” offered me some insights into the experiences of people adopted as babies, the trauma which was never understood by social services, adoption services and generally society until recently, and my heart is heavy for my parent’s 75 years of carrying this pain around. The book also talks about linear time (the time passing marked by clocks and calendars) vs internal time (the time of memories and personal history, which we carry all at once, still live even though it all took place a long time ago).
As an adult I know objectively that what happened wasn’t my fault. While I can hold compassion for their situation, childhood traumas, and depression – the background story and the why – I am letting go of the shame about not having a great relationship with my remaining parent. It’s not a personal failure or a moral defect of mine that we do not have a warm, friendly, close connection. I am learning to redefine and accept our relationship, without pretending it should be other than it is. Helena Liu (in an article I was reading for something unrelated) writes about “love as combining acknowledgment, care, responsibility and commitment”, which is a flavour I feel I can live with.
I thought it took me a decade to process the grief of my parent dying when I was a young adult. But until now I hadn’t examined the remaining relationship and allowed myself to sit with that different flavour of grief.
We can grieve for people, that is an obvious kind of grief. We can grieve poor relationships, and what could have been, and the different selves we would be today if only. Acknowledging that bad things happened, accepting them into our own identity, and learning to live while holding them as part of us, that is a grief process too.
Like all grief, it’s messy and confusing, sometimes doubling back on itself, and it takes the time it takes.
What does this mean for organisational change? I suspect that the grief we go through because things are changing at work may well have tie-ins to our other grief patterns, especially those we haven’t acknowledged or processed yet. How do we address work-grief when it might uncover lots of personal grief, which people may or may not be ready for?
Hmmm. They may not be ready for it but it’s going to be triggered by the work stuff, so we should still work with it. We can’t compartmentalise looking at one grief but not another along some arbitrary boundary.
How do we make sure people are held and supported in a structure that enables them to process without collapsing? I *think* (this is my working hypothesis) that sharing models and shining the light on what is happening is helpful. Also confirming:
- that it is totally normal
- that it is not just “like a sort of grief”, it is actually grief
- that it is legitimate and not ridiculous at all to feel like this
- that there are ways through and that they will absolutely survive.
Investigations are ongoing. Watch this space for further developments on this theme.
