Are there any coping mechanisms for grief other than distraction?
I guess my baseline levels of happiness are probably roughly where they were before my mom passed. I just--idk. I want to not feel empty. I have so much, but I’ve also lost things I can’t regain. I’ll never experience an adult relationship with my mother, I was barely an adult when she died, and I spend a lot of her last year avoiding thinking about it.
I still remember when I was driving with her to the grocery store, and I realized that she would probably die within a year (this was about 3 months before). And I decided to start emotionally withdrawing from her. Like this was a mostly conscious decision on my part. I’m not sure how I had become so dispassionate that I could do that, probably a coping mechanism I’d been working on since her first bout with cancer like 15 years earlier. And I honestly don’t know if that was the wrong choice. I don’t think I could have coped with that summer otherwise.
I started grad school basically on the premise that I’ll never have the final answer of what I want to be, and it was better to keep moving ahead since I’m on a path that leads to good things, or at least things that are close to the values that I am sure about. But I’m not sure if that strategy is sustainable.
And I wish I could talk to her about it. Even if she heard what I said through her own filters and prejudices, she still listened better than my dad. She wasn’t just waiting for me to finish so she could tell me another 15 minute story about her life, she really made an effort to meet me on my level. I wonder if we would have come to understand each other better if I could have articulated myself as well as I can now.
Maybe this is really what I want from a therapist? A surrogate mother.
