Tag Archives: trauma

Jun 12 2016
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grief and trauma, learning to live, on, social work, to my students, what students are teaching me, what they are teaching me

an open letter to my students

i-also-remember-this

An Open Letter to My Students on the Eve of the Orlando Shooting.

June 12, 2016

Dear Students,

You likely woke up today as I did: late. You may or may not have turned on the news as is my morning wake-up custom, coffee in hand and multiple snoozes later. Within moments it became clear that there was yet another mass shooting while we were sleeping. This morning’s shooting at a gay night club in Orlando. Over 100 dead and injured.

I remember thinking ‘My soon-to-be godson is to be baptized today. My responsibilities seem yet-again larger now.’

I’m late to the service by a few minutes this morning; I know you’re not surprised. I stood too long at the television in my bedroom, clenching the wooden ledge on top of the dresser left in the room by my great, great-aunts who were the unusual of their era; they were highly educated, remarkably fashionable, and unusually independent women from a time where that was not allowed. No doubt they were recipients of both celebration and judgment. The dresser left in the bedroom of this house they used which I now sleep in has new fingernail marks as of this morning, left accidentally as I should have been dressing for a baptismal service but was instead being washed again in the blood of others.

“I also remember this, and wish I did not,” as Didion once said. I remember that I was not surprised.

Yet another killing, this time the largest mass shooting in our states’ history and the largest terrorist attack on US soil since my freshmen year of college when I sat in a lecture hall of Blanchard at Wheaton and watched the towers fall before my eyes.

I remember this morning thinking that I was surprised that morning as an 18-year-old hopeful, but that I am not surprised now as a 32-year-old hopeful. And it is the hopefulness of my better wiring which has been wanting to talk to all of you all day long today, even though you’ve managed to sneak away from me for the summer. I’ve managed to talk to you in one of our random, side conversations all day long in my head regardless. Then I decided that I hope you might hear it.

Many of you value your faith deeply; I do as well. Because of this, those who believe differently from you are owed your love and honor. The faith you claim has told you so; the faith leaders you are bothered by have challenged this. Follow your faith.

Many of you think
public policy,
issues of social policy and social welfare,
wealth and poverty,
emails to your governors and senators and representatives
(unanswered as most of them go…which you will remember),
childhood development and influence,
family structure and complexity,
group norms and roles,
mob mentalities and social capacities,
and research formulas and findings
aren’t connected in any real way
to your deep desire to help those who are in need.

The crimes of today should remind you that these things are all connected.

The language and now law signed in by Governor Bill Haslam in Tennessee that allow therapists to legally hate and discriminate by refusing counseling to those of the LGBTQ community affected by today’s mass shooting is an issue of policy, welfare, wealth and poverty, legislators who listen and those who ignore (and are paid to do so, which you will remember), legislation and its [silent] funders, biological development and its influences, structure, complexity, norms, roles, mob mentalities and social capacities, research and its findings…

This language and this legislation and these legislators and these voices are the authors of the men and women who will come into your offices and onto your caseloads wounded, orphans of those killed by this morning’s violence, orphans of those who had parents who lived lives of silence or submission to a norm, or stood silently in the back of your sanctuaries on mornings like these as you went to church and thought it was a regular Sunday morning.

I felt the need all day long today, now pushing the clock to make it honest, to let you know that I expect the world of you.

I am pretty sure I have told you this. You will be the best.

I expect a whole other kind of world from you. I expect you to wake up on days like today with the news of the moment and the heart of a saint that is both willing to break the rules and willing to break the norms to dig your fingernails into the wooden ledge on top of the dresser and be late for something planned and appropriate because you decided you had to stand up and speak out for something possibly inappropriate because it puts all of our humanity at risk.

So in class, when I hound you and harass you and rap at you and sing at you and yell at you and take points from you and even when I feed you in an effort to buy you, please know this: I do all these things so that some day, some Sunday morning when someone is waking up and committing to go to church and pledge gratefully to be a godfather for a young man or young woman who has not yet learned to distrust the world…

I do all these things so that you will remember that it will never be okay for us to not be surprised at this kind of hateful news that greeted us this morning.

I’m counting on you.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

 

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Sep 30 2015
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grief and trauma, on, the calendar, what they are teaching me

Lord willing, we won’t keep growing

Our Jackson Home posted a piece I wrote reflecting on this year’s Remember Me Walk for survivor’s of homicide loss. This group is astounding to me, and I’ve copied some of the post below with a link to read it in its entirety. And if you have not yet checked out Our Jackson Home, you should probably get on the ball.

Screen Shot 2015-09-30 at 2.50.23 PM

The crowd was larger this year than any crowd the past seven. The Carl Grant Events Center at Union University was filled with tables surrounded by people of all kinds, ages, colors, and worlds held together by the sad reality that someone they loved has been murdered—some of them fifty years ago and some five months ago. The reality that no one truly understands this grief is echoed in the camaraderie across the room. “Lord-willing,” they say, “we won’t keep growing. We don’t want other people to know what this feels like.”

Grief is breathtaking. All have experienced it, and we know the deep-down grumbling in our guts that must be an echo of the deep-down grumbling in our souls.

A life is lost. A story ends. …

Click here to keep reading on Our Jackson Home…

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Feb 21 2014
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art and photography, grief and trauma, learning to live, Quotes

more than our sorrow

we-are-more-than-our-sorrow
He sat down at the table with me briefly while I ate and he waited on food to go from the cafe. Since he knew of the chaos raging, not much had to be said. I looked up and tried to squint in the way we try to squint when working to hold back tears that we are tired of.

The same way we squint that usually fails when someone knows of the raging chaos.

As tears began to crack and run down the edge of my runny nose, he said, “It’s like a bomb got dropped in the backyard.”

More tears. Nods. Then conversation about weather, salads, and other things neither of us cared about.

I’ve noticed a sense of being caught between surveying the damage and trying to move. The quote housed about my desk that refrains often in my own mind and heart when things seems unbelievably devastating felt a little out of reach at this point. To quote it, even to myself, felt like cheating the grief and confusion and fury and loss that was gripping everything inside of me:

We fill the craters left by the bombs
And once again we sing
And once again we sow
Because life never surrenders. 

– Anonymous Vietnamese poem

I could not imagine myself filling the craters yet, much less singing and sowing because I could not yet fathom or feel the extent of the damage, I could not sense the size of the crater left by the bomb in our backyards. I could only survey the damage. And with every glance, its complexity became deeper and harder to wrap my hands around. I would find myself staring into the crater and disappearing in my thoughts. I was beginning even to have trouble remembering what used to be in it’s place. All I could sense and see was a crater. Impossible to fill.

But somewhere, a sense that we, in community, always fill the craters, kept me from jumping in completely to the loss. Phone calls to friends and mentors. Visits to kitchen counters and living room floors. Weeping and asking and not answering.

And then, somewhere, even while still surveying the damage left by the bombs, something somewhere insists that we are our sorrow, but we are also more than our sorrow. We are also our hopes and dreams and work and errands and children and families and lives and friends and promises of the future. “We are more than our sorrow” Thich Nhat Hanh says, and so we enter into the reality that is the only thing stranger than the reality of the chaos. We enter into the reality that we are all of these things at once, in our humanity, and we must be all of them at once to find a way to move.

And so we move.
Because we are more than our sorrow, even as real as the sorrow may be.

djordan
Michigan Ave, Chicago

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Jul 21 2013
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grief and trauma, learning to live, reviews, social work

gracefully critical

gracefully-critical

Recently on vacation, the most stressful part of planning for the trip was not packing, arranging the house details, getting work squared away; the most stressful preparation was choosing which books to take when I knew I would have a week of incredible views, delicious food, and nothing to rush for other than finding a place to sit and read.

I had been saving Becca Steven’s new book, Snake Oil: The Art of Healing and Truth Telling, for the trip and it definitely did not let me down.

The book’s author, an Episcopal priest on Vanderbilt’s campus, founded Magdalene, a residential program for women who have survived lives of prostitution, trafficking, addiction and life on the streets, in 1997. From this work and the reality that getting clean and off the streets isn’t enough to support a new and whole life, she and the community around her began Thistle Farms, a social enterprise run from top to bottom by members of the Magdalene community, and involves making oils, candles, paper and more from the highway-found, stubbornly resilient and ultimately delicate thistle. As the women work in vats of oils and in meetings of scent-testing or tubs of paper-making, they are both creating an income, adding quality products to the market and community, and telling a story of healing and hope through the thistle.

Already a fan of Stevens after hearing her speak a few years ago, and following the work and even more so the spirit of the work at Magdalene and Thistle Farms, I’ve learned much about the nitty-gritty of what it means when Stevens says, “It takes a community to put a woman on the street, and it will take a community to bring her home.”

In our work at Area Relief here in Jackson, it’s that push for working to see the delicate beauty in what others have overlooked as weeds that is at the core of who we are. We aren’t great at it, as we often look at ourselves as much as those around us, as wasted and useless. But once we begin to work in the grace and hopefulness that whispers of the kingdom add to any story, we begin to find that we are becoming a part of healing community, seeing others healed as well as ourselves.

What struck me the most when reading Steven’s book was her uncanny ability to be gracefully critical. It is no butterfly and sunshine story of human trafficking, abuse, molestation, drug addiction, fundraising, second-guessing, and ultimately losing many battles to drugs and sex and objectification. It is no easy work no matter how ethereal our ways of speaking. There are power players to be called out, habits to be carefully questioned, ways of operating to completely burned up. And yet Stevens manages to tell the truth about all these issues in ways that lead the reader to want to be more hopeful, more loving, more compassionate, more trusting, more free in the promise of kingdom come.

The hard work of seeking first the kingdom is not child’s play, and yet we’ve been charged to work at it as a child. Truth-telling and healing all at the same. Silence in the face of injustice is not God-honoring, but neither is pessimistic cynicism. Stevens’ work is a strong and beautiful reminder that the kingdom comes through the action following graceful criticism.

And the kingdom does come.

djordan
Juneau, AK

To order the book, CLICK HERE.
To learn about Thistle Farms, CLICK HERE.

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Oct 17 2012
8 Comments
learning to live, what they are teaching me

he measured time in houses

When asked how long ago something happened, he said, “three houses ago.”

We were both laying on the floor of my therapy office, playing with cardboard boxes painted to look like bricks. Recently adopted into the “last house” he was placed in, at around ten years old, he’s in trouble here and there for stealing and lying.

I’m always amazed at how conversations are hijacked by the problems, and both parent and child never notice that the problem begins to run the show and determine who the child is and who the child will be. Most of the time, the therapist is fooled as well.

Trying to see how we could stack the cardboard bricks in ways that would almost crash down, but stay standing, it was his answer that snapped me out of my haze. It was his answer to a simple question that made me realize I had been thinking about him as a child who is a sometimes thief and liar, rather than as a child who, after his parents were caught and incarcerated for drugs, has moved so many times to so many different foster homes, it has become a reliable method of time-telling.

Me: “When did you last see your mom?”
Him: “Three houses ago.”

The session ended soon after, with block stacking and rearranging happening as I was realizing how off-track I’ve been in working with him. The only other words spoken once he answered “three houses ago,” were one last exchange between the two of us before our time was up.

Me: “Do you know I think you’re a pretty strong dude?”
Him: “No.”
Me: “Well, I think you’re a pretty strong dude. Can we discover together next time what it is that makes you so strong?”
Him: “That would be cool.”
Me: “I think so too.”

 

djordan
Nashville

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Oct 02 2012
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grief and trauma, learning to live, what they are teaching me

the class who shows up | on the 5th annual homicide-loss walk

After five years of standing in line watching men and women, propped up babies on hips and grandparents escorted with walkers, this year was different altogether.

It is both encouraging and discouraging to see the crowd grow year after year at the Commemorative Walk for survivors of homicide-loss. It’s been my privilege to listen to and learn from these men and women in a weekly support group, but to see them walk through candlelit paths holding photos of their murdered husbands, sons, grandsons, wives, mothers and grandmothers is altogether horrifying and holy at the same time.

And it has been every year these last five years since the very first walk. It is always holy in the way honestly telling the honest truth is always holy and almost always horrifying.

But this year, there was something new for me as I stood in the evening’s mist.

Looking into the line of men and women with faces barely glowing from the candles in their hands, I saw my students. The clock strikes nine every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and my students are faithful to be patient with me in class as I dance onto tangents, threaten with grades and bribe with food. They have listened to me grow awkwardly teary about the histories of movers and shakers from the margins of the field whom God has used to bring kingdom change across the globe. They have held on as we’ve acted out counseling sessions, as we’ve debated the reasons for poverty and welfare, and as we have pushed the questions of power dynamics and our goodwill to the limits. They always show up.

But this night, lining the sidewalks where women and men who have become dear to me walk through their glowing candles and make clear that their murdered loved ones will not be forgotten, my students showed up. As tears filled my own eyes, I lost my breath in thinking that these very students were standing physically and symbolically right on a dangerous line. They were being both witness to the hard and horrible and hopeless truths like rampant homicide in a community, and were also making a symbolic promise that as social workers who are Christians they will join in the kingdom work to make peace on earth as it is in heaven.

My prayer for those students and any of my students, is that some day in the not-so-distant future there will be professors of Social Work or Theology or Education or Business standing up in front of their own classes telling the names of my students, and talking about how they pushed in from the margins to make peace and to change the world with and for Christ and his kingdom.

And when I hear those stories told, I’ll remember the way their faces glowed this night.

djordan
Pine Tree

RELATED POSTS | what they are teaching me | what they are teaching me 2 | when others tell their stories

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Aug 22 2012
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from the archives

from the archives | loss as loss, not as lesson

 

In reflecting on the upcoming one-year anniversary of mosthopeful.com on August 23, I’m throwing some of the posts that readers have looked at the most back into the mix. Thanks for allowing me the space. It’s been a most humbling experience.

Below is the most viewed post from the blog over the last year, the first year of the blog. Thanks to the friends, families, and clients who have helped me grow in understanding and practice as it involves those grieving, and for helping me learn that we are all learning how to live in a world that is not yet whole.

+++

View the original post and comments from March 12, 2012

 

loss as loss, not as lesson

 

Loss as loss, not as lesson

Maybe it springs from our own deep need to protect ourselves when we know we cannot.

When a tragedy happens of some kind, especially the loss of a son or friend to a kind of accidental death, it is our nature to jump to working at meaning-making. When someone is lost to old age, or even long-term illness, there are many bedside conversations that make space for meaning to be made.

I am sorry for this.
I want you to know this.
I wish we had this.
I want us to do this.

You mean this to me.
You taught me this.
You are loved.

But when an accident happens, or a sudden death, or a suicide, or a crime…
There is no time for words to fill the space.
No hands touching hands.
No way to know they know.

And so we end up stuck on this side of the sleep, trying our damnedest to make sense of the whole thing. We look into every question we could possibly ask to make meaning, and there is none to be found. Often those closest to the loss are stuck spinning in the losing itself, until they can solve it, keep it from having ever happened, get those last words in.

Which of course, proves meaningless as well.

And then there are the onlookers among us, tucking our children in at night, kissing our spouse, patting our buddies on the back, and wondering what we would ever do if we were to lose them.

That’s when we find ourselves making the loss a lesson, as if that makes it worth happening. As if it protects us from it happening to us or those we love. We begin to talk about how “it has taught us …”

And there is an illusion to our nature of doing this that suggests there is meaning as long as we learn something from it. If we make a tragic loss a lesson, it won’t be meaningless anymore.

But I don’t want my dead son, spouse, buddy to be a lesson; I want them to be my son, spouse, buddy. We want lives to be meaningful, not deaths. We want to say their names and images of life, not tragedy, to be conjured up. And when they are gone, especially when I didn’t have time to make meaning with them, I want to grieve. And I want them to be remembered for what their lives taught others, not their meaningless, untimely, horribly tragic death.

The meaning is in remembering who they were.
The grief is in losing them to begin with.

The loss is a loss.
Meaningless.
Void.
Empty.
It is not things as they should be.
It is before all things are made new.

There is, however, meaning in remembering.
And grief is not our enemy, but a sign that we have hearts full of love and woven with connection.
In our caring for the greiving, may we, like our God, be close to those whose hearts are breaking.

Breaking hearts are not a lesson; they are breaking hearts.
And they, in themselves, are worth all the world.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

 

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Jul 17 2012
2 Comments
grief and trauma, what they are teaching me

apparently still and incredibly crisp

floored again in dialogue with a client today
the incredible resilience following him into the room
ignored by the very person living under so much
withstanding, but still struggling
struggling with real and reasonable and incredible grief

and still holding it together
hair on, face on, courtesy on, honesty on

the wrestling only barely under the surface of
otherwise apparently still and incredibly crisp waters
all hiding
all hoping
no one notices what a mess
we all show and tell each others stories

and in hiding and hoping no one notices
we all ourselves fail to notice
our fighting resilience as the only thing stronger than our struggles
and the only thing strong than our fight to hide our struggles

until we see it through a dark mirror
that we all look much the same
and we are all incredibly resilient as we float over
otherwise apparently still and incredibly crisp waters

djordan
Pine Tree

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Mar 14 2012
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grief and trauma, on, what they are teaching me

on grief | a collection of work

Click any of the images below for past reflections on grief and trauma, loss and losing, and the kind of mix of hopelessness and hopefulness that always accompanies both. Here, again, is a favorite quote on grief:

“Real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right – either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room. And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.”

+ Walter Brueggeman, The Prophetic Imagination


Remember Me Commemorative Walk for Homicide-Loss Survivorsa time for everything under the sunheavy boots, i pinched myself, extremely loud and incredibly closejohn chapter 11, lazarus, jesus, mary, marthalazarus, mary, martha, jesus, death, grief, time, too lategrief, losing, loss, death, sudden death, violent deathgrieving in public, grief and the news, sadness, publicity, gossip

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Oct 29 2011
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what they are teaching me

what they are teaching me | 2

There is something quite stunning about this group of men and women. I watched them walk through the candle-lit, witness-lined path at the fourth annual Remember Me walk for homicide-loss survivors, and while emotions varied from person to person, there was a stunning mark of resilience that was breathtaking on all faces. Faces covered in tears beamed with resilience. Faces covered in solemnness beamed with resilience.

And it is stunning.

I am prone to be all one thing.

All furious.

All joyful.

All hopeful.

All helpless.

But I am learning the deeply human art of being all of two things at once. I am learning to carry two emotions in their fulness at one time, refusing to let one swallow up the other. I can be enraged at injustice, arrogance and ignorance on my own part or the part of others that causes grief and pain in the world; and at the same time, I can be grateful for the peacemaking, the meekness and the thoughtful engagement on my own part or the part of others that slowly gives promise to the reality of the coming kingdom.

There is this need for the truly human women and men to stand in a space between horror and hope and refuse to lie about the former in an effort to find the latter. There is a call to stand, much like Christ, with arms outstretched in an effort to keep a tight grip on both reality and promise, knowing our hearts can hold the tension.

And these men and women––walking with photographs in hand of the husband, daughter, mother, grandbaby they had ripped from their lives in violent murder––they walk, faces shining with complete resilience and complete grief. They promise by the mere act of putting one foot in front of the other that God has placed deeply within us his own nature of being fully enraged and fully proud of all that humanity is and will one day be.

Kingdom come.

djordan
Memphis, Tennessee

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