grief

S.A.D., in So Many Ways

Couples Intensive, Couples Therapy, Emotional Focused Therapy (EFT), Hold Me Tight® Workshops

Dear Readers,

I started writing this blog over a month ago now.

Every year, as we move into the fall season and the trees start to change colors and the days become shorter, I write a seasonal blog post to bring awareness to Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.) as well as strategies to prepare and cope with it. When I started writing this year, my working title was “S.A.D. is here…are you ready?”

However, in an unexpected twist, I found myself wholly unprepared for the tragic and sad events that took place on October 7th. The day when my homeland of Israel was attacked, when innocent civilians with babies, children, youths and elders among them were brutally murdered and taken hostage.

Regardless of where you stand geopolitically, the loss of so many innocent peoples’ lives and the violence of the attack left me, my family, my family of friends, and the whole country of Israel in shock, in deep pain, and in acute grief. And in additional to the terror of the attack, the war and violence continue.

I feel deep gratitude for all of you who reached out to me with care, empathy, and to offer sympathy to my country. For a month now I have been frozen in grief, not able to reach out or to finish my blog. When we are grieving, life can feel like it’s been reduced to only what’s necessary to survive.

As I’ve started to write again, this post has taken on a different name: SAD in So Many Ways. The sadness of innocent lives lost, of the loss of hope for peace, and of being caught between governments on both sides that do not care about their citizens.

In Ester Perel’s recent blog post, Reading & Writing in a Time of War, she talks about coming together with each other in times of grief.

‘Despite all that is splitting us, we are trying to really see each other and connect through our humanity. We talk about our grief, how our feelings aren’t binary, how we agree more than disagree. We talk about the people who are experiencing the hell of war on the ground—loved ones, friends of friends, and strangers—and how we can help them. We are not turning away from this conflict, we are turning toward each other. As Peter Levine says, “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathic witness.”’

She also gives advice about how to approach this conversation.

‘ – Try reaching out to someone in your life whom you know is close to this conflict.
– You don’t need to make a point.
– Keep it general but heartfelt.
–“My friend, I have been thinking about you and wanted to affirm our connection. There is so much to say about this war but, right now, I just want you to know that our friendship is important to me. If you ever want to correspond more about what is happening or just about life, I am here”
– Release yourself of the expectation to get anything in return. this is a difficult time for so many and we are all processing it in our own way.
– What matters is that you show you care.’

There are no winners in war,
but countless lives will be torn apart.
Filippo Grandi, head of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR

Seasonal Affective Disorder

And while feeling all of the sadness, I still want to speak a bit, on Seasonal Affective Disorder, and it’s impact.

As the days get shorter and the nights get longer, fall leads into the darker portion of the year in the northern hemisphere. Along with this shift into the darker months, some of us will experience mild or even sever changes in our emotional states. Even if you’ve never suffered from depression, you can experience symptoms of S.A.D.

It’s important to be aware of S.A.D. so that if you are impacted, you can take steps to find the support you need. Don’t brush off that yearly feeling as simply a case of the “winter blues” or a seasonal funk that you have to tough out on your own. Take steps to keep your mood and motivation steady throughout the year. Treatments for S.A.D. can include light therapy (phototherapy), psychotherapy, and at times supplements such as Vitamin D or medications.

I have been so grateful to have my therapy practice to lean into in these times. Being with my clients in the office gives me a sense of hope and purpose, a feeling that regardless of what is happening, I can still contribute to making the world a better place, one hour at a time.

Big News: Hold Me Tight® Costa Rica

Many of you have followed my Hold Me Tight® Couples Workshops journey. You have seen me offer, facilitate, and lead successful Hold Me Tight® Couples Workshops here in Nevada City, CA, over the past ten years. Earlier this year, I decided to take a leap and push a new edge for myself; I booked a Hold Me Tight® Couples Retreat, this coming May, at the beautiful Imiloa Institute in Costa Rica.

A view from Imiloa Institute in Costa Rica where we will be holding our next Hold Me Tight® Couples Workshops this coming May.

After the tragic events in Israel and seeing my homeland go through such hard dark times, I’ve had a difficult time sharing about this retreat, feeling the stark juxtaposition of such a joyful experience, against the reality of so much suffering.

However, I’ve realized that now, more than any other time, we need connection, and we need to heal, and we need to find ways to reignite our belief in love and life.

And so, I want to invite you to share this new adventure and challenge with me at our next Hold Me Tight® Couples Retreat in Costa Rica at the Imiloa Institute. Join us for 6 days, May 18-23, 2024, to share, and to reignite your relationship, in the magnificent healing beauty of Costa Rica; in the midst of a lush jungle with toucans, sloths, monkeys, butterflies, and your partner.

Once again, I am feeling immense gratitude to Dr. Sue Johnson on whose work Hold Me Tight® Workshops are based. She embarked on this journey of figuring out couples relationships and broke the code for “‘what it is to love,” discovered the obstacles to secure attachments, and pioneered how to form long lasting bonding connections with our loved ones.

Owen Marcus, MA, author, workshop facilitator, co-founder of EVRYMAN, and TEDxTalk presenter on Masculine Emotional Intelligence, will once again be co-leading this workshop with me. (Owen’s TEDX talk).

Owen brings with him the width of decades of leading and facilitating men’s group all over the country, helping men access their masculine vulnerability. Owen’s presence, and his work with couples and men, will enhance this upcoming Hold Me Tight® retreat.

Flyer for our upcoming Hold Me Tight® Couples Workshops at Imiloa Institute in Costa Rica.

We are looking forward to share this Hold Me Tight® Couples Retreat and are happy to answer any questions you might have during a free consultation. Please fill out our brief questionnaire to ensure we tailor this consultation to your needs and help us make the most out of our 30-minute session together.

We are offering a 10% reduced fee for early registration.

Fill out a brief questionnaire to book a free 30 minute consultation for more information.

Book free 30 minute consult

Please do not hesitate to contact me privately by email at dalia@daliaanderman.com, or call or text my cell: 530.218.2721.

In gratitude and love to all of you,
Dalia

P: 530-692-0680
DIRECT EMAIL, or via
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_{Hold Me Tight® is a registered trademark of Sue Johnson, founder and originator of Emotionally Focused Therapy.}

Grieving, Loss, and All that we took for granted

Couples Therapy, Emotional Focused Therapy (EFT), Hold Me Tight® Workshops, Individual Therapy

Dear Friends,

Sorry for being MIA….This post has taken a long time to write. Every time I sit down to write to you, something bigger happens, and becomes more important to write about.

We have gone through so much this year, from Covid-19 pandemic, political strife and upheaval, demonstrations, Black Lives Matter, fires and evacuations, to everything in between. It has not stopped.

Thanks to all of you who have reached out and checked in about our evacuation. I am back home and safe, and our little town is OK although California is still suffering intense fires. We are only at the beginning of fire season and fall is when most of the big fires have happened in the past. THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS who risk your lives to save our homes.

Those of you who know me are aware that every year, on the week leading up to Labor Day, (this week!), I make a pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to partake in the Burning Man festival event.

Burning Man is a temporary city of 80K + participants, based on principles of inclusion, self reliance, sharing and gift economics, radical and free self expression, community building, and so much more culminating with a ‘burning of the man installation’, and the burning of the Temple at the closing of the week.

Over the years of participating in Burning Man as a spectator and a guest, I found my own way to contribute to this amazing event. I now go every year as part of the Mental Health Branch (CIT- Critical Incident Team) of the Emergency Service Department (ESD). They call us ‘psychs on bikes’. We provide mental health services to deal with anything from home sickness and drug overdose to sexual assault and domestic violence.

But every year, I also, hesitate about going. Burning Man is hard on me. Between the heat, the dust, the noise, the overwhelm, and yes, at time the loneliness, I take my time to decide about joining my team. Although, every year I end up with a resounding yes…

And then came 2020, and we cancelled the event. Like so so many special events this year, Burning Man got cancelled due to Covid-19, and not wanting to put so many at risk.

It was no longer a decision I got to make…

Like so many of the happenings and not happenings of this year, that which we all took for granted… travelings.. weddings.. seeing family.. seeing friends.. eating out…hugs, are all no longer an option.

Of course we all adjusted and became creative. Here in the small town where I live in Northern CA, streets became pedestrian streets, tables and planter and umbrellas and hey stacks became the new look of summer evenings. (And I actually really like it).

My practice moved online. At first seeing clients on Zoom was strange. I miss the presence of my clients sitting right across from me having the ability to read body language and the energy in the room. But like so many other adjustments, it became normal, and I was able to continue helping my clients.

How naive was I when I wrote my January blog… Can the New Year be 2020?

For most of us, hindsight is 2020, we can look back and see what we did not see, we can have clarity where we were not paying attention, and we wish that we knew then, what we know now..

For most of us, what we are feeling right now is a lot of confusion, frustration, fear, sadness, and grief. There is a lot of grief around losing the lives we lived before Covid and all those things we have taken for granted.

In a touching interview and testimonial of Kessler, the world’s foremost expert on grief, ‘The Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief’ , by Scott Berinato he quotes:

Yes, and we’re feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.

In our discomfort, we are looking for meaning.

Viktor Frankl, M.D Ph.D. was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. He came out of the most difficult situatio, surviving the holocaust while losing his entire family, and wrote about the meaning of life.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. Viktor Frankl.

In her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Lori Gottlieb, write

We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists.

One of the hardest punishments in prisons, is solitary confinement. Being disconnected from human connection is coded in our brain as danger. In my blog ‘A Tribe of Two – Connection in Time of Isolation’ I wrote:

We have all been encouraged to ‘socially distance’ so we can reduce the spread of the Corona Virus. However, being alone is Interpreted in our mammalian brain as ‘Danger’, and Being Connected is Interpreted as ‘Safe’..

When we are disconnected from our family, friends, tribe, coworkers, we may develop ‘Social atrophy’ , and our emotional muscle memory can become numb or frozen.

I invite you to share your own story of these tough times, and the ways you have coped and survived, and also how you became creative and even found meaning.

One day it will all be behind us. One day it will be an intense story to tell. Let’s remind each other that we are in this TOGETHER.

Be well, stay safe, and keep in touch

Virtual Hugs and Love,

~Dalia

P: 530-692-0680
DIRECT EMAIL, or via
CONTACT FORM

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Will I ever feel whole again? Coping with grief

Hold Me Tight® Workshops, Individual Therapy

“Our silence about our grief serves no one. We can’t heal if we can’t grieve; we can’t forgive if we can’t grieve. We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend. We can’t rise strong when we’re on the run.” Brené Brown .

We all know grief, we all have been there. It’s hard to write about grief. It is so private and personal and deep. It is sacred and we let only few into those dark chambers and at times shadows.

Recently I decided to ‘take myself to therapy’ and deal with some issue and wounds that have been ‘unattended’.. as we say ‘physician – heal thyself‘.. I knew, but was able to ‘walk around it’, how early grief can become strategies for coping, but that I needed to deal with that grief.

What has been coming up for me is how I formed early strategies around early trauma and grief. How we learn to survive and even strive, by forming strategies of numbing, dissociating, ignoring, minimizingg… anything to ‘not feel the pain‘. those strategies can become ‘tragedies’, when those neuron-paths in our brain, create an ‘operating system’ that default to not feeling or not caring.. or pushing through, or ‘getting over’. Without the proper grieving, our childhood survival copings, can become our ‘crutches’ and our ‘shut-downs’ later on in life.

I always say, there is no healing without grieving and no forgiving with out grieving.

A widow once told me how her family wishes she was ‘over her grief’ already, and how much she wants, but can not, ‘get back to normal’ even after all those years. We need time to grieve and heal, and there is no time line.

A mother who lost her child told me, ‘You never get over the pain, you get use to living with the pain and the loss, but I will never be whole again’. When we lose someone we love, it is like we lose part of ourselves, and yes, we may never be ‘whole’ again.

A parable that always touched me was the Parable of the Mustard Seed about a woman who lost her child to death, and how the master told her he can cure her child if she brought him mustard seed from a house that was not touched by death. ‘Bringing the body of her son with her, Kisa found Buddha and pleaded with him to help bring her son back to life. He instructed her to go back to her village and gather mustard seeds from the households of those who have never been touched by the death. From those mustard seeds, he promised he would create a medicine to bring her son back to life. Relieved, she went back to her village and began asking her neighbors for mustard seeds… As the day became evening and then night, she was still without any of the mustard seeds that she had been instructed to collect. She realized then the universality of death’.

In her well known work about grief, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross talks about The Five Stages of Grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – as part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

David Kessler who coauthored books with Elisabeth Kubler- Ross, writes: “The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. Our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief ‘s terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life and loss. At times, people in grief will often report more stages. Just remember your grief is an unique as you are.”

In my own experience with grief, and working for decades in my psychotherapy practice helping clients cope with grief, I know that it is not a linear process. We may feel that we are moving around and around in circles, feeling like we are never going to feel better again, and we feel stuck in our grief. For me, I look at it as more like going up a spiral, we seem to be going in circles, but we are ‘up a notch’, every time.

But the truth is, we do not need to get anywhere – anytime. We need to take time to grieve. Grieving over the loss of a loved one, a relationship that ended, kids leaving home and staying in the empty nest, aging, sickness, loss of health, there are many times of grief in our life. Taking time to grieve is so important and essential.

In her work on grief, Brené Brown, Ph.D., talks about the difference between empathy and sympathy and how important and how most essential it is to bring empathy into our life and into our work with grief. “Grief seems to create losses within us that reach beyond our awareness–we feel as if we’re missing something that was invisible and unknown to us while we had it, but now painfully gone.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong

~~~~~~ It is that time of year again ~~~~~

Those of you who know me, know that every year on the week leading up to Labor Day, I make a pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to partake in the Burning Man festival event.

I find Burning Man, with its gigantic artistic and creative art installations; enormous pilgrimages from all over the world; the principles of sharing, INCLUSION, gifting, and self-reliance; and the conflicting beauty and hardship of the tough desert conditions; to be compelling.

I have also over the years of participating, found my own way to contribute to this amazing event. I now go every year as part of the medical team on the Mental Health Branch (CIT- Critical Incident Team) of the Emergency Service Department (ESD), they call us ‘psychs on bikes’. We provide mental health services to deal with anything from ‘home sickness’ to ‘drug over dose’, to sexual assault and domestic violence.

Here is the blog post I wrote few years ago about my work at Burning-Man.

Burning Man is not just a fun and crazy festival. For me it is connecting with myself in the desert, time for reflection and re-set of the year. It is also a time for grief over losses. The Temple at Burning Man is a sacred place to grief losses of loved one. The temple is built and designed as a place of solemn reflection and prayer. It honors loss, holds space for grief, and offers a shelter for those in need of sanctuary. People create sacred alters a the Temple to honor their lost ones. The Temple is the spiritual dimension that grounds much of the festivities. On Sunday, the last day of Burning-Man, the Temple and its content is burn in a silent ritual.

Here is a good article about the Temple at Burning-Man. behold-the-dusty-beauty-of-the-burning-man-temple

When living hurts – you do not need to do it alone

Couples Therapy, Hold Me Tight® Workshops, Individual Therapy

“We’re taught to be ashamed of confusion, anger, fear and sadness, and to me they’re of equal value to happiness, excitement and inspiration.” ~ Alanis Morissette

There are times in our lives when ‘Living Just Hurts’…

We know those days when it is hard to think of getting out of bed in the morning, getting dressed seems an unreasonable task, and the need to interact with others is overwhelming. It is hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel, and hope seems to be just another four-letter word.

Whether we are feeling sadness, anxiety, depression, grief, loneliness, hopelessness or helplessness, there are times when every step in the journey of life can be excruciating.

“Some days, 24 hours is too much to stay put in, so I take the day hour by hour, moment by moment. I break the task, the challenge, the fear into small, bite-size pieces. I can handle a piece of fear, depression, anger, pain, sadness, loneliness, illness. I actually put my hands up to my face, one next to each eye, like blinders on a horse.” ~ Regina Brett

Then there are those times when our heart breaks. When we experience rejections, disappointment, abandonment, or betrayal by a loved one, it can be so painful. It feels like we are dying. We imagine that anything would be better then feeling that pain.

We all know that rejection hurts, but neuroscience has concluded that it does in fact, literally, hurt. While the brain does not process emotional pain and physical pain exactly the same, MRI studies show that the the reaction and cascading events are very similar, and a natural chemical (painkiller mu-opioid) is released during both events. We now know this same experience occurs when an individual feels slighted or rejected by others.

Maia Szalavitz writes, ‘Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can hurt just as much. Indeed, according to converging evidence reported in a new review in Current Directions in Psychological Science, physical and social pain are processed in some of the same regions of the brain’.

In the Brain, Broken Hearts Hurt Like Broken Bones

So yes, when we say that ‘our heart is hurting’, we actually are translating those excruciating emotional feelings as real pain. No matter, heart-breaks are so hard and devastating that it can make us feel that we can not take it any more.

Grief and bereavement can be so overwhelming, that it does feel that ‘living hurts’. At times of grief we go through waves and cycles of denial, anger, depression, hopelessness and helplessness. Grief can bring feelings of shame, blame, guilt, regret, and depression.

“The five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.” ~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Coping with losing a loved one is one of life’s great difficulties. If you have experienced the pain of mourning, you know that any way to ease the loss is welcomed. While our knowledge and study of grief continues to evolve, it’s important to note that not everyone grieves the same way: we have individual patterns and outlets for grief.

We feel so alone in our loss, that it is crucial to be reminded that we do not need to do it alone. At times it feel that no one can understand us.

Life’s transitions, can also bring a sense of emotional devastation and overwhelming stress and sorrow.

It can happen with aging; sometimes we lose our health, we realize we have to learn to slow down. At times retirement can be scary and anxious with a loss of identity; when the kids leave home and go to college or they just move away, we feel the empty nest.

Those events can result in unbearable emotional pain, and at times we lose our sense of meaning in our life.

At times, we do not even know why we are feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, alone. It is just there, weighing heavy on our heart. We feel we just want the pain to stop. We want it to go away. We need HELP.

When Living Hurts, you do not need to do it alone. Reaching out to a friend, someone in the family, a tribe or a community member, can help us carry the load of the grief, the loss, the sadness. Reaching out reminds us that we are not alone.

We need to master the courage to say ‘I need HELP’.

At times of troubles we need to be able to turn to our loved ones. Loneliness can intensify helplessness and hopelessness feelings. We can not do life alone. Our DNA codes loneliness and isolation as a threat to our survival.

Few weeks ago, the Oroville Dam was being compromised and it forced emergency widespread evacuation. It was tense and scary. One of the couples in our January Hold Me Tight workshop was affected by the evacuation. They wrote me this testimonial:

“Thank you for your email. We live above the Dam so we were safe, however trying to get all of the family up here in one hour was extremely stressful.
We were very grateful that the turn of events turned out better than anticipated. Thankful for the work we did at the workshop, we found that in this extreme situation we both turned to one another for support, comfort and strength. We would like to thank you once again for the powerful, uplifting and life-changing weekend. It has done miracles for our relationship and we continue to grow from it daily.”

Our March Hold Me Tight workshop is Sold-Out!!! We will offer another one soon, please go to our contact me page on the website and join our mailing list to be notified about our next Hold Me Tight Couples Workshop event.

Blessings for the upcoming spring…

with warm regards,

~ Dalia

(530) 692 0680
dalia@daliaanderman.com
http://daliaanderman.com/workshops
https://www.facebook.com/DaliaAndermanMFT

Seasonal Affective Disorder

Big News: Hold Me Tight® Costa Rica

We are offering a 10% reduced fee for early registration.

Fill out a brief questionnaire to book a free 30 minute consultation for more information.

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