Into the Storm

Recently, I was talking with someone who had just finished chemotherapy treatment. He explained why patients usually feel so crappy after a round of chemo, telling me, “Well, you know, it kills the cancer cells, but it also kills good cells.” I knew that chemo killed good cells, too, but I had never really put two and two together. I thought about how that same concept is true for so many things, and then I remembered a conversation from years ago that reminded me that one of those things is emotions.

I once had a friend who was on an antidepressant medication; he had been taking it for a few months, and then, just when it seemed it was finally beginning to work, he decided to stop taking it. This person was someone who the medication benefitted immensely—the pills made the difference between functioning normally versus staying in bed all day, depressed. As I witnessed him plunging into an emotional spiral after he quit taking the pills, I asked, “Why did you stop taking your antidepressant?” He said, “Because I can’t cry when I’m on it.” I blurted what I thought was an obvious question. “Who in the hell wants to cry?” His answer surprised me, but when I thought about it, it made sense—he said the medication didn’t just dull the “bad” emotions; it numbed all intense emotions, including ones like joy. In the same way that chemotherapy wasn’t selective with the types of cells it killed, the antidepressant couldn’t pick and choose which emotions it numbed. In his case, the depression was just one of the intense polar ends of his bipolar disorder. And because he had that disorder, taking the medication made sense, and stopping it without consulting his doctor first probably wasn’t a good idea.

But what about someone who isn’t clinically depressed or diagnosed with something like bipolar disorder—for example, someone who is dealing with the severe emotional fallout from a traumatic life event, like the loss of a loved one, a pet, or maybe the end of a relationship? Should that person try to numb the pain with medication, distractions, or any of the other ways we try to escape pain (recreational drugs, alcohol, excessive social media use, isolating/distancing from loved ones, hours and hours playing video games, sleeping too much, overeating/comfort food, etc.)? Antidepressants and other supports can help get a person through the darkest stretches, but they won’t eliminate the grief permanently. David Kessler, a world-renowned expert on grief, believes that grief is inescapable—we can try to outrun or avoid it, but eventually, we have to face it.

When discussing how to deal with grief, David Kessler reminds us that we can learn from how cattle and buffalo each deal with impending storms. When a storm is approaching, cattle run from the storm, but in doing so, they aren’t escaping the storm. It follows them, and because the storm is faster, it eventually catches up with them, and by the time it does, they are exhausted from trying to outrun it for so long. Buffalo, however, do the opposite:

“One night I happened to come upon a documentary called Facing the Storm, about the buffalos in Montana. Robert Thomson of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks discussed how buffalo run into the storm, thus minimizing how long they will be in it. They don’t ignore it, run from it, or just hope it will go away, which is what we often do when we want to avoid our storms of emotion. We don’t realize that by doing this we’re maximizing our time in the pain. The avoidance of grief will only prolong the pain of grief. Better to turn toward it and allow it to run its natural course, knowing that the pain will eventually pass, that one of these days we will find the love on the other side of pain.”

― David Kessler, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief

Looking back, after reading what David Kessler wrote about the buffalo, I could see that for most of my life, just as cattle try to outrun a storm, I had been trying to outrun the pain of losing my mother. I remembered that in my late teens, I went to a therapist for a reason unrelated to the loss of my mom. At the end of the second or third session, the therapist asked me to bring a picture of my mom the next time, so when I left that day, I didn’t stop at the front desk on my way out to make my next appointment; instead, I walked out the door and never went back. I never went back because I knew where she planned to send me to with that picture, and I was terrified at the thought of entering into the hurricane of sadness.

For close to thirty years, grief pursued me, but no matter what I did to try and escape it (alcohol was my primary vehicle), it never relented. And because I was so busy running from the storm, I never had time to stop and bask in the sun. I never let myself truly feel the painful emotions, and because of that, I was incapable of truly feeling the good ones. Sure, I felt joy, love, and connection, but just like the sadness that would sometimes get close enough to nip at my heels, those emotions came in brief spurts and were always fleeting. Now, I know that running isn’t the answer and that the only way out of grief is through it.

Just as chemo, when doing its job, kills the “good” cells along with the bad ones, for us to truly live and not just coast numbly through life, we have to allow ourselves to feel all of our emotions fully. We must let ourselves be sad enough to cry if we ever want to be happy enough to genuinely laugh. When we attempt to numb unpleasant and painful feelings, we inadvertently dull the good ones. When we try to outrun the storm, we end up like the cattle—so exhausted from running that by the time the storm catches up to us (and it will), we can barely survive it.

But, if, like buffalo, we turn and bravely walk into the storm, we don’t just survive it—we come out stronger and more resilient, with the courage to lift our faces toward the sky, enjoy the warmth of the sun, and admire the breathtaking rainbow that wouldn’t exist if not for the rain.