All Signs Point to Healing
Nicole ushers in a new season of Here For Me by discussing detours, and how veering off the path we had planned can be scary and beautiful all at once. In her most personal and vulnerable episode to date, she updates us on how she’s fared through the break between seasons, during which she experienced a clearing in the grief after the end of her marriage, and shares the lessons learned from this time of going inward.
Show Notes:
The Tower card in tarot
Nicole’s curated playlist—her favorite songs by her favorite bands—that has carried her through grief (get it on Apple Music or Spotify)
Study demonstrating how music therapy can help those with PTSD
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[00:00:03] Welcome to Here for Me: a podcast about the power of choosing yourself. I'm Nicole Christie, and I'm honored to be here with you to share life altering stories, lessons learned and advice from leading experts that will help you show up for yourself with the love, honor, compassion, and encouragement you give to others. Because just as we say, “I'm here for you” to show we care for someone, saying I'm here for me to ourselves is the best form of self-care.
We're talking this season about detours, about times when we intentionally or unintentionally, take an unexpected turn in our life's journey. Some detours are forced upon us or we take them to please others or meet expectations of our family or society, or just due to our own fear. Sometimes we take a detour because our hearts pull us in that direction, even if it doesn't make sense on paper. We tend to think of detours as veering off course, going in a direction we're not supposed to go, and needing to course correct to get back to who we are and where we need to be. By this definition, a detour is a distraction, a mistake. But I want to throw out a theory for you to noodle on: What if there are no detours, at least as they're typically defined? What if we're exactly where we need to be all the time? What if it's all the path of life? And detours are just twists and turns, hills, and valleys, all of which teach us something. Maybe to let go and enjoy the ride, knowing we'll end up exactly where we're meant to be.[00:01:45] I'd venture a guess that detours also teach us something about ourselves and often lead us to ourselves. This is the mile marker of the most recent chapter of my own journey. As I mentioned in the mini episode at the end of season one, the latest twist in my path is the end of my marriage. Last year, my husband and I decided to go our separate ways. And since then, I've been feeling my way along the unique and complicated feelings of this detour. The one where I left a troubled relationship. As it turns out, what I've experienced on this journey is known as “disenfranchised grief,” a type of grief that isn't openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly supported because society doesn't deem it worthy of grieving. Examples include job loss, infertility, and in my case, the end of a relationship that isn't healthy. For me, this detour brought mixed feelings that have been hard to unpack. Relief that it's over, pride that I found the courage to end it, and a sadness that doesn't make sense. If a decision is right and for our highest good, if something that was hurting us is gone, why do we grieve? The reason is because all change is loss, and all loss is grief.
[00:03:05] Any change, even good ones like marriage or the birth of a baby, means the loss of something else. In those cases, someone’s single life or child-free life. You could say that's a bit of disenfranchised grief as well as our society doesn't acknowledge loss when something wonderful happens. But our bodies do. Our bodies register the loss and trigger the grieving process. And it can really fuck with your head. It's why newlyweds and new parents find themselves sobbing in a heap on the floor and wonder, why am I upset when something amazing just happened? There's a similar reaction when you end a dysfunctional relationship. Suddenly you're free and you feel hope and optimism for the road ahead. And if you're me, you're Ted Lasso “Bye Bye Bye” dancing in your kitchen. And minutes later, your Kings of Leon “WALLS” sobbing on your bed. Breakups involve the loss of a person you loved, the life and the love you had and the future you thought you'd have together. But I've been learning about this other kind of grief because it wasn't unfolding as I've experienced with other breakups. I found myself not grieving the person, because we had so little emotional intimacy. Not grieving the life or love because daily life had become so painful. Nor was I grieving the future because I could never see that far out.
[00:04:26] And now I can. And it's beautiful and hopeful and authentic and aligned with what's always been meant for me. Yet the emotional pendulum. The “Bye Bye Bye” dancing, interspersed with the Kings of Leon sobbing, told me I was grieving, and I wanted to understand what was going on. Why was I upset when something so right was happening? So I went down a rabbit hole on what grief looks like when an unhealthy relationship ends. And two things resonated for me. One, grieving the loss of self. And two, grieving the loss of who you thought your partner was and what you thought you had. I never felt I lost myself because I never strayed far from who I am. But I did abandon myself, burying my true self in a nearby shallow grave. The beauty of this was that it wasn't too hard to reclaim myself. I just had to wake up, dust myself off and start walking. The hard part was informing my newly awakened self of what had happened. And that gap is where the grief materialized.
I grieved, not valuing myself. I grieved abandoning my goals and dreams, taking a back seat in my own life, not asserting myself. Not loving myself. Not respecting myself. I grieve, not seeing clearly, ignoring red flags, giving the benefit of the doubt for far too long. Taking someone's side when I should have taken them to task.
[00:05:58] And most of all, believing when someone told me I was loved and valued, though their behavior didn't match their words. This is what this kind of grief feels like. It's elation and hope and deep shame all at the same time. As I worked through these feelings, I found myself sleeping very little and listening to a lot of loud music. Like a lot of loud music. While I'd been married to a musician, music was rarely played in our home. At least the music that I, a rock and roll girl to the core from Seattle, considers her lifeblood. And so I drowned myself in it. Airpods on full blast, nearly from the moment I started the pour over coffee in the morning, to the moment I poured the glass of lemon water I take to bed every night. Loud, hard-charging music day in and day out for months. The bands I love, but that were never welcome in my marriage. Pearl Jam. Kings of Leon. Foo Fighters. The Strokes. The sounds of more hopeful days. The days before I kicked myself into a shallow grave and believed something was what it wasn't. Before I fell in love with a storyline that wasn't true and would never come to pass. I was filled with adrenaline, sleeping 4 to 5 hours a night, so distracted I could barely eat or work.
[00:07:20] I'll be honest, I worried about my mental health and that I might be sliding into something I couldn't pull myself back from. But I also knew on some level this is grief. It didn't look like typical grief, but it was how I was experiencing it. I told myself, keep an eye on it, but ride the wave and let it take you to shore. After a couple of months of this, I talked about it with a friend who suggested maybe I was drowning out my feelings, that maybe if I sat in silence for a while, or at least cut back the near around the clock rock concert, I might more effectively feel and process what I was experiencing. So I put myself on self-imposed silent retreat for three days. I didn't believe I'd process everything in that time, but it was a start. I sat in silence and tried to force tears by looking at old photos, our wedding album, reading the letters he wrote me in the early days of our relationship. But all I felt was fondness for those times. I'd been through plenty of breakups where this sort of reminiscing would trigger a torrent of tears that cleared the cobwebs from my heart and mind and pushed me a step further down the healing path. But it wasn't working this time, and I worried I wasn't doing the hard work.
[00:08:41] When my three days was up, I spoke about my concern with a friend who's an intuitive healer, and she said: “Nicole, you've been letting go of him for the last three and a half years. You let go while you were sick, your body grieved everything for you.” It was like a punch to the gut. The “a-ha” heard around the world. I knew she was right. And as much as I felt relief, I also felt simultaneously sorry and grateful for my body. Sorry I'd so ignored what was going on around me, that it had to do the hard work for me and in such horrific ways. And yet deeply grateful that it processed a level of dysfunction my mind couldn't wrap itself around. There were still the painful realizations to grieve the self-abandonment, the shallow grave. The person I thought I knew but didn't. But I'd been letting go of him and the relationship and the storyline for years. It felt shitty. Like, why didn't I let go sooner? Set him free. Set myself free. But the grace I gave myself was you didn't know. Because I didn't. My mind couldn't wrap itself around that dysfunction because it had too much hope, too much belief in the story I wanted to tell. The one where love conquers all, especially long-distance love. The kind everyone wants to see pan out Hollywood style. As this sunk in, I started sleeping more.
[00:10:12] 2:30 a.m. bedtime slid back to 1:30, then 12:30, then 11. I began to feel more regulated. The adrenaline was wearing off. My focus was returning. I started taking steps toward things I wanted for my business, my health, what I wanted to build with new friends. I scrubbed the entire house, purged possessions, saged and smudged, and palo santo-ed, and mantra-ed the fuck out of the joint. I bought myself a very snazzy selenite lamp that is beautiful and modern and right in my foyer where it can best do what it does: clear negative energy before it makes its way into my space. I had let go. I was rebuilding. I was home.
One day I unexpectedly felt tears knocking on my eyelids, my body letting me know I needed to ride an emotional wave and feel some shit. So I found my way to the couch and gave in. And when that emotional wave subsided, as they always do when we ride them to shore, I looked out the window and saw two things I had never noticed in six months of living in the space. The first was a mural featuring the image of an angel with the words “Trust me.” I'm not sure if it means to trust the angel, the universe, God, the path I'm on, or just myself. But through my tears that day, I decided to trust all of it.
[00:11:43] And the second thing right across the street from the mural was a condo building named The Tower, perched just above a church aptly named First Lutheran Church, which coincidentally is the name of the church I grew up in. Stay with me because I'm going to get woo-woo for a second: The placement of the condo building against the church's steeple mirrored the image of the tower card in my tarot deck, which I raced to grab along with the guidebook that details the card's meaning, which is The Tower represents the purifying destruction of foundations and ideologies that are no longer productive. This is likely to be painful and chaotic, but necessary to clear the path.
Anyone who knows a bit about tarot, which for the record is a tool for reflection and not fortune telling, knows that the tower is a bit of an ominous card, but ultimately a good omen, aptly summarized by the more simplified adage: “Sometimes good things fall apart, so better things can fall together.” When a relationship ends, our society implies that it's a failure. A sign that a mistake was made, a lapse in judgment occurred that two people have issues they can't resolve. But in seemingly every other area of life: work, school learning, a sport or a new hobby, missteps are seen as learning growth mindset failing forwards. Part of the process.
[00:13:07] Somehow, if there's a piece of paper, a ring on the finger and community property, the collapse of the union represents a lapse in judgment, one that garners pity from others and shame from ourselves. Instead of accepting that things change, people change. People evolve, sometimes together, sometimes apart. I'm not sure where we came to believe that if it ends, it was wrong. And if it lasts, it's right. I think the French are on to something with this proverb: “tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse.” Which loosely translated, means: Everything passes. Everything wears out. Everything breaks. It speaks to the impermanence of things. Even if it doesn't end, it must evolve. And sometimes your whole world falls apart because it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, like the tower. But that doesn't mean you are in the wrong place.
I don't know that I'm 100% healed. I don't know if anyone is ever fully healed from something painful they've endured. But there is a clearing. I held on through the twists and turns, the hills and valleys on this detour, which is really just a painful and chaotic stretch of my path. There's a lightness, a calm, and I can see the open road ahead. The loud-as-fuck rock and roll has stuck around, not so much around the clock anymore, but still prevalent while I cook, clean, walk to Pilates, to coffee, to the farmer's market.
[00:14:36] Recently I came across an article about ways to cope after the end of a troubled relationship, and this was recommended: “Listening to certain types of music, usually loudly without any other background noises. For some odd reason, certain sound wave patterns seem to relax those with PTSD, and metal or hard rock music is especially and strangely relaxing to many who are in suffering.”
So I let the music play. I take it as a good sign that it's not all day, every day anymore. But I reach for the AirPods when I need to, and it's still where I turn for soothing, release, or inspiration. So much so that I recently ordered a white neon sign to hang in my house that reads “No music, no life.” My music, my life, myself. The self this detour led me to. It was painful and chaotic, but it cleared the path.
Trust me.
Here for Me is produced by Lens Group Media in association with Tulla Productions. My deepest gratitude goes out to the people I am blessed to work with in bringing the show to life: Dave Nelson, Stacy Harris, Amy Kugler, Amy Senftleben, and Amanda McGonigal. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave us a review. Until next time, I'm Nicole Christie. Thank you so much for listening. Here's to you being here for you, and to the power of choosing yourself.