Where does it hurt?

Why self-compassion matters

Where does it hurt?

You may well know the scenario. Your youngest child, only just beginning to be able to find basic words to describe their world, plonks themselves down on the floor and starts wailing. You assume they’ve hurt themselves in some way and attempt to discover which bit of them needs attention.

It’s at this point that you call upon the detective skills you’ve gained as a mother.

Maybe they banged into a bit of furniture, as they were tottering around in the drunken fashion babies do, when they first find their feet. Maybe it wasn’t a bang, the crying is in fact a response to their walking on one of the Lego pieces their older brother had been using to carefully create their latest model. Because we all know how painful stepping on those little bricks can be.

Or maybe it was the strategically aimed flight-deck that has just been thrown in their direction, because, yet again, their baby sister has interrupted their painstaking construction of a spaceship. Dom, always the protective older brother (it’s him cuddling a young Caitlin in the photo at the top of this post) wasn’t likely to be the culprit in our family, but my middle son, her brother Marcus, born just 17 months before her was, at this point in their relationship, uninhibited in expressing his annoyance towards his sister.

Likely as not there’s nothing to see. But that’s not the point. Because what calms our child is our recognizing that something painful has happened to them. From here we can help them show us (if only via pointing at it) where the pain is. Most times just ‘rubbing it better’ is all that’s needed.

Why is it so simple? Why that intense wailing, if it’s all over so quickly? Was our child just ‘making a fuss?’

Well, no, they weren’t. No doubt there was initial pain for them, but there was more to it than that. There was shock, a sense of something suddenly coming from nowhere that really hurt them. Something that interrupted the happy and secure bubble of childhood.

I know I’ve got my rose-tinted spectacles on here. Our own childhoods, to varying degrees, contained moments which are challenging, because our parents were (surprise surprise) not perfect. We want to do ‘better’ when we become parents ourselves, because that’s the way it tends to work. But, sooner or later, we discover that it’s best to let ourselves off the hook and settle on being a ‘good enough’ parent. Because, even when we endeavour to create the best environment possible for our child, we rarely achieve the perfection that, in our mind’s eye, could exist.

It’s just as well really, what sort of preparation for the ‘real world’ would our child be getting if things never went wrong when they were little?

Anyway, I’m going to get back to that wailing baby (or it’s likely the crying will just intensify.)

You see, babies are very good at recognizing when something really needs attention. In fact, they’re much better at it than we ‘grown-ups’ are. Because unfortunately, the ‘real world’ that we enter as adults has a way of training this out of us. And that’s what this post is all about.

When we lose our child, we are in deep, deep shock. And we are hurting, like never before. We experience a searing pain, a heartache which is as physical as the name suggests, coursing through us. We feel as if we could die from this. In fact, right now, we may ‘want’ to die, because that would reunite us with our child again…and being severed from them feels like a death anyway so what’s the difference?

Just like that crying baby, it’s at this point that we need ‘looking after.’ Because we have virtually no defences against what has happened to us, we are psychologically stripped bare, feeling intensely vulnerable and pretty much helpless.

In my book, ‘Walking with my Son’, I talk about what these early few days looked like for me and our family. Some people were incredibly thoughtful, discretely turning up on our doorstep with reheatable meals. Yes, we received a lot of lasagnas and pasta dishes, but they were a godsend at a time when there were 6 people to be fed, and I frankly didn’t have the capacity to cook anything for us myself.

And later, when my children and their partners returned to their own homes and Nick was at work, so it was just me in the house, there were those special people with whom I met up who understood that I needed opportunities to simply talk (endlessly) about what had happened to our family, and to me.

Because, circling back to the beginning of this post, namely our wailing child, what calms them when they are young is also what soothes us when we are grieving parents. And that is others acknowledging that something intensely painful has happened to us. Witnessing our pain, being able to be present with us while we describe where it hurts.

Closing the Gap...

I explained why this is a primary need we have, after our child has gone, in the previous post above, ‘Closing the Gap.’ But I’m a realist and I do recognize that not everyone is able to offer themselves to us in this way. And that’s because it’s incredibly hard to witness someone in so much pain and there’s only so much capacity any of us have to do this for another.

Which is where self-compassion comes in.

I confess that, before Dom died, I didn’t really give self-compassion the credit it deserved. For me it was too wrapped up in the mantra of ‘loving yourself’ which I felt was being used to sell products. The cynic in me believed that L’Oreal’s message, ‘Because You’re Worth It’, had paved the way for viewing massages and nail extensions as the antidote to life’s challenges. Anyway, as a Yorkshire woman (with apologies for the stereotyping) the mind-boggling price of this whole self-care industry put me off; I prefer to buy something I’ll have permanently when I spend that sort of money.

I’ve learnt to be less judgemental now, recognising that a ‘treat’ can be a form of self-care, and that it’s important that we offer this to ourselves. But I still believe that self-compassion is about so much more. And that, after we lose our child, it is VITAL that we learn to give this compassion to ourselves.

Give it TO OURSELVES. Ah, this is the important (and very hard) bit.

When we’re vulnerable, like that baby, we SO want others to comfort us. And I’m not saying that we don’t deserve this. It’s just that there will never be an infinite supply of this form of comfort coming our way. Other people have their own lives, their own problems, even if from our vantage point they might look small in comparison to what we are going through. Ultimately, we are on our own with this thing.

Which is terrifying in the early stages of our loss, when being on our own can mean spending time with ‘the enemy.’

That’s the voice in our head which says we failed our child, and that we are forever to be living with the sense that we somehow caused this tragedy. A bit extreme, I know, and I really hope that you didn’t go/aren’t going through this stage in your journey having lost a child, but in my experience a lot of parents did/are. I explore this in my post ‘Guilt…it’s Complicated.’

Guilt...It's Complicated

It’s incredibly important that we challenge this thinking or it will continue to hold us captive and effectively block our healing. Because, left to its own devices, our sense of ‘guilt’ will tell us that we have forfeited the right to any sympathy.

Which is a disaster, in terms of how we treat ourselves now.

Because, what I’m saying is that the only reliably available comfort we will always be able to access, after we have lost our child, is the gift we give to ourselves: compassion. And that striving to get to the point where we can freely offer this self-compassion is essential, if we are to move forward after our devastating loss.

You see, it’s a given that other people will disappoint us. And they may be the ones who are close to us. They may be our best friends. They may be our partners. They may be our other children.

I don’t think they ever mean to do this. It’s a form of carelessness. Likely as not, we’ve done it to them too, at some point in the past. It’s part of the human condition. It’s just that, when we are in a state of bone-china fragility, we so easily feel hurt.

It’s vital that we protect these relationships, because they’re important ones. They are where we get to spend our quality time, where we feel our greatest sense of connection. We love these people, and they love us back.

But we’ve got to love ourselves more.

Not in a selfish way. But in the way we loved that baby, learning to understand what hurts, and why. And I think we do this by making a point of recognizing ‘where’ it hurts.

Our body will be our greatest teacher, if we listen to what it is telling us. When we are upset (and it’s important to understand how sensitive we can be to those unintended ‘slights’ from others after our child dies) we need to (metaphorically) locate our wounds and ‘lick them. To soothe ourselves, in whatever form that takes.

It’s as individual as we each are, this self-compassion.

Speaking personally, if I’m feeling others have been insensitive to what I’m going through, I find huge relief in walking my dog, in the woods, because, although it can be very annoying when he won’t come back to my calls when he’s seen a squirrel, he never actually upsets me. A long bath with candles can be helpful when I’m feeling let-down by someone, something about being immersed in water already makes it feel an appropriate place to weep and wash tears away at the same time.

And when I’m generally feeling like no one understands the effort it can take to just function, sitting quietly on the settee, the place where I used to lie with Dom and my old dog Ollie, gives me permission to treat myself gently, like the emotional burn-victim I sometimes feel. And to acknowledge my very real and understandable sense that what has happened is unfair.

We need to give ourselves these moments. Fighting these feelings, repressing them and trying to put a happy smile on our faces for the benefit of those around us, can do all manner of harm. We can end up feeling resentful to others, and jeopardizing relationships which really matter to us. Relying on other people (however central they are in our lives) to always understand what we are going through, is making us even more vulnerable than we already are.

Asking ourselves the question, ‘Where does it hurt?’ is so important. But it’s even more important that we follow it up with self-soothing. That we learn to be our own best friend. This way, we will always find the compassionate voice we need.

Our own.