The Path to Joy

When I became a psychologist, I could not have predicted my practice would one day be filled with parents suffering from ongoing, unrelenting grief. That I would need to grapple with ques- tions like: What if I never see my child ever again? What if my grand- children think that I don’t love them? Does my son remember any of the wonderful times that we had together? Does my daughter still care about me if she’s decided she won’t see me? Or does she just hate me?

I also didn’t know that I would have to address heartrending end- of-life issues such as: Who will bury me? Will I die alone in a hospital bed with no children or grandchildren to comfort me? Will my children even miss me once I’m gone? If I get cancer will they finally end the estrange- ment? How will I feel if they won’t?

Nobody trained me for these questions, and I’m sure I responded clumsily and ineffectually the first few years that I began to be flooded with referrals after writing When Parents Hurt. But after working with so many estranged parents over the past decade, here’s what I’ve learned. To start: There’s nothing I can do or say that will take away your pain. You’re going to see a grandmother push her granddaugh- ter down the street with her daughter smiling by her side and feel pain. You’re going to listen to your friend or relative tell you about the fantastic trip they all went on with their three adult children and their grandchildren and feel pain. You’re going to wake up from a dream where your son blissfully reconciled with you, remember you’re heading into year seven of no contact, and feel pain. Despite your strongest inner warnings, you’ll go again to your child’s Facebook page or Instagram or wherever the hell they post pictures of themselves, their children, their in-laws, their friends—seemingly everybody but you—and feel pain.

Here’s what else I’ve learned: It’s what you do with the pain that will make the difference between a life tethered to constant, implacable sorrow and one that has joy and meaning along with the pain.

“The path out of hell is through misery,” writes University of Washington psychologist and researcher Marsha Linehan, the founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. “By refusing to accept the misery that is part of climbing out of hell, you fall back into hell.”

The path out of hell is through misery. Excuse me? What is that supposed to mean? It means that you have to start by “radically accepting” where you are right now. Radical acceptance means that you don’t fight what you’re feeling in this moment. You feel sad? Feel sad. Don’t judge it, don’t push it away, don’t diminish it, and don’t try to control its passage. Turn toward the feeling rather than turn away from it.

I learned this lesson the hard way. When I was going through my estrangement, I found myself daily rehearsing every parental mistake I’d ever made and winding up in the same pool of sadness, anger, and fear. However, one day, instead of continuing to bathe myself in the deadly font of those feelings, I thought: “Hey, guess what? Your daughter may never talk to you again. Ever! Last time you saw her? That may be the last time you’ll ever see her. Deal with it.” It wasn’t a harsh or critical voice—more like wise and caring counsel from some censored part of me. And the acceptance of that gloomy reality was oddly, paradoxically reassuring. That’s radical acceptance. It’s accepting what you cannot change in this moment and may never be able to change.

Here’s another example: Psychotherapist Megan Devine tragically watched her partner drown at the beach when he was thirty-nine. She knows a lot about the geography of pain. This is what she advises: “Your pain needs space. Room to unfold,” she and Mark Nepo write in It’s OK That You’re Not OK: “Maybe your pain could wrap around the axle of the universe several times. Only the stars are large enough to take it on.”

The path out of hell is through the misery of accepting where you are right now. Right now, you’re reading this because you’re desperate, you’re angry, you’re guilt-ridden, worried, ashamed, scared, and scarred. These are powerful messages from your mind: There’s something here you should be attending to and not judging.

You might think, “But I’m already attending to it. That’s the problem!” True, but there’s a right and a wrong way to attend to our thoughts and feelings. I’ve found that it’s useful to distinguish be- tween pain and suffering, because pain and suffering are two different things. Pain is the inevitable and unavoidable part of being human and of being an estranged parent. Unfortunately, you have relatively little control over that. However, you can gain increasing control and awareness over how long you feel pain. You can reduce the meaning of it, the actions you take that increase it, and the distance the pain travels through other aspects of your life. That’s the suffering part.

The difference between pain and suffering is an insight that found its way from Buddhist teachings into contemporary psychotherapy. Psychiatrist Mark Levine, who developed the Mind to Mindful program, gives this example: “Let’s say I stub my toe walking across the kitchen floor and it really hurts. That’s pain. But then I start telling myself a bunch of things about stubbing my toe such as ‘You idiot, why don’t you watch where you’re going?’ Or ‘Next time you’re going to fall flat on your face or break your hip!’ Or ‘This is so typical of you to be so clumsy. Just one more example of what a screw-up you are!’

That’s suffering. Suffering lengthens the experience of pain because it creates an endless cognitive feedback loop where pain is always its terminus. Where suffering begets suffering begets suffering.”

Here’s a more relevant example: You go to a dinner at your friend’s house where their adult children are visiting from out of town. These are kids you grew up with, so you’re happy to see them and they’re happy to see you. And these are your close friends, so it makes you glad to see them with their thriving, successful children. And devastatingly sad because of the mirror it holds up to all that you’ve lost. So you end up excusing yourself multiple times throughout the evening to go to the bathroom and sob into your hands so no one will hear you.