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The Phase No One Warns Parents About

On By Dian Elizabeth GrierLeave a comment

Estrangement

Sometime in college, I started hurting my parents.

I became short on the phone. I didn’t return messages promptly. I bristled at questions that felt intrusive. I wasn’t trying to punish them. I was trying to separate, to figure out who I was apart from my family. Certainty, absolute and unshakeable, was the tool I used to create that space.

At the time, I was sure they didn’t know anything. My mind could not be changed.

College gave me what I needed most: distance. Physical distance first, then psychological distance. It was the first real space I had to begin figuring out who I was on my own. I didn’t handle that separation gracefully. I wasn’t kind. I wasn’t curious. I wasn’t generous. Sorry, Mom and Dad.

Looking back, it’s clear what I was doing. I wasn’t rebelling for rebellion’s sake. I was learning where I ended and they began. From the inside, that phase felt necessary, even if it was painful for all of us.

Years later, my own children, now in their mid-twenties, came at me with a similar force.

Each of them, in their own way, told me how I had failed them. All I could really do was listen and agree. They weren’t attacking me. They were renegotiating our relationship as they grew into their own people.

If you believe in karma, I got back exactly what I gave.

Seeing this cycle from both sides made me pause when I started hearing more talk about family boundaries, estrangement, and moral certainty. Parents feel blamed. Adult children feel justified. Everyone feels sure. It’s often described as a new fracture, a troubling trend, or a sign that something has gone wrong.

I’m not convinced that’s true.

We are hearing about family cut offs with the newer generations in the media lately. Some are convinced it is an “epidemic.” I am not convinced it is new. I think developmental phases of the younger generations are much louder and more visible.

 I’m noticing a pattern that feels familiar. In my own life, periods of certainty, separation, and boundary-setting marked important turning points in how I became myself. What looks different now isn’t the behavior itself, but the context in which it’s happening.

Certainty is normal developmentally when you begin to set boundaries. The certainty I’m describing isn’t intellectual confidence or moral superiority. It’s a developmental tool people use to draw clear lines before they know how to soften them.

When my children entered this stage, the power dynamics shifted in ways I wasn’t prepared for. As a parent, I hated that phase. I felt like I was losing control and watching something beautiful change very quickly. And I was. When our children become adults, the relationship we’ve known no longer fits. They are meant to evolve. They are meant to separate. They are individuals, not extensions of us. All we can really do is stay curious.

My children are nineteen months apart, which meant I didn’t get a clean break. There was a pause between one child starting this process and the other moving out of it. Just enough time to think I might be past the worst. It took a few years between the two of them to get through what felt like being humbled.

Letting go wasn’t passive. It took effort to listen without defending, to tolerate discomfort without trying to regain control, and to resist explaining myself into innocence. That period taught me something I didn’t want to learn: love doesn’t guarantee authority.

And then something shifted.

There are real advantages to this phase with my adult children, even if I couldn’t see them at first. I no longer feel responsible for fixing things for them. The relationship has room to breathe now. I also have space to continue my own development.

They call me out sometimes. I laugh because we don’t agree. I laugh because sometimes they’re right. I hear perspectives I wouldn’t have arrived at on my own. We grew up in very different worlds, and they’re living a reality I’ll never fully inhabit. Letting them teach me something feels like an honest exchange now.

What may feel like a crisis in families is, in many cases, a developmental pattern. Certainty and boundaries are often necessary tools for growth. What’s different now is visibility.

Social media hasn’t created these experiences. It’s made them easier to name and easier to find. Stories that once stayed inside families are now shared publicly. When something private becomes collectively recognizable, it can feel like a trend even if it isn’t new.

What’s interesting is that despite all this attention, there’s no clear research showing that family estrangement is actually happening more often than it used to. What has changed is how visible it is.

What looks new may simply be an old pattern, amplified and collectively witnessed.

Separation does its work. Certainty softens. Relationships change shape.

We’re still figuring it out.

But the air between us is different now.

It is better.

Past Life Regression

On By Dian Elizabeth GrierLeave a comment

The Cave Dweller and the High Priestess

QHHT Experience

The stick comes from behind.

I don’t see it. I only feel the explosion of impact—wood or stone or bone, something hard, slamming into my spine with a force that drives the air from my lungs. White-hot pain shoots through my back. My knees buckle.

This is it. This is how I die.

The humans have found us.

I’m not actually dying. I’m lying under a blanket in McLean, Virginia, in November 2024, in a Quantum Healing Hypnosis session—that deep trance state where, supposedly, you can access past lives.

But that pain in my back is real. A death wound from 40,000 years ago that I can feel in my modern spine.

And it doesn’t leave. Not for three entire hours.

I’ve explored alternative healing throughout my life with what I call “open curiosity.” Not blind belief, but not cynical dismissal either. Just openness to what might emerge.

QHHT has no peer-reviewed research—it lives in that space between thousands of anecdotal experiences and zero scientific validation. I knew this going in.

What I didn’t expect was how different I would feel in each body. How much I would love one life and feel suffocated in another. How a session meant to reveal past lives would instead hold up a mirror to my present one.

The Cave

Bare feet on cold earth. I can feel every pebble, every shift in temperature. The soil is rich and dark. Pine trees rise around me, their scent sharp in air so crisp it stings my lungs.

I’m wearing furs tied with a leather belt decorated with teeth and bones—each one a kill, each one a meal that kept my people alive. I’m a 20-year-old Neanderthal. My body is strong, healthy, capable.

We’re about twenty of us, living in a massive cave. We hunt, fish, gather berries, haul wood for fires. We watch constantly for the violent humans who want us dead.

And then I’m sitting with them—my people—and the feeling hits me so hard I could weep: I belong here.

We’re sharing a meal. Meat roasted over fire. Vegetables. Berries. Everyone contributed. Everyone eats. There are no complicated rules. Just absolute bone-deep knowing that these are my people and I would die for any of them without hesitation.

When my practitioner asks what I do all day, the answer comes easily: I hunt. I fish. I gather. I watch for danger. And it feels easy. Natural. Right.

I love this life so much it hurts.

Then I’m made Chief. Only eight of us are left. I have to find other Neanderthals we can join for protection. I make decisions.

Bad decisions.

And then—the stick. The impact. The explosion of pain. I’m dying. The humans found us. I failed. Everyone I loved is being slaughtered around me.

The pain in my back is everything.

And then it’s the thing I carry with me—impossibly—into Egypt.

The Pyramid

The air is different here. Still. Stale. Heavy with incense and death.

I’m in one of the smaller pyramids. Stone walls. Narrow passages. Darkness except for oil lamps. My hands know exactly what to do—they’ve done this a thousand times.

We are six women who perform the mummification rituals. We work without speaking. Words are impure. Our entire existence is about maintaining purity so we can touch the dead.

I was chosen for this as a child. Trained. Taught that this was an honor. Prestigious.

But my body knows the truth: this is a cage.

We sleep in the same quarters. We eat together. We work together. We never leave each other’s presence—being in the community or alone for any amount of time, might contaminate us. No marriage. No children. No choice.

It should feel sacred. It feels empty. Worse than empty—wrong. Like being buried alive in a pyramid built for corpses.

Nala is the senior priestess. We work beside each other for years. And somewhere in all that silent proximity, something forbidden happens: I love her.

When her hands shake with age, I feel protective. But love is impure. Love lowers your vibration.

So I watch in silence when they come for her. She’s too old now. They give her poison.

Guilt rips through me like a blade. I shouldn’t feel this. Feeling this means I’m not pure.

But I feel it anyway.

Decades pass. My hands become the arthritic ones. When my day arrives, I ask my team to prepare my body after I’m gone. I feel their pain—sharp, silent, forbidden.

I deliberately don’t send them empathy. Emotions only lower vibrations.

They give me poison.

I die having never married. Never changed. Never been truly honored. I served the dead faithfully, and in return, I got to die the same death I watched Nala die.

I die having never really lived at all.

The Mirror

My Higher Self answers when my practitioner asks about the lesson: “She learned how important emotions are in the human experience. That’s why you are here!”

And suddenly I understand the cruelty of the comparison.

The cave-dweller—barefoot, furred, “primitive”—felt everything. Love so deep it was woven into daily survival. Eating together was holy. Dying trying to protect each other was holy.

The priestess—educated, trained, “sacred”—felt nothing she was allowed to keep. Every emotion had to be suppressed. Love lowered your vibration. Connection was contamination. The only pure thing was death.

I loved the cave-dweller’s life. I hated the priestess’s life.

And then my Higher Self said: In this current life, I’ve been living like the priestess.

I’m a sensitive being who has shut down. I’ve blocked people out. I’ve told myself emotions are too much, inappropriate, unprofessional. I’ve been serving structures while starving for what I actually need: the cave. The connection. The messy, authentic, allowed-to-feel-everything belonging.

The guidance was concrete: Meditate twice daily. Walk longer. Get off the phone before bed. Connect with animals and nature. Practice gratitude. Use the priestess’s discipline—she had that right—but for connection, not disconnection.

And this, which hit hard: “She’s overdoing her mission to help.”

I’ve been overserving. Over-giving. Performing rituals for the dead—metaphorically—instead of living.

What Actually Happened?

I’m writing this two years later. My back doesn’t hurt anymore. That phantom ache faded, but it took a week.

I can still feel it if I think about it. That impact. That knowing. That moment of understanding: I failed them.

I don’t know if I was actually a Neanderthal 40,000 years ago or an Egyptian priestess around 3,000 BC. I looked it up—women didn’t perform mummification. That was men’s work.

So either my subconscious is an elaborate storyteller, or I accessed something history got wrong, or… what?

What I know:

I felt different in each body. As the Neanderthal, my body was younger, stronger, more physical. My emotional register was wide open. As the priestess, my body was older, more rigid. My entire being knew how to shut down.

I felt the pain in my back for a week. Not “remembered” it. Felt it. How do you feel pain from a death that happened 40,000 years ago?

The guidance is working. I’m meditating more. Walking more. Practicing gratitude. And the things that voice said I needed to address—the overdoing, the shutting down—they’re uncomfortably accurate.

My body ached for days afterward. Deep, cellular aching. Like old poison working its way out.

Did I access actual past lives? Did my subconscious create elaborate metaphors? Did I tap into collective unconscious?

I don’t know. And increasingly, I’m not sure it matters.

When I tell people about this, I include that the research on hypnotherapy is solid—effective for pain, anxiety, various conditions. But QHHT specifically? Zero peer-reviewed studies. Just thousands of anecdotal reports.

I’m one of them now.

I cannot say if I was imagining these stories or if they were true past life regressions. I felt things and I gained valuable and insightful knowledge about how to move forward in my life. It was interesting how easily these stories emerged. She would ask, What are you wearing? I would look down and see it. Nothing I said felt contrived, but I am aware it was some part of me. I believe we have a collective consciousness, maybe I tapped into that. Maybe my imagination is very good with stories. I don’t have to know these answers to know I felt that for me, it was effective in some small way. But, the healing that is promised in the end, for me it didn’t happen. It is OK as I know these methods are at least interesting. I don’t believe there is a magic ritual to healing. But if you want to try this method, do it! You only live maybe 1000 times! If you look up Delores Canon, she has practitioners listed in your area.

Allowing Emotions

On By Dian Elizabeth GrierLeave a comment

Moving Through Rage to Grief

I am deeply grieving.

Over the last year, my marriage has dissolved.  When my marriage ended, I spent at least six months living inside anger. Not a righteous , purposeful anger that was moving me toward change, but the kind that wraps around you like armor—protective, impenetrable, and ultimately suffocating.

The rage I felt was almost pharmaceutical in its addictiveness. Adrenaline would flood my system, sharpening everything into focus—a hyper-alert state where I knew exactly who was right and who was wrong, where every injustice had a name and a face. In those moments, I felt powerful. The anger gave me something solid to grasp when everything else seemed to be disappearing. It temporarily relieved the unbearable helplessness that comes with a sense of betrayal, replacing vulnerability with the illusion of control.

But anger, I’ve learned, is a loan shark. It offers immediate relief at a cost you don’t calculate until later. When the adrenaline faded, the underlying uncertainty would return, sharper than before, driving me to find new grievances to feed the fire. For months, rage stopped being something I felt and became something I was—a way to maintain an identity when my old one had shattered. It promised agency without requiring me to do the harder work: to change, to be vulnerable, to look inward at what I couldn’t bear to rsee.

Like a suspicious deer, grief stood at an opening in the forest and finally made the decision to enter the open field. When it arrived it felt very heavy and it was sharp like the blade of a knife. It has softened with time, but withstanding the initial pieces of grief was overwhelming.

Now the memories arrive uninvited, in flashes that bypass all my defenses. I see a picture of us in the kitchen with his back to me. I walked to him and embraced him from behind. That last embrace when I felt all his muscles respond with tension, the physical language of withdrawal more devastating than any words. The way he’d sleep pressed against the far edge of the bed, as if proximity itself had become unbearable. These images surface and I do something I couldn’t do before: I let myself feel the full weight of their sadness.

But memory is never singular. It insists on wholeness. So alongside the pain come other flashes—his dark eyes catching light, that infectious smile that could transform the ordinary into celebration. The way he had of making every moment feel significant, worth savoring. My mind is allowing me to miss him now, to hold both the beauty and the devastation in the same breath. I’m learning to let it wash over me, this grief, while also reminding myself of what those beautiful moments cost. To remember the pain as well.

This is the strange mathematics of grief: allowing yourself to feel everything without being consumed by it, holding love and loss in tension without letting either destroy you. The raw vulnerability comes in waves, overwhelming yet wise. I am learning to swim in it rather than fight it. Because there’s something honest happening here that anger never permitted—a reckoning with what was real, not just what was wrong.

This movement into grief is my psyche’s way of telling me I’m finally ready. Ready to let him go. Ready to forgive him and, perhaps more importantly, to forgive myself. The anger was necessary—it held me together when I might have shattered. But it was also a postponement, a way of keeping the deeper truth at bay.

Now I’m doing the work anger helped me avoid. I’m confronting not just what happened, but my own role in it, my own humanity, my capacity for both hurt and healing. This is what authentic healing demands—not the adrenaline rush of righteous fury, but the courage to sit with what’s tender but true. To acknowledge that grief is not weakness but a kind of wisdom, the psyche’s way of integrating loss into the fabric of who we’re becoming.

The anger protected me when I needed protection. But grief is teaching me something anger never could: how to hold brokenness without breaking, how to remember love without denying its cost, how to move forward by first allowing myself to fully feel what I’m leaving behind.

Why We Love End-of-the-World Movies

On By Dian Elizabeth GrierLeave a comment

I Don’t Watch Apocalypse Movies Because I Want the World to End

I watch them because they strip life bare.

I’ve always loved end-of-the-world movies and shows. The kind where the power goes out, the sky does something creepy, and everyone suddenly understands what matters. Someone finds canned beans. Someone becomes heroic who wasn’t planning to. Someone else reveals a surprising lack of character over bottled water.

It’s dark entertainment, I know. We’re supposed to prefer stories where everything works out neatly. Where people heal, succeed, and get the job by page 317.

But apocalypse stories do the opposite.

They take away the noise. They flatten everything down to the basics.
Food. Water. Shelter. Who shows up. Who doesn’t.

There’s something quietly dishonest about peace-time storytelling. It promises you can keep everything. Apocalypse stories admit you can’t.

You will lose the house.
The job.
The reputation.
The illusion.

All the things you thought were solid suddenly become decorative.

What research actually says is that this kind of storytelling isn’t morbid. It’s regulating.

When you imagine catastrophe from a safe place, your nervous system runs a practice drill without real danger. Psychologists call this threat simulation. Your brain rehearses survival. Your body discharges fear without needing to live it.

It’s the same reason children tell ghost stories at sleepovers and adults binge crime shows with the lights on. Fear, in small controlled doses, doesn’t harm the nervous system.

It organizes it.

These stories give the brain a boundaried version of chaos. A place to feel danger without being endangered. A way to metabolize anxiety without calling it anxiety.

There’s also relief in stories where the rules are obvious.

No networking.
No pretending.
No email signatures.

Just this: Who are you when it counts?

Apocalypse stories simplify people in ways regular life refuses to. You know who the villain is. You know what the stakes are. You know when someone is brave. You know when someone… is not.

And in a strange way, that clarity is calming.

I don’t watch end-of-the-world stories because I want the world to end.

I watch them because they remove everything false.

When the backdrop disappears, what’s left is raw and real…
Who you protect.
What you steal.
What you refuse to do.
Who you become when there’s no audience.

Sometimes I like to imagine who I’d be in those scenes.

I hope I’d be brave.
I hope I’d be generous.
I hope I’d offer my last bottle of water.

But I also know this:

If our group doesn’t steal coffee early in the apocalypse….I’m out.

Some survival instincts are moral.

Some are caffeinated.

Her Legacy

On By Dian Elizabeth GrierLeave a comment

I didn’t grow up with religion.
I grew up with stones, trails, weather, and long walks where questions were allowed to stay unanswered.

My father took me hiking the way some people go to church. Not formally. Not reverently. But faithfully. Over time, nature became my sanctuary, not because anyone named it that way, but because it was where attention was practiced. He wasn’t teaching beliefs. He was teaching how to be here.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” he’d say when I missed an animal or an interesting stone.

It wasn’t a correction. It was an invitation. Out of my head. Back into my body. Back into the moment. As if being alive meant paying attention.

And just when the moment tipped toward something solemn, he’d stop walking and ask, “Did you hear that?”
The pause, then the smile, told me everything.

Suddenly we weren’t hikers anymore. We were characters in an old Western, listening for the sheriff right behind us. The spell would break. We’d laugh. Then we’d keep walking.

I remember one hill in particular, late in the day, legs burning, the kind of climb where discouragement starts whispering. We were both tired. Without warning, he planted his walking stick, grabbed it with both hands, and started chanting, “Pull. Pull.” Each word came with a dramatic lurch forward, like he was being hauled uphill by an invisible rope.

“Do you feel that?” he asked, grinning.

I grabbed my stick and joined him. “Pull. Pull.” I stumbled up the trail like a fool. Soon I was laughing so hard I forgot how tired I was. We climbed the rest of the hill like that, two grown humans pretending we were being dragged up a mountain by nothing at all.

That was my father’s gift. He could read a moment and know exactly what it needed. If seriousness would crush it, he brought play. If humor would distract, he brought focus. He met life as it was, not as it was supposed to be.

I’ve come to believe that anyone who truly understands awe can move easily between reverence and humor. My father moved between even more. Wisdom. Play. Parenting. He shifted without effort. He taught me that meaning does not require solemnity.

He was always more himself away from the artificial edges of the world. As we walked, he would scan the land the way other people read books.

“Look over there,” he’d say. “What does that grove of aspens tell you?”

“Water,” I’d answer.

“Good.”

He’d ask where I would set up camp and why. I’d explain my thinking, and we would walk there together, sometimes finding the quiet evidence of people who had stood in that same place long before us. Small flakes of obsidian or flint scattered in the dirt, remnants of arrowhead making.

It felt miraculous. Not supernatural. More intimate than that. The miracle of recognition.

I may have been the first human to touch those flakes in hundreds of years. I would hold them carefully, wondering who made them, what their hands looked like, whether they laughed with their children the way my father laughed with me. Those moments gave me my first felt sense that I belonged to something vast and ongoing. Not as a spectator, but as a participant.

That training in attention never left me. It deepened.

Over time, my fascination with stones turned into something quieter and more devoted. When I hold one in my palm, something ancient settles me. Geological time presses gently into my body. These objects, shaped by forces that never rushed or planned, carry a presence I can feel.

It is not faith. It is familiarity.

A stone that predates all living things on Earth speaks in a language older than thought. One that survived fire, ice, pressure, and patience embodies a kind of endurance my nervous system recognizes immediately. Each has a personality. One steady and dense. Another playful in its angles. They have watched the entire human story unfold without comment.

Sometimes, without realizing I am doing it, I whisper thank you.

This feels like spirituality stripped bare. The moment we pause long enough for wonder to reach us.

I need to pause now, more than ever. Modern life tends to fracture time into emergencies and noise. Faster. Louder. More. But beneath all of that, my body still remember how to slow when I am in appreciation.

When I hold an ancient stone, my thoughts soften. My worries about money, deadlines, and the future lose their urgency. I am not diminished by that perspective. I am steadied by it. Returned to scale.

After my son graduated high school, I traveled with him to Machu Picchu. The city was built around 1450 AD, recent history compared to the stones it is built from, which are hundreds of millions of years old. Standing there, I thought about the hands that shaped them. The precision. The devotion.

I looked at my son and felt time stretch backward and forward at once. I thought of my father.

Three generations standing together in geological time.

How lucky this brief life is. A blink against the mountains. A moment. And still enough to pass something essential on.

The people who built Machu Picchu felt the same stone weight I feel now. They looked at the same stars. They wondered about those who came before them. Just as I wondered about the person who knapped those obsidian flakes beside my father. Just as my son may someday remember this moment.

This is how continuity happens. Not through doctrine or certainty, but through attention. Through presence. Through gratitude.

Our bodies already know what matters. Stillness. Wonder. Contact with the real. This wisdom does not ask us to believe anything.

It asks us to notice.

My father taught me how to pay attention to what really matters.

Thank you, Dad.

Four Years of Dead Bodies Built My Confidence. Then My Nerves Started Dying.

On By Dian Elizabeth GrierLeave a comment

When I started as a social worker, I didn’t want to take on what others wouldn’t. I just wanted to do the hardest job I could think of. To build my confidence enough to handle anything that came my way in the future. If I could do this, I could do anything.

I chose Crisis Response.

The First Call

I remember my first call. My heart was racing as I read the information from dispatch: 68-year-old male found without pulse. Caller refuses to perform CPR stating, “He is dead. He is cold.”

When we got to the apartment, I felt dizzy because of the smell and probably wrapping my head around the concept of dead bodies. I tried to hide the fact that I wanted to throw up, but I was reacting. My partner had explained in detail everything to expect, but it didn’t prepare me for the gravity of the family, the dead body in the room, all the procedures to remove him.

It’s funny, but I only remember standing outside afterward. The building was stucco. Beige. It sort of matched my feelings. I don’t remember anything else except trying to maintain my composure while propping myself against that building.

By the second call, I was physically fine. But learning and confidence came with time.

The Work

We worked out of a firehouse. Calls came over the intercom: CR78, Crisis Response Seventy Eight. A 73-year-old man found blue and cold. Caller refused CPR… and then the address.

We’d run to the van – no lights, no sirens – and drive as fast as we could. Sometimes 45 minutes away. One person navigated and read the updated messages from dispatch. The other drove. Radio crackling: “What’s your ETA? Fire and police are stuck on scene.”

We couldn’t use sirens. So we sat in traffic while people waited.

The short calls were always the worst. Just one sentence from dispatch, no follow-up. That usually meant unexpected death.

It was rare that we got to sleep. Most scenes were about three hours until the Medical Examiner arrived. We couldn’t leave a body with a family. So we stayed. Firemen and police loved it when we arrived. They could hand the emotional family off to us.

We comforted. Offered snacks, water. The most important thing was getting them information and resources. This was a first aid situation, not therapy.

Learning Situational Awareness

One call taught me everything about reading a scene fast.

Elderly man, dead in the garage.

My partner and I arrived before the police. The grandson was blocking the door to the house, screaming. Fists balled, eyes wide, stance wide. His body in fight mode.

I stepped closer to de-escalate. That’s when the police rounded the corner and drew their weapons. They only heard aggressive screaming. Now we had an even worse situation.

I had no exit. Car to my left, police behind me with guns drawn, teenager blocking the door, wall to my right. The boy saw those guns and got more aggressive.

I spoke to the police on his behalf: “Sir, he is very upset and is not processing his feelings well. I don’t think he means harm toward anyone, but he just found out his grandfather died. Let me take him in the house and listen to him.”

I nodded at the boy – aggressive nodding, eyes wide – so he knew to take the cue.

He did.

We went inside. I handed him a drink, offered food. Offerings are a universal language.

Then: “What are you feeling?”

That started a two-hour conversation.

What You Absorb

A man who’d recently gotten housing after being unhoused.

Nobody had heard from him for a week.

Welfare check.

He was dead.

There is a stench of death that can never be erased from a person’s awareness. This one was off the charts.

He had a small Chihuahua in the apartment. The brother was holding the dog in the courtyard below. The dog had nibbled a little when he got hungry.

The Chihuahua ran across the table. I smiled and moved closer as he licked my face.

It smelled of death.

Literally in this situation.

I had a sudden realization about what just happened. Had to swallow my reaction. All I could do was laugh at myself.

Dark Humor as Survival

We were called to a discount hotel. The maid opened the door for cleaning and found two bodies on the floor. Neon spray paint in yellow and orange, red all over the walls: “Die like a rockstar.” Big letters. Multiple places.

The couple had taken heroin and tried to overdose. They’d pinned their driver’s licenses to the wall with hypodermic needles so they could be identified. They’d planned this.

The damage to the hotel room was incredible. I’m sure they thought they wouldn’t have to deal with it.

Watching Narcan revive a person within seconds is amazing. It had to be a shock to them. “Did I die?” “Is this the afterlife?”

None of the issues this couple had should be minimized, but… closing your eyes to die in a blaze of glory with a smile on your face, only to wake up and be walked to an ambulance. Charges being pressed. Going into a mental health hospital. Coming off of drugs. Paying the expenses of trashing a room.

Sounds about right for a rockstar.

Humor was a survival mechanism then. Humor still is a survival mechanism in a world where I hear the worst of the worst.

Finding Beauty

I made a point on every difficult scene to view the world like I was taking a picture. I strategically looked for the beauty even in the worst of crisis imaginable. When I remembered the scene, I would remember the moment I kept.

Like the death of a man. I was at a distance watching his sister and wife touch foreheads over his body, holding hands. It was a photo moment I will never forget.

That’s what I held onto. Not the body. The love.

Learning There’s Nothing to Say

A father ran over his daughter with his truck. A lifted truck. No backup camera back then.

She was dead on scene, but they always took children to the hospital for the family’s sake.

Before we left for the hospital, the grandmother was highly anxious. I was trying to calm her. I was new. I didn’t know to keep my mouth shut in these situations yet.

I said something to her and she replied aggressively:

“I will never forget this day, never! This is the day that changed me forever.”

It was quite profound. All I could do was agree. I think that day changed me forever too.

They had taken the father into custody. Possible charges for manslaughter.

The Mother on the Floor

We were called to the hospital for this one. It was rare that we would go to a hospital. As we walked through the automatic sliding glass doors, you could hear a primal wailing. I knew this was going to be bad.

Police, fire, hospital staff surrounding a woman on the floor. The fire department pulled us aside: she was cooking in the kitchen, turned around for what she thought was a short period of time. Her toddler had gotten through the dog door, fell into the pool, and died.

This was a no-talking-unless-asked-a-question situation.

While she was wailing, I slid down the wall next to her, handed her a water and tissue. Nothing was said.

Two hours of witnessing.

Grief always comes in waves. The body has to take a break, then it resumes. She was a thin woman with her head in her bent knees. She would stop briefly, but it would start back up within seconds.

How does a mother get over that?

They don’t.

I did not cry because I was taught that my job was to hold the space for her. She needed a witness, but I think if I had cried it would have been absolutely called for.

We left and she was still at the hospital. We gave her resources, but even resources and referrals to grief groups seemed trivial.

There is nothing you can say to a grieving mother who just lost her child. You just sit beside them. Get them water or food. Absorb the pain as best you can.

This is what being a witness means.

What It Built

By the end of the four years, I never felt apprehension going to a call. I had confidence and exuded it. I learned that confidence helps people in crisis.

I think that is what I was looking for.

Unshakeable confidence. The kind of presence that maintains a scene no matter what you walk into. So that every job after – addiction work, hospice, the highest level men’s prison – nothing could shake me.

And, I achieved the goal.

What It Cost

It was toward the second year when I developed pain in my body. All over my body.

I would later be diagnosed with idiopathic small fiber neuropathy. I feel that the crisis response work affected me on a cellular level. To work in the energy of trauma for 12 hours or longer a day took its toll.

I didn’t realize it then, but trauma affects everyone in the room.

The pain came in waves just like the grief. I would flare and it was as if all my muscles were suddenly tight. So much spasming and sharp pain. As the nerves die, they cramp the muscles and seize. I kept going, never thinking to be gentle with myself.

Was It Worth It?

I wanted to build unshakeable confidence. I wanted to know I could handle anything that came my way.

I got what I wanted.

I can walk into any room, any crisis, any level of human suffering, and I don’t flinch. I know how to hold space. I know how to be a witness. I know when to speak and when to just get someone water.

But my nervous system has been talking to me for almost 2 decades.

Four years of sitting in rooms full of acute trauma – mothers wailing over dead children, fathers charged with accidentally killing their daughters, the smell of a seven-day-dead body, teenagers screaming with grief – my body absorbed all of it.

The strategy worked. I built myself into someone who couldn’t be shaken. I just didn’t know the foundation would have cracks in it.