I left home at 18 to go to college, and halfway through my sophomore year, my family found out about my involvement in starting a student org that they didn’t agree with. Even though I was an adult, legally, I’d been through so much enmeshment and abuse that I just went along with them pulling me out of school and making me move home. That’s when I started having panic attacks. So, I’ve been in therapy off and on since I was 19 years old. I did a little EMDR in 2021 to try to help myself cope with the trauma around long Covid, but other than that, I’ve primarily focused on talk therapy. Last year, I started Internal Family Systems therapy, a modality that kind of allows you to see coping mechanisms as “parts” of a whole self as a means of allowing for curiosity and self-compassion, and that’s been incredible for me. I’m not here to debate the merits of different types of therapy, and I’m not here to talk about whether people think long haulers should use one modality over the other. I’m here to share that, since last year, I’ve been doing intense trauma work using IFS, pre-verbal EMDR techniques, and some other stuff I’m not quite ready or willing to talk about on the world wide internet.
This work has changed me and kicked my ass. It’s really been all-consuming, but I can’t lie…I’ve loved it. I feel like shit a lot of the time, I’m exhausted, but every day I feel a little bit closer to understanding who I am and why I am this way. There’s been so much grief, anger, resentment, pain, and regret, as well as buckets of tears.
Enter this penultimate episode of season 4 of A Friend for the Long Haul - A Long Covid Podcast with Claire Jones, co-founder of Sista Creatives Rising and author of Musings of A Black Disabled Elder, which you can find on the SCR Substack via that link. Claire is a cancer survivor, a Covid conscious friend, an artist, a mother, and she developed a framework for herself to feel more grounded in her life and in her body. That’s something I’m wholly unfamiliar with, because I’ve spent a lifetime dissociating. Claire’s framework guides her through difficult circumstances, and when I knew she was going to start writing about it, I asked her to come chat with me.
The framework is based on what Claire describes as “Clarity is just so hip!” and consists of:
Clarity: seeing what is actually happening
Awareness: recognizing the chaos and patterns and their effects
Presence: coming back to the now rather than getting lost in competing thoughts
Acceptance: dealing with the reality of what is happening
Gratitude: allowing room for appreciation and a changed relationship with life without pretending the hard things didn’t happen
For a long time, I thought acceptance meant letting go of the fact that something hurt. I thought accepting things meant that I couldn’t be hurt or angry about them anymore, or that I had to forgive the person who caused it. It’s like I thought that somehow saying “I accept this” meant saying “No biggie, it’s fine that xyz happened.” I didn’t want to do that. But towards the end of our conversation, I shifted into realizing that acceptance, for me, might just being able to know that I can’t change what happened by ruminating on it. That I don’t need others to witness and acknowledge those things for them to be real. Maybe acceptance is being able to say, yeah…that happened…what do I do now?
You can watch our conversation on YouTube:
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