Faith, Feelings, and My F-150, episode 8
Unstacking Your Grief Tower
NARRATOR: In the weeks after his mother’s sudden death, Alex’ anger gradually subsided. He was coming to the place where he could think straight again. He knew that underneath everything else he was feeling, he was still angry over the years of abuse he had experienced from his father.
He knew that the next chapter in Lauren’s audiobook was about how to process the emotional losses from one’s childhood. One morning, on a long drive to a construction site in St. Cloud, Alex listened to the entire chapter.
LAUREN WELLS:I stood in front of a crowd of college students. They stared at me, some sitting straight up with a pen and journal in hand, others slouching like a rag doll in an oversized hoodie, obviously only there because a friend dragged them along. With a pile of large wooden blocks in front of me, I began to share my life story. As I did, I stacked a block for each painful, traumatic, or difficult life event that I exposed to the crowd. One by one
the tower stacked up taller and taller. A couple of times the tower teetered and a student would muffle, “Ooooh, here it goes!” But I kept on stacking.
By the time my story had covered my childhood and adolescence and reached my adult years, my block tower was on the verge of toppling. It swayed with each added block. Then I shared about my sophomore year in college, and the tower fell heavily with a loud crash, startling the slouching sleepers in the crowd (which, I’m not going to lie, was pretty satisfying). But I didn’t stop there. I continued my story into adulthood, stacking the next blocks on top of the pile of crashed blocks, continuing to share one story after another, some traumatic, and some just difficult. “This,” I said, “is the story of my Grief Tower."
NARRATOR: Alex liked the word picture Lauren was using. Even though he wasn’t present in that classroom, he could imagine her piling up stacks of blocks, like in a game of Jenga, until everyone in the room expected the tower to fall over. Her point was clear: if enough emotional baggage piles up, your life is going to come crashing down. That’s exactly what happened to Nikolai and Alena. Alex was better off than either of his siblings because he was a committed Christian. But he knew he still had a lot of emotional blocks piled up on his Grief Tower.
LAUREN WELLS: We all have hard things that happen in our developmental years (from birth to around age 25). I call these hard things “Grief Tower blocks.” These blocks can be anything from the death of a beloved grandparent to growing up in an abusive home. When hard things happen in childhood, they are either processed through the loving and supportive care of an adult in our life (usually a parent), or they stack up because we didn’t have nurture and support to help us grieve and make sense of the hardship.
As the tower stacks higher, we begin to find ways to cope with each new difficult experience. Sometimes these coping skills are healthy, and sometimes they grow into unhealthy coping skills; either way, they helped us survive. As the tower stacks, we also begin to decide, through the lens of the hardship, what we believe about ourselves, others, the world, and spirituality. Each new hard thing that comes our way tends to subconsciously confirm whatever our previous grief blocks taught us.
Unstacking is the process of being curious about how our past hardships have influenced how we live our present life. It’s the process of feeling the emotions that perhaps we didn’t allow ourselves to – or didn’t know how to – when that hard
thing happened. It’s investigating how that difficult thing made us think about ourselves and act in relationships. It’s recognizing that the things we’re doing today that are holding us back from thriving might be because we’re carrying a tower of grief that was never unstacked along the way. Unstacking is being brave enough to pick up your grief blocks and start asking questions.
Unstacking does not mean that we’re pulling the block off our Grief Tower and throwing it over our shoulder and into the abyss, never to be seen or talked about again. Instead, we’re taking it off the tower and setting it on the ground beside it. We still can go back and remember, and we can pick it up again when something reminds us of that hard thing and we just need to have a good cry. We can still notice when a pattern is surfacing again and take the time to reexamine some of our blocks. The goal of unstacking isn’t to get rid of the blocks.
Neither is the goal to never deal with our internal narratives or never struggle with unhealthy coping again. That would be an impossible goal. Instead, the goal is to be aware of what our narratives are so that we notice when they slip back in and are ready with combating narratives to counteract the unhelpful ones.
Step 1 - Brainstorm
Grab a journal and write down any Grief Tower blocks that you can remember. Don’t worry about explaining, processing, or even thinking about them much. Just put a word down that will remind you of that block.
Step 2 - Lay out the timeline
You can imagine your timeline like taking your Grief Tower and laying it down on its side. Arrange the blocks you’ve written down into chronological order.
Step 3 - Reflect
Step back, look at your Grief Tower Timeline, and take a deep breath. Pay attention to the emotions you’re feeling and the thoughts you’re thinking. Are you surprised to see how many blocks there are? What emotions are you feeling? Do you notice any patterns?
Step 4 - Add emotions
Using an emotions list or chart that can be found through a web search, ask yourself which two emotions you remember feeling during each block or experience. Then write those two emotion words under each block on your Grief Tower Timeline.
This will likely still be more of an intellectual process than an emotional process. We’ll spend time going back and processing each of the blocks emotionally, so it’s okay if this step feels more methodical than emotional.
PROCESSING
Your Grief Tower Timeline has now become your processing to-do list. You’ll go through each block one by one, using the following process for each. There is no prescribed order you should do this in, and you can start anywhere on your timeline.
Processing Questions
• What emotions did I feel in that season or situation?
• What made that feel so hard?
• How did it feel in my body?
• What coping skills did I use to get through that season or event?
• What narratives came out of those blocks?
• How have those narratives influenced my actions?
• What do I want to take from this experience, and what do I want to leave behind?
• If I haven’t talked about this out loud with anyone, who is one safe person I can tell?
NARRATOR: All of that made sense to Alex. But it was totally new to him. He had never kept a journal or done anything else to really process his losses. He didn’t know anybody else who did that. But it seemed to him that writing out what he was feeling sounded like a good idea.
So he made a plan. Most of Alex’ good ideas came to him while he was driving his truck. It was a quiet place where he had a lot of time to process. But it wasn’t a good place to write. So he would make quick notes to himself when he stopped at a client site. Then when he got home, he used a journal to write out what he was experiencing. Somehow using a paper and pen felt more real than typing at a keyboard.
Alex followed Lauren’s instructions. He wrote down specific losses he remembered as a child, how he felt about them, and the narratives he told himself because of them. Here are some of the things he wrote.
I was never able to invite anyone over to our home. My best friends in high school never saw the inside of my house. I made up stories of my father being strict about American friends. The truth is I was terrified of what he might do or say if someone came over. The empty vodka bottles. The holes in the walls. The way he could switch from charming to monster in seconds. I came up with stories I told everyone about why I couldn’t have them over - "The house is a mess, maybe next month." It was easier to tell these stories than to admit I'm ashamed of where I live, and who my father is.
I remember when Coach Vasquez asked me to join the baseball team in 7th grade. Said I had a natural swing. For three days, I carried that permission slip everywhere, rehearsing how to ask my dad. When I finally showed him, he said "Baseball? American nonsense. Waste of time." But I knew the real reason – people would see my bruises in the locker room. Somebody might tell Child Protection Services. I was so disappointed. All my friends were on the team, hanging out together in the afternoons. As I think about it now, I realize I wanted to be good at something my dad couldn't ruin.
I always had mixed feelings about family gatherings. I really loved my aunts and uncles. But it was hard to know what I could and couldn’t say. In the car my dad would tell me, "Remember, family business stays in family." When Aunt Irina asked about the cut on my cheek, dad’s lie came automatically: "Hockey accident." I became an expert liar. Babushka had a look in her eyes that said she knew something was up. But she said nothing. Neither did I. Sometimes I think they all knew and chose to say nothing. That hurt worse than Papa's belt.
For a while I was doing well in algebra. But when dad went on a rampage, none of us could sleep. That meant I couldn’t focus in class. When I failed three tests, Mrs. Harrington kept me after class, concerned about my grades. How could I explain that I spent the night before locked in the bathroom? That I hadn’t slept more than three hours at a stretch in weeks? That I couldn’t concentrate on equations when my brain was constantly wondering what my dad would do that night? I nodded when she said I needed to "apply myself more" and "take my future seriously." I didn’t think I had any future. I barely survived until graduation. I told myself I was stupid. I gave up on learning anything through books, and focused my energy on learning things I could do with my hands. At least I didn’t feel like an idiot when I was holding a power drill. I’m still not into reading today. Maybe that’s some of the residual effects of what dad did.
Alex would sit and write furiously for extended periods. Then he would take a break, sit back, and look at what he had just written. He realized how much it helped to write these things down. Before that, his head was just a jumbled mess of feelings. Writing them down got them outside Alex’ head. Now he could step back and examine them from a distance. Lauren said the goal wasn’t to forget about these things, but to let go of their control over us. Just seeing them on paper was a step in the right direction. Alex was making genuine progress.
