My Journey With Grief Through Meta-Coaching - The Nightmares (Part 1 of 4)

Introduction

This four-part blog article is to explain how coaching helped me feel at peace with my grief and made my nightmares about my parents’ deaths stop.

Part One covers the nightmares that would plague my limited sleeping hours as the mother of a newborn.

Part Two explores the different emotions encapsulated in the word grief for me.

Part Three delves into the experiences of coaching that changed me.

Part Four explains how coaching changed the meaning I was giving to the emotions inside my grief.

When My Mind Would Not Accept the Ending

‍Dear Reader,

If you have read My Story, you will know that coaching helped me move beyond recurring nightmares about the deaths of my parents. That sentence is neat, tidy and also entirely inadequate. It makes the process sound rather like taking a tablet before bed: I have nightmares, I get coached, the nightmares stop.

‍Unfortunately, things are not so simple.

‍The change happened over approximately six coaching sessions. I cannot give a perfect recollection of every word said during these coaching sessions. I only remember parts of each one and have therefore broken them down into a series of key moments where something fundamental shifted inside me.

‍Before I tell you about those moments, I need to explain what my grief looked like. For a long time, I used the word grief as though it explained everything. I was grieving, therefore I was sad, therefore I had nightmares.

‍Except that, once again, things were much more complex. During the night, my brain was trying to process problems that my waking mind had refused to even acknowledge — an entity it hadn’t yet comprehended, simply called “grief.”

‍The Nightmares About My Mum

The sequence of events that eventually led to my mother’s death began when she had a stroke in front of me.

‍It was a birthday party. My mother was seated on a white chair wearing a yellow dress and I was sitting behind her. Suddenly, she began leaning to the left. My dad put his arm around her shoulder to prevent her from falling. We carried her into my uncle’s van and rushed towards the hospital.

During the drive, I sat opposite her and called out to her, desperately hoping that the sound of my voice would keep her awake. My naïve younger self thought she must be extremely tired to have been randomly falling asleep in this way.

‍But no, Dear Reader, my mother was not extremely sleepy. There was no sound loud enough to wake her up. People entering a coma can look deceptively like people falling asleep. I kept calling her, as though if I repeated ‘Mum’ enough times, she might wake up.

‍In my nightmares, I would keep reliving the moment she was going in and out of consciousness, as I would again desperately call out to her, trying to keep her awake. My dreaming mind kept reliving the situation and repeating the same story that took place in real life, erroneously believing one more “Mum” would bring her back. Upon waking up, I would be wrought with despair and frustration at being unable to keep her alive.

‍The nightmares about my mother seemed to try to solve the question of ‘what can I do to prevent her death’.

The Nightmares About My Dad

The nightmares about my father were different.

‍My relationship with him had been difficult during the last few years of his life. He struggled with dementia, and we were often in conflict due to his illness and his unwillingness, or perhaps inability to accept his dementia diagnosis.

‍After he died, he would appear in my dreams alive again. We were arguing still, trying to resolve a conflict that had no happy solution for either one of us. I would wake up feeling angry and frustrated about an argument that was going nowhere.

‍ The nightmares about my father were more about ‘How can I resolve our conflict before he passes’. 

The Questions Hidden Inside the Dreams

‍The nightmares about my mother and father were thematically different, but both returned me to a moment, or a leverage point in the past where I could act to change what I knew was coming. 

‍Both questions that the nightmares were trying to answer had the same inconvenient problem in that they cannot be resolved. There is a certain finality in death that makes it impossible to fix mistakes or resolve conflicts. But my brain refused to accept it.

‍The nightmares were the most dramatic part of my grief, but they were not the whole of it. Waking up did not end the experience. It simply moved it into daytime where it sent me in an unresourceful state of frustration and sadness. I soon noticed that the less I thought about my parents during the day, the less likely I was to have a nightmare. Therefore, I just stopped talking or even allowing myself to think about them. The nightmares were less frequent but never disappeared.

‍In Part Two, I will explore the word grief and look at the seven different experiences I had packed inside it, as if it were a suitcase. Some of these experiences were neatly folded, others were just thrown in haphazardly.

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