Those Who Dig
Breaking Ground
My dad was just 63 when he died suddenly, 15,000 km away from where I slept in a different time zone.
If the early hours phone call from my sister was a shock, the following year would be something else altogether.
There was some over-intellectualised, yet illogical part of me that wasn’t expecting this to throw everything on its head. Our relationship was inconsistent, rife with things unexpressed. I’d put oceans—literal and emotional—between us years earlier. That space had been a boundary, a stopgap for the frightening and confusing childhood/adolescent experiences I still didn’t know what to do with. I had tried to put us in a box where the pain of the past, the unsaid, and the ways I still didn’t exemplify my own values in the context of our relationship couldn’t hurt me as much.
Somehow something key had slipped my mind though — I really, really loved my dad.
Waking up to a world he suddenly didn’t walk around in anymore cut me down in a way I could never have predicted.
It wouldn’t just be the absence of a cheeky, eccentric, mercurial character that I would have to grieve, but the fear, regret, defensiveness, and irrefutable list of similarities that had burdened and fastened our relationship while he lived.
The cycle that was never fully deconstructed in this lifetime.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was my dad’s favourite movie. I kept coming back to the quote I put at the top of the page when I was writing, until it easily wove itself in.
Because in the story of my Dad & I’s lives, I see how digging — painful, necessary, unglamorous — became the only way forward, and the loaded gun an overt metaphor for the defensiveness that could drag us both into repetition time and time again.
Hitting Rock
As a person who prides herself on self-reflection (and neverrrr falls into navel-gazing, don’t worry), imagine my surprise when this ordeal (and it was an ordeal — the week of the funeral deserves its own novella) seems to get away from me. It’s pure chaos, terror, rage, and a seemingly endless fountain of shit spews forth from my psyche at intervals over the following year. The history was rich and colourful, alright.
I’m left with a choice, day after day: turn away or dig in. I know already, from previous victories, that digging in is the answer.
‘The only way out is through’ is an annoying fucking cliché for a reason.
But I can’t always make discoveries and put two and two together, processing like a pro. Some days feel like a black hole, a chasm with no return. And — I’m exhausted. I have to work. I have to try not to be a shit partner. I have to prove I’m not in the same cycle as my dad. I have to prove I haven’t been insane the whole time and this is just my final straw. I have to stay the kind of person people can still be around (some days, that alone feels like murder).
In the poetic words of a work conference acquaintance about one year later — we are drinking wine in an art gallery when we discover our dads died around the same time, us on other continents when it happened, both for better or worse “daddy’s girls”/“chips off the old block” —
“It really, really fucked me up.”
Very eloquent of her, really. Succinct and to the point.
Long Ride Back to the Same One-Horse Town
When Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way,” I’m pretty sure he was thinking about me personally, and how this forced journey would compel me into a level of consciousness about that aforementioned cycle that I had never had before.
(I haven’t mastered applying Marc’s thoughts to being told I need a root canal yet, but we forge on.)
There are a seemingly endless number of things to learn from my dad. They are not all cute things, as you’ve probably guessed — though there are plenty of those too.
Our social environment will often encourage us to blaze on over pausing — but digging takes time — it involves looking directly at the good, the bad, and the ugly and understanding all three.
People don’t like to do this too overtly with dead people. It’s rude. “We are gathered here today to collectively draw wisdom from the clear reasons why this person died decades too young,” doesn’t have the same palatability as “to celebrate a life,” and I really do understand that, as it’s taken me over a year to work up to writing this. There’s a time and place for these things.
Time: now
Place: wherever you’re reading this
In the literal sense, my dad died at the job site he was working on. Instantly, felled like a tree onto a lawn he had grown, in a garden he had been landscaping for about a thousand (20) years previous.
In the less literal sense, my dad died in the midst of repeating a cycle of struggle I had witnessed since I can remember. To make sense of it, I’d have to map something bigger than grief. Something deeper than past addictions, PTSD, shame-based religions, estrangement, aggressive reactivity, or bouts of deep isolation that had eaten up years and so much energy in between my first breath and his last one. Those were symptoms.
The cycle beneath the symptoms held a deep-seated fear that was not consciously recognised. The fear was that he had some making up to do for existing. That he had been in a deficit before he was even born and fallen further since. That his mistakes, shortcomings, and struggles set him apart in some unique and disgusting way, and that he was bound to their repetition.
That fear bred system-wide attempts at damage control — the symptoms, and the symptoms and their consequences then reinforced the fear. Self fulfilling prophecy.
Because of work like the ACE study, and the careers of stewards like Maté, van der Kolk, and Levine, we have validated (for those who have for so long been invalidated) how traumatic early experiences can predispose you to cycles of struggle later in life. This goes beyond a cognitive issue — traumatic stress is a whole-system issue that self-perpetuates when it keeps running without interception. A large part of digging becomes learning how to bring peace (resilience) to a system that doesn’t know what that is and doesn’t trust it.
My dad had spoken to me about different childhood experiences over the years that can only be categorised as extremely painful. One example I feel ok sharing, was how being an adopted child had generated a sense that he would always be rejected and abandoned due to personal deficit. A perpetual sense of insecurity was born early on, and it would impact the way he recovered (or didn’t) from stress and pain for life.
So — then I figure out I’ve inherited this thing — this constant, desperate ‘knowledge’ that there was something innately wrong with me. This ever-present sensation that I am unsafe, outside and inside. The lack of ability to truly bounce back from challenges or rejection. The ceaseless confusion about who I am and what I ‘should’ be doing. The exhausting hypervigilance.
It’s a large, scary burden to carry.
I’ve found out I’m gonna have to dig, too.
Damn.
There’s Gold in Them There Hills
There is over a decade and at least a couple of books (in my ego’s estimation) of hard-earned, voraciously studied wisdom and plenty of misadventure between realising I held this legacy and developing the internal foundation I would need to start seeing that I did have a say in how my life would go — that I wasn’t necessarily destined to repeat this cycle for life and maybe all my desires didn’t need to go to someone ‘better.’
This was a long and confusing process, like learning a new language while learning what language itself even is. It involved half a counselling degree, the international move, courses on courses, sleepless nights researching, experimentation and therapy, shitty relationships then beautiful ones, lame jobs at bad companies then good jobs at great companies — in the mix a real understanding of myself starts to emerge. And I learn how to actually rest in myself, not just implode inwards repeatedly. A sliver of self-compassion opens up, which allows me to look directly at this whole cycle — not just swirl around in it. Victory!
My dad had plenty of victories in his life too, and he remains loved by many. He was committed to extremely high standards in his work, ever diligent and like a dog with a bone when problems cropped up. He recovered from addiction and looked for comfort in nature and God when he was in pain. He took responsibility for the care of others — as a first responder, a volunteer at homeless shelters, a supporter of various churches. He landscaped and handyman-ed the hell out of various friends’ and Nanas’ houses, gratis, and was always ready with a selection of barely-roadworthy vehicles to help someone do their thing. He grew, and he contributed, and he survived a lot.
Yet, I never witnessed him enjoy any type of security for long — or perhaps ever. I never saw him in a truly functional, deeply connected relationship. I worried for him constantly as other patterns continued to cycle, and when he passed it was as much a tragedy of the unresolved as it was a relief that he was now resting in true peace.
That combined sense of tragedy and relief further fuelled the importance of digging to me, and it’s why I’m trying to share it with someone other than myself now. He loved me a lot, and I know he wanted me to be free.
Get to Diggin’
Here are some foundational concepts of my ‘digging.’ There are 100 practical ways to start building these concepts into life and they all deserve more than a paragraph — but it’s taken me a goddamn month to write this thing about my dead dad, so just think of this as a chapter list at the front of a book. More to follow.
Routines of Peace
If rest requires distraction or sedation, is it really restorative? A chronically or traumatically stressed system has coping strategies that are not necessarily healthy, and it’ll need to learn new ones. An example of this is Beta dominance, where your brain struggles to shift from Beta (doing energy) into other states like Theta, which are essential for relaxation, quality sleep, and processing emotion. Teaching your system to gear down/up for itself & by itself takes time and diligent effort. Predictability builds trust.
Capacity for Grey
Expanding capacity for this and that, black and white.
When you are insecure and fearful there is no space for this. Understanding, innovation and deep connection often lie in the grey. This is a WHOLE cake and it takes time. Increasing your capacity and increasing your resiliency go hand in hand (a good analogy for capacity & resiliency is that you need to be able to first feel sensation in a muscle, in order to then know if you are stretching it too hard or not hard enough).
Zooming Out
Stepping into the role of an observer rather than cult follower of your thoughts and feelings. This immediately gives a degree of separation. E.g. it flips a ‘knowing’ that you are defective, into an observation that you think you are defective. Realising that something is an experience and not an unshakeable identity can drain the emotional intensity enough to start pulling it apart, without invalidating yourself in the process.
Pain Makes You Susceptible to Wilful Ignorance
And often it’s not even wilful (conscious). Self-flagellation can be the ultimate defensive strategy and ironically it often blinds you to the core of the issues that are self-perpetuated and derailing your life. Healthy self-relationship allows you to ‘dig’ into discomfort rather than resorting to defences (like avoidance or reactivity). I want to be clear — you must laugh at yourself — life is far too bizarre not to! But when you do it from a place of fear you are keeping yourself stuck.
Dirty Hands for Life
The key is and always has been finding a way to turn towards the pain, instead of away into distraction, numbness, and self-judgement. To turn towards and reach out a hand to the parts of you that fear that you are alone and unacceptable. To gather the right resources internally so you neither repress nor indulge your feelings (I’ve done lots of both, so you’re hearing that from an expert), but take the information and move through to the understanding. You unearth a lot of beauty and new ability, and a wicked sense of humour as you go.
I get sick of practising this. I fall away from it sometimes. It becomes second nature for some things and stays a grind for others. Doubt flares up regularly. The aching sensation of a monumental volume of loss. Then I turn to look down the road of everything I’ve not only made it through, but expanded from, the peace I do hold, the cycles that are broken, and I pick that shovel back up.
You dig.
