You Can Leave the Door Open Without Waiting There

It is strange to hold grief and celebration in the same open hand. This is what September is holding for me.

On the first, Balanced Roots Counseling turned two. Two years of building something from nothing but conviction and a laptop. Two years of showing up for clients on their hardest days, of learning what it means to run a practice and hold space at the same time. This moment was recognized as no small feat, yet celebrated quietly in the short moments I had to myself. And I was okay with that, because this has been a fast and furious year with so many moments of pivoting and helping others. I very much enjoy being there not only for my clients, but also for my loved ones.

Nine days later, on the tenth, marked six months since my brother died.

Six months is long enough that people stop asking how you're doing and the condolence cards have been moved off of the mantel. But six months is not long enough to stop the desire to tell him all the things on my mind and not feel the floor tilt slightly. Grief, I'm learning, doesn't observe a decent interval. It doesn't care that a business anniversary landed nine days earlier or that life is, by every external measure, going well.

To add to that grief, he would have been fifty-seven on the seventeenth. There is no ritual for a birthday that isn't. It felt strange knowing there was no possibility of texting him to say happy birthday, and I felt the weight of that. Meanwhile, I still held space for my clients and did well in setting my grief aside. That evening, I ordered dinner instead of cooking, a small reward and a chance to sit with my own thoughts for a while.

On the other hand, on the twenty-seventh, my daughter turns twenty-eight. Twenty-eight years of watching a whole person come into being, a person I made and raised and now simply get to know. It truly is a pure joy, and I notice I almost feel guilty for how easily it arrives, sitting as it does just ten days after her uncle's would-have-been birthday.

This is the strange math of September: two years of something I built, six months without someone I loved, fifty-seven years that will never be lived, twenty-eight years of a daughter thriving. None of these numbers cancel each other out. They arrive with their own emotions, without any particular need to morph into one single feeling.

I think this is part of the actual work of being human. We spend a lot of time trying to make sense of what we feel, and sometimes we assume that one feeling should replace another. If we're happy, maybe we're moving on. If grief shows up again, maybe we aren't doing as well as we thought. If we love someone, perhaps we shouldn't also be angry with them. But our emotional lives are rarely that organized. I can be proud of my practice and devastated by my brother's absence. I can grieve a birthday that isn't and celebrate one that is on the same page of the same calendar.

Lately the fog has started to lift a little. I notice it in small ways, like a morning where grief isn't the first thing I feel upon waking or a day when I realize I've actually been present most of the day. I know better than to mistake this for arrival. Grief comes in waves, not stages, and the tide that's out today will likely come back. What has changed is that I trust that movement more than I did in the beginning. A hard day doesn't mean I'm back at the beginning, just as a good day doesn't mean I'm finished grieving.

September has also had me thinking about relationships, especially the ones where grief and love and disappointment get tangled together.

The death of my brother was traumatic in itself. How I learned of it added its own layer of grief to carry, a second wound sitting on top of the first. There were things surrounding his death that I didn't get to be part of, including saying goodbye in some of the ways people traditionally do. Some of those choices weren't mine to make, and some of the information I would have needed to make them wasn't shared with me. It is a very difficult thing hearing someone talk about an absence when there was no real communication for a presence. I've had to make peace with knowing that other people may have their own version of what my absence meant, while I know the truth of what it meant for me.

I have spent a lot of time in my own therapy looking at all of this, including what belonged to me, what I might have done differently in relationships, and what was never mine to control in the first place. Somewhere in that process I started thinking about capacity, because I think we sometimes confuse how much we want from a relationship with how much another person is actually able to bring to it.

Almost none of us got everything we needed growing up. Our parents had their own histories, wounds, ways of communicating, and capacities for emotional connection. We bring pieces of that history with us into adulthood, including into the relationships where we are determined not to repeat it. We can absolutely change those patterns, but wanting to be different and actually having the capacity to be different are not always the same thing.

I've realized that I am more of a ten-gallon capacity person when it comes to emotional connection. I love big. I like the deeper conversations. I want to know people and be known by them, and for a long time I assumed that the people I loved wanted or were capable of the same thing. When they weren't, I often experienced that as rejection or believed there must be something I could do differently to get us there.

I've had to learn that isn't always true. I've also had to recognize that, if we're being fair, there are probably relationships where each of us is the pint sized capacity too. We don't have the same emotional capacity with every person in our lives, and being the ten-gallon person doesn't make us more evolved, more loving, or somehow better at relationships. The problem comes when we repeatedly expect ten gallons from a pint and then continue to be surprised when the container doesn't change.

This is where I think a lot of us can get stuck. We explain ourselves again. We try another approach. We soften what we're saying, become more direct, give it some time, or decide that maybe we asked for too much. We replay conversations and think about what we could have said differently. Sometimes that reflection is useful because there may genuinely be something we need to own or change. But there also comes a point when we have to consider what the other person has consistently shown us about what they can bring to the relationship.

That can be difficult because accepting someone's capacity may also mean grieving the relationship we thought we could have with them. We can grieve a parent who is still alive, a sibling we thought we would be closer to as adults, a friendship we believed would last, an apology that never came, or a conversation we have imagined having so many times that part of us is still waiting for it. There is no funeral for those losses, and most people around us may not even know we're grieving them, but they can still be very real.

I see this in therapy often. People come in trying to figure out another person, and sometimes we spend an enormous amount of emotional energy doing exactly that. Why did they say it that way? Why don't they understand? Why do they keep doing this? What could I say differently next time? There is certainly value in understanding our relationships, but eventually we may need to shift some of that attention away from the other person and back toward ourselves.

This is one of the reasons the body matters so much in the work I do. We can have a very convincing intellectual explanation for why something shouldn't bother us while our nervous system is having an entirely different experience. A name comes across the phone and the stomach drops. We notice ourselves holding our breath during a conversation. Our jaw tightens, our shoulders come up, or we suddenly have a strong urge to explain ourselves, defend ourselves, shut down, leave, or make everything okay before the other person becomes upset.

Those responses don't automatically tell us what is wrong with the relationship or what we should do about it. Our bodies carry history too. A reaction can be about something happening right now, something much older that the present situation has touched, or some combination of both. This is where slowing down becomes important, because if we move immediately from activation into reaction, we may never get the opportunity to find out what is actually happening.

In Somatic Experiencing work, we pay attention to those sensations and impulses rather than treating them as inconveniences we need to get rid of. We might notice where the tension is, whether it changes when we give it a little attention, or whether there is an impulse underneath it to move closer, pull away, protect ourselves, speak, or become very still. We aren't doing this so the body can make the decision for us. We are gathering more information about our experience before deciding what comes next.

I think this is where therapy can become especially useful in relationships. The goal isn't to become so regulated that nothing bothers us or so healed that nobody can trigger us. I don't know that either is realistic. The work is developing enough awareness that we have more choice about what happens after we're activated. We can notice what our body is doing, recognize the old material that may have been stirred up, and still look at what is actually happening in the relationship in front of us.

From there, the questions become more practical. When we bring something vulnerable to this person, what happens? When there is conflict, can we eventually come back and talk about it? Can two different experiences exist in the same conversation, or does one person always have to be wrong for the other to be right? Can a boundary be respected even when someone doesn't agree with it? Can either person acknowledge impact without immediately retreating to intent?

Looking at the relationship this way gives us something more useful than simply asking why another person can't meet us where we are. It helps us understand what is actually available in the relationship and decide what we want to do with that information. Sometimes there is work for us to do. We may need to communicate more clearly, stop expecting someone to know what we haven't said, set a boundary we have been avoiding, or work with an old wound that we have been asking another person to soothe for us.

Other times, we may realize that we have communicated and the answer is simply not the answer we wanted. Acceptance in those situations isn't pretending something didn't hurt or deciding that another person's behavior was okay. It also doesn't automatically mean ending the relationship. Sometimes it means changing what we expect from it so that we are no longer repeatedly asking someone for something they have consistently shown us they cannot currently give.

The same is true when it comes to repair. Relationships can change, and people can change. I believe deeply in that or I probably wouldn't do the work I do. But repair requires participation from both people. We have to be able to hear that someone experienced us differently than we intended, tolerate the discomfort that comes with that, and be curious about our own part. At some point in difficult relationships, I think we also have to ask ourselves a pretty uncomfortable question: Do you want to be right, or do you want to make change? Being right can feel incredibly important when we've been hurt, misunderstood, or feel like our experience is being dismissed. There are times when we absolutely need to stand firmly in what we know to be true. But if the goal is repair, proving our version of events cannot be the only goal. Something has to become more important than winning the argument.

That doesn't mean taking responsibility for things that aren't ours or agreeing with someone else's version of events just to keep the peace. It means being willing to consider what might need to change even when we still disagree about parts of what happened. Sometimes that change is in how we communicate with each other. Sometimes it is a boundary. Sometimes it is accepting that the relationship has limitations we wish it didn't have.

We can remain open to the possibility of repair without putting our lives on hold waiting for it. There can be room for a future conversation without rehearsing that conversation every day or organizing our lives around whether it ever happens. We can leave a door open without standing in the doorway waiting.

For anyone who has spent a long time standing in that doorway, stepping away from it can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. We may be so accustomed to monitoring the relationship, anticipating someone's reaction, replaying conversations, or trying to find the explanation that will finally make everything make sense that we don't immediately know what to do with the space when we stop.

This is another place where paying attention to the body can tell us something. There may be relief, followed immediately by guilt about feeling relieved. There may be sadness underneath all the effort that we haven't allowed ourselves to feel. We may notice how tired we actually are. We may also begin noticing that there are people around whom our bodies respond very differently. There are conversations where we aren't rehearsing every sentence before we say it, relationships where disagreement doesn't automatically feel threatening, and people with whom we don't spend hours afterward wondering whether we said the wrong thing.

Those differences are worth noticing, not because the goal is to surround ourselves only with people who never make us uncomfortable. Healthy relationships can challenge us, frustrate us, and require difficult conversations. The difference is that there is usually some capacity to return to one another afterward. We aren't always left alone carrying the emotional work of the relationship.

For those of us who are used to doing a lot of that work, it can be worth asking where our energy has been going. How much time do we spend replaying something that has already happened, anticipating the next interaction, waiting for an apology, or trying to understand someone who may not understand themselves? How much of our attention is still directed toward a conversation that isn't currently happening? And what else has been waiting for some of that attention?

Maybe there are relationships already in our lives that have more room for us than we've noticed because so much energy has been focused somewhere else. Maybe there is work we want to do, something creative we've been putting off, a part of ourselves we haven't spent much time with lately, or simply the possibility of resting without mentally returning to the same unresolved situation.

Moving some of our attention elsewhere doesn't mean the relationship no longer matters. It doesn't mean we've closed the door or stopped loving someone. It means their readiness, capacity, or willingness to change no longer has to determine whether the rest of our life gets to move too.

I think that's where the strange math of September reaches beyond my own calendar. Most of us are carrying several things at once. There are relationships that nourish us and relationships that hurt. There are things we are building while other things are ending. There are people who can meet us deeply and people we may have to learn to love differently. Our nervous systems are carrying pieces of the past while we are trying to live in the present, and none of that sorts itself into clean categories just because we would prefer it to.

So perhaps the useful place to begin isn't by figuring all of it out. It may simply be noticing where we are spending ourselves. We can pay attention to which relationships repeatedly leave us bracing, explaining, waiting, or recovering, and also notice the places where there is room to breathe, be ourselves, disagree, repair, and remain connected. From there we have more information about what needs attention, what may need a boundary, what still has room to grow, and what we may finally be ready to stop trying to force into a different shape.

There may still be a conversation someday. Someone may surprise us. A relationship may repair in a way we can't imagine from where we are now, and leaving room for that possibility doesn't require us to close ourselves off or become cynical. It also doesn't require us to wait there.

There is still a life happening while the door is open, and we are allowed to go live it.

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Kris@balancedrootscounseling.com

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Kris Williams, MS, LMHC, LPC, NCC

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