VM Psychological PLLC

Your Body Is Talking. Might it have a narrative?

Not everything shows up as a thought.

Sometimes it shows up as a tight chest before a difficult conversation. A knot in your stomach when you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. A lump in your throat when there’s something you wish you could say but can’t quite find the words for.

We live in a culture that encourages us to think our way through everything. But some experiences aren’t asking to be analyzed. They’re asking to be noticed.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that many of the sensations we fight against are carrying information. Anxiety, grief, anger, fear, vulnerability, they often show up in the body long before they show up in language.

That doesn’t mean every ache has a deeper meaning. But it does mean that when something keeps showing up, it may be worth getting curious instead of immediately trying to get rid of it.

A simple question I often return to is:

“What am I noticing in my body right now?”

Not to fix it.
Not to judge it.
Just to listen.

Sometimes healing begins the moment we stop arguing with our experience and start paying attention to it.

Vinnie Mangiapane, MA, LLP
VM Psychological PLLC

Not every loss can be transformed into something useful.

The reality of grief is different from what others see or guess from the outside. Platitudes and pat explanations will not work here.

There is not a reason for everything. Things happen that do not have a silver lining. We have to start telling the truth about this kind of pain. About grief, about love, about loss.

Because the truth is, in one way or another, loving each other means losing each other. Being alive in such a fleeting, tenuous world is hard. Our hearts get broken in ways that can’t be fixed.

There is pain that becomes an immovable part of our lives. We need to know how to endure that, how to care for ourselves inside that, how to care for one another.

We need to know how to live here, where life as we know it can change, forever, at any time. We need to start talking about that reality of life, which is also the reality of love.

Your survival in this life post-loss won’t follow steps or stages, or align with anyone else’s vision of what life might be for you. Survival won’t be found, can’t be found, in easy answers or in putting your lost life behind you, pretending you didn’t really want it anyway.

In order to survive, to find that life that feels authentic and true to you, we have to start with telling the truth. This really is as bad as you think. Everything really is as wrong, and as bizarre, as you know it to be.

When we start there, we can begin to talk about living with grief, living inside the love that remains.