Holding the Invisible

Transitions often come in waves, combining to hit us with unpredictable power. Yet how often do we step back from our busyness to reflect on our response to transitions? Join Helen Teague for a long walk on her Favourite beach, where she finds wisdom in the waves.

My Figurine Moment

Recently, I received an incredibly thoughtful gift; a figurine of a grandmother with her daughter and granddaughter, each with a hand on the shoulder of the generation below. It beautifully captured the maternal bond that flows through a family. It is delightful, yet as I unwrapped it I found myself experiencing and quickly resisting a tidal wave of mixed emotions. You see, this was a gift from my daughter, who is pregnant with her first child – a time for joy, love and new life. However, as I looked at the figurine, instead of seeing who was there, I could only see who wasn’t. Where was the mother figure with their hand on my shoulder? How was I now the grandmother and not the daughter in the figurine? I felt lost, all at sea and overwhelmed. I quickly composed myself, feeling ashamed to be thinking about myself when I wanted to be present for my daughter at this important time in her life. I hugged her tightly as I made a silent promise to myself to create some space to tune in to the powerful emotions demanding my attention. This was not because I wanted to but because it was clear that I needed to.

To put my emotional cards on the table, for the past seven years I’ve been experiencing the gradual loss of my mum through Alzheimer’s – watching her gradually fade away as she transitions through each deteriorating stage of this terrible disease. Pauline Boss describes this experience in her beautiful book Loving Someone Who Has Dementia. She defines it as ‘ambiguous loss – a loss that is unclear; it has no resolution, no closure’¹ (p.1). Perhaps you are navigating through a similar experience. With 55 million people globally living with dementia², I know I’m not alone. The journey is long, full of highs and lows as well as moments of joy and pain. In the main, it runs silently alongside the rest of my life and work. It has heightened my awareness of being a part of a relational system in flux. It has also given me a growing appreciation for the myriad of relational spaces that we all occupy in both our professional and personal lives, as well as the constant ripples we experience as we – and the people we relate to – alter. My well-worn copy of William Bridges’ seminal work on transition³, with its description of ‘endings, neutral zones and new beginnings’ (p.4) has supported me in the past, but now it does not. Richard Rohr’s more recent book The Wisdom Pattern⁴ powerfully urges readers ‘to let go of our first order, trust the disorder, and, sometimes even hardest of all – to trust the new reorder.’ (p.10) However, this sound advice has also left me cold. So, this ‘figurine moment’ has acted as a catalyst for my journey that digs into the familiar coaching territory of transition – the psychological dimension that underpins and enables change – in the search for fresh insights and practical wisdom for myself as well as those I work with, coach and love. I wrote this article over a period of six months, and it shares some of my experiences and reflections, supported by valuable insights from trusted colleagues.

Emotional Undercurrents

True to my word, I carved out some time for a long walk on my favourite beach. Living by the sea, I often find myself mesmerised by the waves. I notice how they come one at a time in an almost orderly fashion before a lull and then the emergence, seemingly from nowhere, of a huge wave, comprised of several merged waves, accompanied by a tumultuous roar as it crashes on the shore. It struck me: that’s what transition is and what it feels like to me. Just like waves, transitions don’t wait their turn or exist in isolation of each other; they coexist, all bundled up together at different stages of beginnings, middles and endings. The waves visible on the surface are accompanied by equally powerful and invisible undercurrents that destabilise and knock you off your feet. As one colleague eloquently describes, they are ‘transitional forces with their own agency and dynamism’.

At this point, it dawned on me that my search for practical wisdom was actually an attempt to avoid further uncertainty, to try and get a grip of and head off unexplored and unpalatable feelings. Sue Monk Kidd’s words in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter⁵ resonated with me: ‘Don’t try to leap over yourself. Just accept what is and be with it, really be with it, because when you do that you are being in the moment. You are being present as you live your life.’ (p.114) Anecdotes from trusted colleagues revealed story after story of winding paths through transition points in their lives, with one colleague powerfully stating that, ‘transitioning has many unconscious aspects to it – it’s not a process that can be ‘controlled’ but instead needs to be “held”’. While I am aware that I often ‘hold’ the space for others, whether in my work as a coach or in my close relationships, at this time in my life I find it difficult to put my finger on how I approach holding my own process of transition. How do you hold the invisible? This question nudged me to explore how I might develop my own art for holding the invisible, unconscious aspects of my transition.

Facing the Waves

In my effort to understand my own process, I’ve surfaced an inherent tension in the balance between looking inward and reaching out. There are essential lonely times as well as times for shared humanity. I’ve noticed that, having moved towards my confusion and emotions in private more deeply than usual, I’ve stepped into my coaching supervision spaces in a different way. I really trust the psychological safety of that space and that established relationship. I am allowing myself to arrive at a session feeling alone and confused, and also to leave a session feeling supported and still confused! Practising gestalt theory for myself, remembering once more, as Hycner and Jacobs⁶ describe it, that ‘change occurs with supported awareness of what is … with no demands to change and no judgements that it should not be as it is’. (p.63) Allowing myself to say things out loud that don’t make sense on the surface but reveal hidden depths that resonate powerfully. Appreciating that listening to myself and being present in this way reconnects me with my own history, as my sense of self today alters for the unfolding future. One colleague beautifully described this as ‘a small kernel of something new emerging from the mire of uncertainty’.

Ever the pragmatist, I’ve revisited the FELT coaching tool⁷ developed by Liz Hall, which is a model I often use with clients. (p.207) But there’s a difference I’ve noticed where I’m resting in the ‘letting’ stage. The model offers the following question: is there anything that wants to be let be, let go of or let in? I’ve found myself tuning into this question, as well as some of my own queries, and allowing myself to be lost in a sea of inquiry for as long as I need, and noticing the undercurrent below the surface trying to emerge.

I’ve noticed that different parts of me are responding to my intentional inquiry from a deeper level, as if they are daring to surface, trusting that their voices will be heard. For me, a ‘small kernel of something’ is now emerging from my figurine moment around identity and I’m pondering Helen Ebaugh’s idea of ‘role exit – the process of disengagement from a role that is central to your identity and the re-establishment of an identity in a new role that takes into account your ex-role’, which I discovered while reading Exit, The Endings That Set Us Free by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (p157). I’m learning to value, not fear, paradoxes, appreciating that rather than diminishing me, they herald deep internal shifts, learning and integration – an emerging ‘new order’ as Richard Rohr says. Perhaps most importantly, I’m learning that noticing and being with the tensions transmitted by invisible transitional forces is invisibly productive.

Riding the Waves

Going back to my walk along the beach, while I watched the waves, I also watched the surfers. Noticing that once they catch a wave, they become at one with its chaos and turbulence before emerging beyond it. At no time do they attempt to control the wave; they go with it, shifting their position on the board to lean into its force to stay with it as the wave churns and changes. So too, we can lean into the disorder of our transitions as we alter and emerge once more for the journey ahead. Perhaps holding my own process is akin to riding the waves. Perhaps next time I go to the beach, instead of going for a walk, I’ll go for a surf!

1
Boss, Pauline PhD (2011) Loving Someone With Dementia, Jossey Bass Publisher
2
World Health Organisation https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dementia
3
Bridges, William, (2003) Managing Transitions, Nicholas Brealey Publishing
4
Rohr, Richard, (2022) The Wisdom Pattern, SPCK Publishing
5
Monk Kidd, Sue (2002) The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Harpercollins
6
Hycner & Jacobs, L (1995) The Healing Relationship I Gestalt Therapy, The Gestalt Journal Press, Gouldsboro, USA. P.63
7
Hall, Liz (2015) Coaching In Times of Crisis, Koganpage

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