Hello, I’m Johnr Davidson, pronounced either John-are or John-er. I am a Father and a Grandfather.
It is well known that grief is cumulative, grief increases by successive losses. I suffered 2 divorces and the death of all 4 Grandparents without fully grieving. Perhaps I thought I had grieved, I was sad, in pain, and I wept. I was young and didn’t really understand what grief work was.
My path to becoming certified as both Grief Recovery Method Specialist and Grief Educator began as a man broken by the experiences of many losses in a relatively short period of time. Big intense losses. The death of my father, 2 years later the death of my mother, a month later I was given a 4% chance to survive a medical condition known as Septicemia, 2 years later the death of my wife of 20 years to cancer, 2 years later foreclosure of my home and property. The hidden losses associated with these overt losses is a lengthy list.
My grief was expressing in all spheres of my life; psychological, social, physical, emotional, and spiritual. The pain and trauma associated with these overt losses, and the underlying covert aspects creating more losses left me confused, frustrated, and exhausted. I needed to do something, anything to “get out of” this madness. I remembered a quote from Joseph Campbell: “…The way out is the way in, where we stumble we find our gold.” The term Monomyth from Campbell, commonly referred to as “The Hero’s Journey”, seemed to me to be the way in. A glimmer of hope came to me.
I enrolled in a writing workshop led by a young PhD of Inter-Cultural Studies, where I became familiar with grief through the eyes of this culture and other cultures. I found another Grief Workshop and enrolled in it.
The healing I experienced began to change my inner landscapes. The transformational power of grief and the “Hero’s Journey” I had embarked on, or quite literally stumbled onto, really, began to bring gold to shine in and through me.
I became vetted as a volunteer co-facilitator of the Grief Workshop I had attended locally. The more I witnessed people in their grief, and more importantly, the changes I could in see those folk in supporting them in their grief work, the more I understood grief to be a transformational power. Six years later, I still co-lead this workshop as a volunteer.
Next, I became certified through The Grief Recovery Institute as a Grief Recovery Method Specialist. Research conducted by Kent State University has shown The Grief Recovery Method approach to helping grievers deal with the pain of emotional loss in any relationship is “Evidence Based” and effective. I offer The Grief Recovery Method as in person one on one sessions and in person small groups.
After arriving in the Emergency Room October 3, 2010, I was informed by a surgeon I was in acute sepsis with only a few hours to live. He further reported he was calling a surgery team together and would do their best to save my life. After surgery, he said, my survival would be completely up to me. He estimated I had at best a 4% chance to pull through the first night. I spent 14 days in ICU. I awoke in a Surgical Acute Ward a few days later without any memory of the past number of days. In total I was hospitalized 35 days. The surgery team had performed a total colostomy. Combined, a total of 30” of small and large intestines had been removed. It would be 4 months before the large intestine could be sewn together again.
During the following 2 year recovery time I would provide end of life care to my wife as she succumbed to cancer. During this time I began to realize there had to be a reason I had indeed survived. The reason as revealed to me later was to serve myself through serving others by meeting them in the pain of their losses. To help others navigate the turbulent waters of grief and loss. This has evolved into a knowing I am in service to the higher good of all, and the desire of my Soul.
My ideal clients tend to have the emotional ability to be open, honest, and authentic. Also, I am able to help those that believe they are unavailable emotionally by working with sensations underlying feelings as a way to begin to open to feeling states.
Society tells us to swim upstream when it comes to grieving loss, changes in familiar patterns, or the want for things to be different, better, or more. From my perspective in the way Love encompasses all of life, grief underlies all of life. Society teaches us to compete and acquire, not how to handle loss.
Doing our grief work brings many benefits to us:
- Being met right where we are and have our pain witnessed.
- Express the feelings in our grief stories.
- Release the guilt associated with our grief stories.
- Free ourselves of old wounds. Triggers provide a map of our grief and lead us to where the pain is intensified, and the healing resides.
- Integrate the pain of loss. The promise of Grief is to turn the pain and sorrow of losses into joy and beauty in our lives.
- Find meaning in ourselves and in life again as we move forward to a new future.
