Sample Chapter from The Griefcase, Chapter Three ~ The “False” You in the Griefcase

Chapter Three The Griefcase

The Griefcase
by R. Glenn Kelly


Chapter Three ~ The "False" You in the Griefcase

Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.

~ Carlos Castaneda


You get the Griefcase analogy. The word grief, which I openly admit to using frequently myself, is not an emotion or a feeling at all. The word actually comes from the Latin word gravare, which means to make heavy. For our purposes, however, grief is the commonly used and accepted carrier word for all the emotions experienced after the death of a loved one.

   As in the analogy with Taylor, each manila folder, or file found in your Griefcase represents an individual and painful emotion that came with your loss. To start moving towards a new normal, you can visualize yourself separating, sorting, and organizing each.

   You are already reading the phrase move forward quite often. That is because the one thing that will happen, must happen, is that you will move forward. You have no choice in that fact. How you move forward is up to you, however.

   Your Griefcase, filled with painful emotions comes to you heavy and confusing. Those folders inside will never completely go away, which is why it is said that you will hold to your Griefcase for the rest of your life, even if you have resolved the emotion to what you believe is its fullest.

   Each unbearable emotion you once felt so deeply will always leave a tender scar on your soul. When touched later in your life, believe it or not, the sensation will actually bring a smile. Any tears shed will be tears of joyful memories versus the debilitating sense of anguishing pain.    

   To get to that new normal in your life, you must begin to work through the Griefcase. To really do that in the best way, you should first deal with a potentially impeding part of you that came long before your loss.    

Ego – the Gatekeeper

Before we even think about what to do with the Griefcase, there is a way to lighten some of the weight almost immediately. If you recall, the top manila folder in Taylor’s stack was labeled EGO. This may turn out to be the heaviest folder early in a man’s grief, although you might ask if ego actually is an emotion.

   No. By definition, ego is not an emotion. Trust me, however, it truly is the number one folder to be handled. Ego may not be classified as an emotion, but in men, it is unquestionably the gatekeeper to our feelings. Ego, never a positive trait, comes down to the simple definition of your own perceived impression of what others think of you. Regardless of how you feel about yourself, ego wants to know if other people think you are good? Do other people think you are strong, smart, and trustworthy? Are you seen as someone who is counted on in bad times?

   I have had the honor of speaking publically quite often, which is known to be one of, if not the largest fears for most people. In a recent clinical study solely on male phobias, public speaking was actually not the top phobia. Instead, men reported their greatest fear was being discovered for not being the man they portray themselves to be before others. Will someone find out you cannot live up to everything you present yourself to be? Will they find out you get frightened or feel weak at times? It is easy to see where ego plays here.

Ego vs. Self-Worth and Self-Esteem

Do not confuse ego with either self-worth or self-esteem. While these two are close in definition, self-worth is your foundational awareness that inside you are a good person. Self-worth is who you really are when everything else is stripped away. You began developing this as a child and it should not change as an adult. Self-esteem is a little more fluid, as it relates to how you feel about yourself at this moment. Unlike self-worth, self-esteem is normally based on recent failures or accomplishments, which could actually change any minute.

   Self-worth and self-esteem may live predominantly in the subconscious, but occasionally come out in conscious thought. Ego, however, lives almost exclusively in conscious thought but wants to take the place of self-esteem inside our minds. That way, it can act on our behalf without control.

   Self-worth and self-esteem are powerful in their own right, but can be easily blocked out and overshadowed by ego. Ego wants others to think of you in great ways, even if not true. Like lies we tell aloud if repeated to yourself enough, they eventually become false-truths in your subconscious. Also like lies told in life, each is usually followed by bigger and bigger lies until one day the truth becomes obvious, the whole thing falls apart and takes self-esteem with it.

   I have come to refer to the ego as Edging God Out and hope you will allow me to use stages of my life as an example of what ego can do. As a child, I was raised with the knowledge that I was my father’s son. He was a good and compassionate man and a hard, honest worker. I was a child of God also, and early in my adult life used the self-worth imparted by those two major influences to live a life of service to my country and to my community.

   I would enter the corporate world almost two decades ago when I opted for money over service to others. Even though brought in at a senior level from the start, I felt a need to make sure everyone knew who I was by wearing my past as Marine and cop on my sleeve. When you are in those fields the titles do not exactly single you out. In corporate America, however, it made me someone others looked up to.

   Looking back, I came into my new career with my self-worth intact, as it could never be taken away. I did not have self-esteem, though, as I was entering a new world with no immediate accomplishments to stand on. I did have the pride of who I had been, however, and people looked up to me as someone who could do anything. Understand, though, I was intimidated, anxious, and frankly concerned that someone would find out that I was not a true superstar in my new profession.

   I would adapt and become pretty good at being an executive leader over the years. Sadly, I would not equate my success to my self-worth but instead began to believe I was the superman everyone thought I was. I was living on my ego, always propped up by what others thought of me, regardless of it being from the past.

   These were lies, though. I was no longer a Jarhead or a cop. I was just me. Many times early on, I wanted to jump up and down and announce that fact but never did. It was intoxicating in a way. Everyone seemed to love me, and many acted as if they wanted to be me just for who I had been in my past. To them, I was the guy they could always count on to be brave, strong and take care of everything.

   Soon, ego edged God right out of my heart. I began telling myself those lies over and over, which eventually clouded my foundational self-worth and actually took over my self-esteem. My ego led me to honestly believe I was the rock who could never be broken, no matter what life threw at me.

   That ego worked well when my mother passed, followed a few years later by my father. There was unconditional love between us, but I had taken it for granted they would always be around, so visits were not as frequent as they could have been. I would be the rock after each was gone and not only tell others their deaths were just a natural part of life but convince myself of that as well.

   None of that was true, of course. My mom thought the world of me and would have loved me if I had been a serial killer. My father was the man I always wanted to make proud. I loved him as deeply as I loved my mother. So, the pain for both losses was very deep and anguishing, but again, I was the rock and held it in. It was made somewhat easier by living so many miles away from my parents, meaning they physical were not a part of my daily routines.

   That meant that after the services were over I eventually returned home where my day-to-day life went on pretty much as it had before. Without constant reminders, I was able to block out the grief and keep the rock image going.

   It would be a whole new ball game when my son passed away. I remain amazed at the power of my ego then to hold back the emotions of grief for as long afterward as it did. Not only did I share an amazing unconditional love with this child, but he was also deeply interwoven in almost every aspect, thought, and deed in my life.

   The ego, however, told me that others expected me to be strong. They needed me to be strong. On top of that, I had bought into the lies and therefore even I expected me to be strong. When my son passed, there were services to arrange and others around me who would need a strong shoulder to cry on. I had to be the man I thought everyone perceived me to be.

   I avoided moving forward after the loss of my child because I wrongfully thought others needed to look to me for strength, not only at home but on my quick return to work as well. Everyone was aware of my loss, of course, and I wrongly reasoned that I could not show them a chink in the armor. Surely, the rock they looked up to could take on even the incredible tragedy of losing a child and move on.

  Return to Self-Worth

In my first book, Sometimes I Cry in the Shower, I wrote about an event that took place about six months after the death of my child. I described how in the shower one morning the very spirit of my son came to me and in unspoken words told me how disappointed he was that I was not honoring his love and the legacy he left behind for me.

   Whether you believe I had an actual visit by my child or not, that event was the realization of my own self-worth. Before that moment, my ego had become my self-esteem, and more so, blocked out the incredible light of who I really was inside. The false-self kept the emotions held inside so I would not appear weak or unmanly to others, including myself.

   Emotions, especially the painful ones, are not meant to be held inside, thank goodness. They are meant to be expressed or else will collaborate with ego to kill self-esteem and hide self-worth. As men, we are already masters of holding back the daily emotions most of the time. Hold back the painful emotions of loss and your true self, while still there, becomes almost unrecognizable.    

   For over six months, my Ego had actually won out over the love I had for my child. How very, very sad was that? How long would I have gone and how much damage would be done had I not been able to look deep inside beyond ego to my true self? There can be no greater praise for the power of unconditional love. 

   If you are truly here to find ways to move forward beyond the debilitating pains of grief, you may have to deal first with the ego. Take that Ego file out of the Griefcase and open it up. Pull out all of those unorganized papers inside and use the unconditional love for your lost loved one to shred them now, or toss them in the recycle bin. Take a black magic marker, strike out the word EGO on the tab, and beside that write in, “Self-Worth.”

Living with Ego

Very few of us will ever be able to empty the Ego folder entirely. For me, there is still so far to go on my path towards healing, but feel I have come a long way already. Even with that, I am also very aware I will probably never be without some level of male ego.

   If I ever do take ego completely out of my life you might find me on some mountaintop draped in only a robe and spouting sage proverbs. I do not anticipate that for me in this lifetime, but do not feel too badly about that. After all, I know of many supposed “enlightened” souls who I respect very much, but even in them, I do not see a wardrobe change in their near future.

   Like many other negative traits in our lives, sometimes the best offense is to recognize simply that the ego is present. That does not mean accepting it, just acknowledging its potential for influence and act accordingly. As ego takes over self-esteem, it tries to set up shop in your subconscious. Through acknowledging and recognition, you are no longer an unwilling and unaware slave to the ego as it attempts to act on your behalf. When it does, you can begin taking actions against it and force it back to the conscious mind.

   When it came to the folders of emotional pain within my own Griefcase, ego stopped me entirely from even looking at them for quite some time. Not only did this damage me inside, but it delayed my start down the path to a new normal and did not honor someone who loved me unconditionally.

   If you are truly prepared to begin your journey in moving forward to your new normal, use unconditional love to pull all those papers from inside your EGO folder immediately.