I’m thrilled to share this guest post by my husband, Daev Finn, a licensed professional counselor working here in Boulder, Colorado and worldwide, where he shares, with wisdom and vulnerability, a bit of his journey around processing unfinished business, specifically around the illness and death of his father many decades ago. One of the things I love most about my husband (and there are many) is how courageously he travels into the depths of difficult emotions, and how skillfully he’s able to guide others to do the same. As an artist and visual thinker deeply trained in Jungian psychology, he has a beautifully creative way of describing the tendrils and tenets of our complex emotional lives.
Daev and I, alongside our moderator Victoria, will be offering a FREE webinar on career transitions, dreams, and the emotional life of men on Wednesday, March 4th, at 12:15pm ET. Learn more and sign up here.
If you would like to learn more about Daev’s work and his therapy practice, you can do so here. He currently has a small number of openings for long-term clients.
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FEELING ACTIVATION IN A MEDITATION
I had an experience in a deep meditation some months back, when the ground was still cold here in Colorado. The practice took place late at night as I meditated for hours. As usual, I am listening to my meditation music in my studio, working to deepen my practice. There were convincing, but fake, flickering candles, which I often use when I meditate, even though I keep my eyes closed and I cover myself with a blanket like a cloak. This is also a form of setting intention, as the goal is to go completely inward. I remind myself that this is a slow, incremental process, especially when I feel impatient with something I feel I may be carrying in my life.
Since it’s fall I’m punctuating this article with the fractals the increasingly reveal themselves in the autumn.
In my deepest state of meditation, when I found myself slipping into liminal states of consciousness, I felt like I was feeling the presence of my father close by somehow. I don’t know how to explain this fleeting experience exactly. It could be that I slipped into the slipstream of memories that took me close to some of my earliest trauma (his illness and death). It could be that I brushed up against the visceral memories of caring for him in his earlier years in some way. In those moments, I felt it, and received a flash as if not just him, but my past was close by to my left.
As I felt myself shift my awareness to this, it was then that I felt something else; I felt my meditation abruptly end as if I were kicked clear by part of myself that shut the door abruptly. It was an emotional rebuff.
My eyes opened, and still under the blanket, I didn’t dare move. I tried to sense the confusing feelings that seemed to animate along that invisible constellation of my unconscious. I could see the candles flickering through the opening in my blanket and said, “Oh.”
This “oh” sound embodied a realization of something that bubbled up from inside, something I refer to with clients as unfinished business.
For me, I felt a clear part of myself present in that moment of meditation, a child part that was simultaneously hurt, and was this anger? Could I harbor anger against my sick and now deceased father? Why should I? As a psychotherapist, I know the answer is yes, of course, but I thought I had worked through this anger and hurt in the decades I’d been in therapy, or maybe in the years studying psychology. The clarity of an insight that came up in this meditation is that there is still a part of me that is hiding within. This child part, a small hurting boy, seemed very present that night in my studio.
A CONSTELLATION OF CONNECTIONS
Not only was this part of myself locked away, but he was keeping me from feeling and exploring something around my father, which I still carry. This unprocessed grief, anger, and hurt. This unfinished business. This is not to say that I blame my father for these things, but in this lifetime, I feel that my goal is to continue to explore these stuck places, the unprocessed parts that are part of that matrix of my psyche, the constellation of connections in my unconscious that I speak of.
This realization is what I refer to as intellectual insight, but this insight, which allows me to process this intellectually, is only part of how these deep hurts need to be processed. There is a feeling sense around these things as well, and expressing the feeling is more difficult – but is also where much of the healing is.
LMU campus in Los Angeles from our recent trip. I continue to use the fractal branching of various trees to illustrate the connections in our consciousness in another visual way.
The reaction to feeling the presence of my father was met with this closed door within, as if this child part had locked itself away. I could only marvel at this realization that I could sense part of myself receding quickly, denying me more understanding, even though I still felt growing intellectual clarity around what I experienced. I touched something deep within. I was rebuffed, left with some insight, but there was no catharsis, no alchemical transmutation of energy into something else.
Many of us, perhaps all of us, have unfinished business in our lives. This is usually with those we are closest to, or at least had a chance of being closest to. The unfinished business is a relic of the past, a remnant of things we have struggled with. Even in doing decades of psychotherapy, journaling, studying psychology, and meditating, I am clear that I also still have these places within myself as well. There is more catharsis ahead, more transmutation, and time travel to the most painful parts of my life.
YOUR UNFINISHED BUSINESS
The unfinished business we each carry in our lives may be multi-faceted, of course. We may never find closure from all the unfinished business we carry, but there is some baggage that we may need to unpack and face. We may simply become aware of more of these hard places, these stuck places, as we get triggered by stressors in our lives.
Having that intellectual insight, though, takes time, and even if we say, “Ah, yes, I resent so and so, that’s my unfinished business,” it doesn’t mean that the weight of that baggage has been put down.
Consider that as we work to deal with parts of ourselves, we are not just working to uncover hidden memories, difficult things from our past, but we need to find healing and resolution to a complex constellation of memories and emotions that are intertwined with those memories. I refer to them a constellation because a memory does not live in isolation; the way we perceive something in our past or present is linked to many past experiences that create a feeling sense around memories. Some of those experiences are outside of our narrative memory completely, but something older than chronological narrative memory has still been tracking our experiences.
From a neurological perspective, we might say that the need is to rewire the neural pathways of the brain. This itself may be a complex problem. The neural pathways that may have been created by that wound, the unfinished business, may be hard to navigate. We can find clues, though, because they leave a trail, an imprint, evidence. We can see how the stories that are woven by these connections affect our lives, our mood, and our feelings around what it means to be oneself. Are we feeling anxious and not confident today? Perhaps a constellation of self-doubt and rumination has been triggered.
Cottonwoods in our yard. I marvel at the way fractal patterns are revealed as the leaves drop.
This process itself may trigger feelings of shame or anger that make us not want to examine these feelings, but on the other hand, to pause and become aware (to fold with it) allows us to find some insight.
Another way to speak of it is to address the emotional imprint that is left behind from something. This emotional feeling is somewhat different than the straightforward narrative, as a narrative can be told with detachment. Feeling the weight of a narrative is another thing altogether. The feeling sense around something begs the question in general, why should there be a feeling sense around an experience or a cluster of experiences? We humans are not automatons that simply experience things like a computer watching the world through sensors; we experience at an emotional level as well, and to be in denial of this is part of where someone may also get stuck.
FINDING THE PATTERN IN THE NOISE
I am talking about the process of looking for connections within that may yield insight and healing. I often speak of slowing this process down and “folding” with the thing that comes up. We find clarity by going towards pain, rather than masking it, burying it, or ignoring the ways that it comes out. We look for clues in our lives, like where we feel our temper flare, or if we feel ourselves slipping into a depressed state. We may feel the vibration of anxiety from a social engagement, or the loneliness of retreating to our own space.
There is a beautiful pattern even in the chaos of the fallen Maple trees here.
Often, we explore the latticework of filaments of the unconscious in ways that Freud would have referred to as free association. We explore something and seek the connection to something else. These associations from a Depth psychology perspective suggest real connections – a hidden latticework of the mind.
This combing for information, clues, and understanding takes time because, in effect, in therapy or in seeking insight, we are traveling to seemingly random places in the unconscious. We are listening, though, and trying to feel for a connection to a narrative pathway. We are trying to see the pattern in the noise, and it is revealed incrementally.
GRAVITATIONAL WAVES OF UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Consider that our lifetime of experiences acts on our psyche like gravity works on the dust and matter in space, where we now know it coalesces together, forming these tendrils of connection between galaxies. This is the hidden latticework that connects the galaxies, and it closely resembles the connections in the human brain.
I am suggesting it is not simply the neural pathways that we can see with a microscope, but that the same latticework is present in human consciousness as well.
This latticework begins to form at the time we are born into this world. In my article, Fractals of the Mind, I link to the simulation of the universe forming by Volker Springel. That simulation could also be imagined as human consciousness forming over a lifetime.
NASA astronaut Frank White in his book, The Cosma Hypothesis (2018), speaks about this latticework of cosmic filaments across the universe as not just matter, or energy but rather he describes the Universe as a living conscious system the way Earth was described as conscious, in James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, which first appeared in a paper, and was later published as Gaia: A New Look at life On Earth, (1979).
This organizing principle of the Universe, White describes as “information.” We can use the idea that the latticework of outer space mirrors the latticework of information for the human psyche as well.
We are trying to get that overview effect of our psyche in our lives.
Our lifetime of experiences coalesce into the latticework that creates our sense of self.
Much of this is hidden in the unconscious, where our sense of self is shaped, and for some of us, the narratives attached to some strands of this latticework are narratives that don’t serve us and may be linked to hard experiences like trauma.
It could be that a strand of our unconscious gets activated when we are triggered by something in our lives. Someone cuts us off in traffic, and our sense of outrage is out of proportion to the event. Perhaps someone hurts our feelings in a way that vibrates along multiple strands of our unconscious and brings up painful feelings of abandonment.
We feel these effects on our psyche the way we feel gravity pull us down to Earth. There is a clear effect, and sometimes it can feel just like gravity in that we report we are feeling lethargic, unmotivated, heavy, or weighed down.
There are other ways of describing when we feel something within is triggered, but trying to find visual ways to embody this can help us navigate the latticework of our unconscious. Through this, we can explore ways that we are fused with an old story, or an old experience, like I felt with the young boy I felt triggered in my meditation.
All of this takes time.
These are slow explorations that we need to be patient with. There may be a sense that we make progress, and we retreat. There may be the idea that maybe we’ve explored everything, and yet something else gets activated again with a new experience, a new life transition, or a challenge.
Some of this is hidden from our conscious mind for good reason; it may feel too painful to have in the forefront of our awareness until we process around it and understand more of ourselves.
This slow unfolding allows us to build confidence, understand ourselves more deeply, and with patience and dedication, put down the most painful things in our lives so that we no longer have to carry the weight of unfinished business.
Dear Sheryl,
The synchronicity is incredible. Just today I was writing in my journal about how I feel “stuck” in an unfinished matter from the past — using almost the exact words your dear Daev shares.
For several years now, I have been trying to support my older daughter — and my younger one as well — as they move through intense emotional suffering. Along that path, I have had to face my own inner challenges in order to truly be a source of support rather than, unintentionally, an obstacle. It has been an immense process of pain and growth… and yet I feel that I must keep going deeper and deeper.
In these past weeks, I have recognized that the intense emotional experience I am living — being physically far from my daughter and feeling her suffering — that “inner constellation” Daev describes so clearly, is not new. I have known this inner place for many years, perhaps since my earliest memories. Now it is activated again, coloring what I am experiencing with her, and preventing me from acting as I would like: with wisdom, love, peace, and true containment.
I see now that it disconnects me from my maternal intuition and from my connection with God, taking me to a place that feels like an inner hell.
I understand more clearly that this is unfinished business within me. Something that needs to be seen, felt, integrated, and transmuted if I truly want to accompany my daughter in the way she needs.
Interestingly, it was not my own healing that initiated this journey, but my daughters’ suffering. They spoke to me about anxiety, and I read your book and took your course to better understand them… only to discover that I, too, was struggling with it. They spoke about emotional neglect, and as I studied it, I recognized parts of my own history. I saw them struggle with emotional regulation, and I began to notice those same difficulties within myself.
I had developed coping mechanisms that allowed me to function, and perhaps on my own I would not have looked so deeply. But through them, life has held up a mirror to me.
Today I feel called to go deeply inward — to understand my mind, my emotions, my bodily sensations. As quantum physics suggests, something in the observer transforms what is observed. If I transform, the field changes.
Sometimes I think I would have liked to study psychology when I was young. Life did not unfold that way. But now, from a different place, I am committed to understanding and healing myself. I know that this path will not only allow me to connect more deeply with my daughters, but also to improve my relationship with myself, with my beloved husband, with my family of origin, and with the world.
Thank you for this beautiful and courageous piece. It reminded me that this work is truly the work of a lifetime.
With love,
Esmeralda
Esmeralda,
Thank you for the beautiful response to my article on Unfinished Business. I think so often that when people write to someone as you did, there is such a great unfolding. You just did the work in exploring and processing your experience, and I would think this also resonates with others who are navigating their own constellation of experiences from the past, which are always present in some way.
You mention wishing you studied psychology when you were young, but I came to this during a career in visual effects when I wished to understand my own struggles. It’s never too late to keep taking in information and understanding ourselves more deeply, and honestly, I think that we have a need to understand more as we get older.
My overall sense of things is that when things become hard we have a couple things that happen. The first is that we have a default response to some of the things that may flood us based on past experiences. So for instance, we may respond to something with shame, which then creates a depressive state and slows us down. The second is that we may give in to this field as though it creates static in our minds and we may succumb to it, or block it altogether.
The trick is to show curiosity around these harder feelings. To have an aha moment, and think… “ah I feel stuck in shame right now because of this situation, the suffering.” or maybe, “I feel gravity pulling me down, I’m weighed down by this suffering. What do I know about suffering?” or maybe if it’s not that clear just thinking, “something is present, I feel gripped…”
If I can put my meditation practice in a nutshell I would say that I use music to amplify my awareness around some mood, or feeling that may be present (or partially present). I may ask at the beginning of the meditation, “what do I know about shame?”
Step 1: Intention: Identify what might be present and ask the question. What do I know about this?
Step 2: Invitation: Soften our presence into the meditation music, and allow it to guide us. Can we let our mind/body merge with this music? What might come to the surface as we do this? We don’t force it, we soften our attention, focus on the breathing, and allow ourselves to go deeper. This is an invitation.
Step 3: Processing: When the meditation is over, we ask again, what came up? Did anything? This is when I write about what is present.
I may be oversimplifying some of this, but to me, it is about allowing something to come forward, not about necessarily extinguishing all thoughts whatsoever. I’m working on another article to explore this better, feeling that some of my past writing on meditation may be too long
My last thought is that I tend to be very specific about music that amplifies states of awareness within. This is one piece I use quite a bit.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/peaceful-journeys/1416424511?i=1416424519
Thanks again for responding to my article and being vulnerable here.
Daev
Dear Daev,
Thank you so very much for your generous and thoughtful response. And please forgive me for not thanking you sooner — I needed some time to sit with everything and process it more deeply.
Although I do not currently have a steady meditation practice (something that has always been challenging for me), I was very moved by what you shared. I was not able to access the music yet — I need to take some time to figure out how to do that — but what struck me most was your invitation to identify one emotion.
That, I realize, has been difficult for me. When I look inside, there are so many feelings — and one leads to another. It feels layered. And when I trace this back to childhood or adolescence, I see that it was the same then. Many emotions intertwined, difficult to name clearly.
I have also realized something important: the pain of watching someone I love deeply suffer — especially my daughters — led me into fear. And in that fear, I lost connection with my maternal intuition. I stopped trusting myself. I also felt disconnected from my relationship with God. Fear took over.
That realization has been humbling.
Because of this, I became very interested in Polyvagal Theory. It seemed to resonate with my lived experience — the idea that when we are in a state of threat, we lose access to connection, clarity, and intuition. I wanted to learn how to regulate myself first, to move out of fear, so I could show up differently.
However, I have recently learned that Polyvagal Theory is being seriously questioned in some scientific circles. So now I find myself in that stage of inquiry that feels chaotic — when something that made sense begins to unravel, and you have to sit with uncertainty again.
Perhaps this, too, is part of the work.
I also wanted to share something personal. Living now in Seville for four months — and before that in Rome for seven — has reconnected me deeply with the Catholic faith. Perhaps simply because here it is everywhere. There is a church on every street, and they are full. I have allowed myself to be drawn into it.
Catholic spirituality embraces suffering. It loves the cross. It sees the cross as a symbol of redemption. And I have realized how difficult that is for me — to embrace the pain of watching others suffer, especially one’s children or family members.
The image of Mary witnessing her son’s suffering has touched me deeply. The idea that the pain of seeing your child suffer can be held — not eliminated, not controlled — but held when you trust there is something greater.
I am a mother of adult daughters, yet still very much a mother in progress. And I am discovering that the older they become, the more intense my need is to understand myself — so that I can remain connected from love rather than from fear.
I also wanted to tell you that I have read several of your blog posts, and I truly enjoyed them. I want to congratulate you for your deep curiosity and your evident commitment to growth, learning, and sharing. It is inspiring to witness that level of dedication and openness.
Thank you again for your kindness, clarity, and vulnerability. Your words truly resonated.
With gratitude,
Esmeralda
Esmeralda,
Thank you for sharing more about your experiences and about what it means to carry things as a mother. As an ex-catholic I am struck by your thoughtfulness around what you experience around Catholic symbols, and the suffering that is present in the Catholic symbolism in various ways. Keep in mind also that when you go into a big church, the church itself is meant to be a meditation. The symbolism of the design is part of it, but think of it as walking within a mandala, which is not unconnected from the temples of India, which invoke the mandala in three-dimensional space as well. This is an invitation, a technological feat that is meant to lift the spirit, and allow someone to ascend to a higher state of consciousness. This is a big part of many religions, from Whirling Dervishes to the vision quests of native Americans, or the pain rituals of various cultures. There is a shift (sometimes subtle) in consciousness, often not so subtle.
This is in part what seated meditation is about as well, a shift in consciousness, and to me that involves understanding that there are emotional states of consciousness present that we can amplify to help release something.
I’m writing some new articles on meditation practices, one is based in part on our conversation, in that I try to simplify some of my approach to meditation because I know I can write too much and I want to simplify some of my meditation instructions.
Another article is called Chthonic Meditations, and instead explores how to go toward the emotions that may be roiling around confusingly within ourselves in order to amplify one experience.
You’ve named some of your experiences as fear, and I can hear grief underneath.
So maybe my next articles will appeal to more of where you are, and help you deepen your practice, but keep trusting some of where you are drawn. The Catholic church appears to create a holding environment offering something sacred, and that is not a bad thing to seek, you are placing yourself within the mandala.
-Daev
This resonates today. I had to practice acceptance afresh today about having OCD. i’ve been resisting it. Wishing it was different. Today I said “I have OCD and it is hard. I accept this is my truth right now. ” and then as soon as I said that I had the thought “I have to accept he is dead.” This relates to a partner who died well over 20 years ago. Acceptance of one hard truth surfaced the need to accept another hard truth. And that is part of my unfinished business.
Hangovergirluk,
Thank you for sharing about such a hard thing, the loss of a loved one, and how this came to you spontaneously.
You had an internal response to your saying, “I have OCD, and it is hard. I accept this is my truth right now.” There is an echo of the word “accept,” and the difficulty of accepting your partner’s death, but also the word accept invites a certain finality which you may be feeling that we may wish to keep at bay, because we often fear what may be behind that wall if we let it through.
These things then tend to be layered, or connected through a constellation of experiences throughout our lifetime. Embedded in the word accept, and the connection to the loss is a big thing. Also embedded in this may be another internal message about what this means to you personally.
So on the one hand, it’s already a big thing to face the grief and loss that is present with what came up. It was a tremendous insight.
Also, along with that, maybe another message is intertwined with what it means to accept or what it means to lose someone.
I don’t want to make assumptions about what may be intertwined, so I’ll give you an example from my life around loss and this is just one strand of my latticework. I became a workaholic in the wake of my father’s death because it was something I had control over. The trouble with being a workaholic is that there is never enough work to keep something away that is really powerful. Along with the overwork, I was writing programs to help keep things under control. If I could write software fast enough, then I could streamline my process and keep chaos from coming in; chaos was the perceived enemy.
I was exhausting myself keeping chaos at bay, and also I was getting encouragement for what I was accomplishing. So many strands became intertwined. I was appreciated, received attention, kept the chaos away. Until I couldn’t anymore, and with the chaos came so many emotions I was holding back for a long time.
Sometimes these threads vibrate again when something comes closer to the surface.
Sheryl and I went to Europe not long ago, and it was my first time in London since my dad died. I woke from dreams of being a child again and seeing my dad enter the garage and disappear into darkness. It was a memory from when I was around 7. I was suddenly revisiting new aspects of loss that I wasn’t even aware of until I could smell the scent of London, and walk up familiar stairwells I had seen after his death. These things live within us in various ways, and I try to feel into when they are vibrating and asking for attention now.
Again, not implying that this is your story or a strand from your intertwined threads, giving examples of how things vibrate along these internal constellations of experiences, and come to the surface.
Thanks again for what you shared.
Daev