There's Nothing Like a Sharp Needle to Puncture a Balloon of Grief: I Know, Because It Happened to Me

Keep reading, folks: there are needles in this story, but not till the end

As I think most of my readers know, I started my Substack, What to Believe, to serialize the memoir I wrote about my struggle to accept that my dad's death had been a suicide and not an accident, as my mother insisted and the coroner confirmed (because Mom lied to the coroner).

There were many repercussions of living with that kind of lie, one of which was that my grief was long and drawn out. I hesitate to claim that there’s such a thing as a normal grief schedule, but my ideal trajectory is that someone you love dies and you deal with it then, when it’s fresh, and for months after, and especially in that first year when you are faced with all the holidays and anniversaries and birthdays that he or she used to be around for. For most of us, the pain subsides gradually. Eventually it stops being consistently unbearable. When you least expect it, it will resurface, but even then, it won’t last as long as it did in the immediate aftermath.

In the 10 years after my father’s death (which happened when I was 13) I lost four uncles, two cousins, a step-grandfather, and a classmate. I thought I was pretty good at grief. But when I began stumbling across evidence in my early twenties that Dad’s death hadn’t been an accident, I was plunged into a different kind of mourning. It wasn’t just having to come to terms with the idea that Dad had deliberately chosen death over me (and my mother and sister), it was that I didn’t know who or what to believe now that I could no longer cling to Mom’s comforting accident story.

A few years ago, when prolonged grief disorder was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I believed I finally had a name for what I had experienced. Then I interviewed one of the researchers whose work was key in getting the disorder included in the DSM and I learned that prolonged grief disorder is marked by an inability to get on with your life six months or more after the loss of a loved one, and by feelings so profound that you often wish you were dead, too. 

Even before the expert confirmed my hunch, I realized that I did not have prolonged grief disorder. What I had was grief that was prolonged because of the dysfunctional way that my father’s death was handled in 1974, which, to be honest, was somewhat understandable: suicide was a far more shameful and taboo topic back then than it is today. (My interview with author Meg Kissinger has more about this.) I have long since forgiven my mother. I understand why she and the community handled Dad’s death the way they did. And I figured that when Mom died, in 2018, I’d finally get to experience the kind of grief I wanted, at home, with my family, on what I considered to be a normal schedule.

That didn’t happen. 

Two weeks after Mom died, my then 20-year-old son was admitted to the local psychiatric hospital because he was suicidal. I'd known he was depressed but I hadn't realized it was that bad. I told myself he’d probably only be in the hospital for a few days. In fact, he was there for six weeks. Then, he was discharged on a Friday, tried to end his life again on Monday, and went back into the hospital for another six weeks. That’s when he finally got the help he needed.¹

I was so consumed with terror about the possibility of losing Noah that I never really grieved my mother. I didn’t deliberately avoid it—I just had no bandwidth to acknowledge it.

Here’s something about grief that I think few of us contemplate: it’s not like laundry or music lessons, an agenda item you can slot into a certain time or date. And yet it’s something you have to deal with, because if you fail to do so it’s likely to wreak havoc on you in some form or another. My failure to fully deal with Dad’s death kept me emotionally trapped at age 13 until I faced the truth in my twenties.

My failure to deal with Mom’s death, as best I can tell, lodged itself in my lower back, where it may well have contributed to my lack of flexibility. But I was unaware of this until March 2023, when I went to see a physiotherapist because I could not sit cross-legged on the floor, something I could once do with ease.

Included in Chelsey’s bag of physio tricks were acupuncture-style needles that she uses for a procedure called dry-needling. Basically she sticks a needle into a tight muscle where, ideally, the muscle will grab onto the needle and, upon release, relax. The way she explained it to me, dry-needling would basically accomplish in about 30 seconds what it would take six months for standard physio and exercises to do—get my tight muscles to loosen up, improving my flexibility.

I was face down on the physio table my first time, so I couldn’t see the needle going in (a good thing, as I’m squeamish). However, I could feel when Chelsey tapped it to push it down. It didn’t hurt. In fact, with the first few needles, I felt nothing. Finally, when she sent one into my right lower back, I felt a twitch.

“Are you done?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “I need to do the other side.”

In went the needle. Tap went her hand to push it in. Then I waited for the twitch. There was nothing, at least not at first. Maybe five seconds went by, maybe more, before I felt the slightest movement. But it wasn’t a twitch. It felt more like a flower bud opening slowly, gently, deep inside me. It may well be the strangest sensation I have ever experienced (certainly the strangest in that particular quadrant of my anatomy). It was also very soothing.

“I felt that,” I said, my voice full of wonder.

And then, again, “I felt that.”

Immediately my mind went to all the things I had never felt, or been allowed to feel—like grief for Dad when he disappeared and died. And that’s when I lost it. I began sobbing uncontrollably.

“I’m so sorry!” I apologized to Chelsey, who was as surprised as I was by my reaction—though she quickly assured me that tears weren’t unheard of. Sometimes, she said, people had an emotional response to being dry-needled.

Still, I was shocked. Those feelings—it was as if they’d come from nowhere. Although, from a physiological perspective, they’d come from my lower back. Metaphorically, they’d come from deep, deep inside. And with that thought, I understood that I wasn’t crying about Dad. I’d spent 49 years crying for Dad. This must have the grief I’d never expressed for Mom. I’d never had the chance to grieve for her because I’d been so consumed with terror that I was losing Noah. And as a result, those feelings got knotted up in my lower back.

With that thought, I began sobbing even harder.

“I’m so sorry,” Chelsey said again.

“No!” I told her through my tears. “Don’t be sorry. This is amazing.”

I lay there sobbing for nearly a half hour. Every so often Chelsey or someone else would come check on me. The someone else would also apologize, and I would wave them off and tell them to stop, this was a good thing.

After I’d cried myself out, I got dressed, paid for the session, booked another, and headed to a bakery where I’d planned to treat myself to a chocolate croissant after my appointment. But when I arrived, I had no appetite for something sweet. Instead, I bought a loaf of bread, even though I didn’t really want that, either. I put it in the freezer as soon as I got home.

For the next few months I ate only when I was hungry, a massive change from the mindless eating that had been part of my life for so long that I’d actually worked with a nutritionist to try to learn new habits. But while the nutritionist had been helpful, nothing in my psyche changed until Chelsey’s needle released the pain I hadn’t even realized I was holding onto. I was so blown away by the experience that next day I bought the last copy of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score at my local indie bookstore, hoping to better understand what had happened to me.

I found no answers—nobody’s body seemed to keep score the way mine did. I searched academic papers about dry needling, and while I learned that the procedure has become more popular (and is not legal in every state in the US), I still don’t really understand what happened to me. I’ve had many more sessions with Chelsey, most recently last week, and I’ve never had another emotional reaction.

The balloon of grief was released. Life goes on.

If any readers have had similar experiences, I’d sure be interested in hearing about them.

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1. Thanks to a host of factors including good therapists, appropriate medication, the support of family and friends, meaningful work and a loving relationship, he is doing very well now, and has given me his blessing to write about this.