In 2015, former Winnipegger Heather Plett wrote a blog post about the death of her mother and how she and her siblings felt supported during that journey by a palliative care nurse.
“None of us knew anything about supporting someone in her transition out of this life into the next,” she said. But the nurse, named Ann, helped them learn what to expect and how to care for their mother in her final days.
“Ann gave us an incredible gift in those final days,” Plett said. “Though it was an excruciating week, we knew that we were being held by someone who was only a phone call away.”
What Ann did, Plett said, was more than “what can fit in the title of palliative care nurse. She was facilitator, coach, and guide. By offering gentle, nonjudgmental support and guidance, she helped us walk one of the most difficult journeys of our lives.”
Or, as she wrote in the blog post, Ann “held space” for Plett and her siblings during that challenging time.
That post went viral — it received 10 million views — crashing her website and leading Plett to create the Centre for Holding Space and to write two books on the topic: The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation, and Leadership (Page Two Books, 2020) and, more recently, Where Tenderness Lives: A Journey Of Self-Exploration, Forgiveness, And Individual And Collective Healing (Page Two Books, 2024).
In her first book, Plett, 58, offered a broad view of what it means to hold space for other people and for ourselves. In her second book, she shared more deeply about her own challenges and traumas, focusing on what she’s learned about holding space for herself.
“It’s about 10 per cent about the practice of holding space, and 90 percent about me being honest about my trauma,” she said.
Plett’s goal in writing the book was to “excavate my own story” to show how she was able to weather some challenging experiences in life — a miscarriage, abuse, a horrific sexual assault, a difficult marriage and divorce — and “how I got through it and found healing by being tender, compassionate and forgiving of myself.”
“I don’t know how to teach or write about any of these things without being honest and real and gritty and vulnerable,” said Plett, a mother of three grown daughters. “I don’t know how to help people find healing for their trauma without sharing stories of mine.”
Plett, who grew up in Neepawa and lived in Winnipeg for many years before relocating to Vancouver Island, also deals with religious trauma, devoting a full chapter to that topic. This includes how some churches emphasize the idea of hell.
“Ask anyone raised to believe in hell and they will tell you stories of their fear of being ‘left behind,’” she said of the belief in some churches of the imminent rapture of true believers into heaven with Jesus.
“I remember numerous occasions when I’d come home from visiting a friend or I’d come in from the barn after doing my chores to find nobody in the house, and the panic would rise as I considered that the rapture might have happened, and I was not among the righteous. That kind of fear, established in childhood before the brain and body are fully developed, takes a long time to leave a person, even years after you stop believing in hell.”
Plett no longer attends church — she says she still has faith, but it’s more liminal, a belief in a divine being or positive force in the world. But the old messages about hellfire and missing out on heaven still echo in her mind, telling her that she is “sinful and being left behind.”
This includes feelings of being judged and rejected because of her divorce and no longer attending church.
“Inwardly, I still struggled with shame, self-doubt, fear, and an ongoing anxiety that I would be rejected by my family and community if I admitted that I no longer saw the church as necessary for me,” she said. “I avoided conversations about faith and was easily triggered if I sensed a family member judging me for not going to church or for getting divorced.”
One of the reasons she wrote that chapter on religious trauma “was to show how religious belief systems can impact people negatively,” she said, adding that some Christians believe they “have to show the world that everything is positive” because of their faith, denying the reality of their struggles. “People can get trapped in that belief system,” she said.
Today Plett has found peace with a different version of God, “one that is less masculine, less exclusive about who has access, less restrictive, and more accessible to my LGBTQ+ friends. I also needed a faith that wasn’t so ruled by the fear of hell that we had to jeopardize relationships in order to save people’s souls.”
Instead of going to church, she feels more comfortable “wandering in the woods or sitting by the lake,” she said.
Of the new book, Plett hopes it gives readers “permission to do their own deep healing work, to uncover the systemic harm done to them, to take off the thing layered on by parents and church and come to peace with who they are in the world.”
More information about Plett, her books and the coaching and workshops offered by the Centre for Holding Space can be found at http://wfp.to/Czy
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John LonghurstFaith reporter
John Longhurst has been writing for Winnipeg’s faith pages since 2003. He also writes for Religion News Service in the U.S., and blogs about the media, marketing and communications at Making the News.
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