In Reaching for Beautiful, psychotherapist Sally McQuillen takes us on an intimate journey through love, loss, and healing. As a mother and addiction recovery specialist, she offers a deeply personal and unfiltered look at grief—exploring the weight of fear, guilt, and regret while uncovering the resilience that emerges from profound loss.
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Sally McQuillen is a psychotherapist specializing in addiction recovery, grief, and trauma healing with a background in writing and dance criticism, as well as experience in public relations and marketing. She later pursued her passion for social work and now helps individuals navigate some of life’s most difficult challenges. Her debut memoir, reaching For Beautiful is a luminous, deeply moving account of love, loss, and healing. Sally shares the unfiltered reality of grief through the dual lenses of a mother’s love and a therapist’s insight.
Sally: It’s been such an organic journey. I had forgotten how much I loved to write and. Having been an English major in college, I went to this wonderful liberal arts college and had the opportunity to spend time dancing and writing poetry and all of that. And I graduated immediately, took my writing into public relations and admittedly didn’t even really know what that was, but started working in that field and fast forward, I went from. Public relations to sports marketing to becoming a marketing sales rep for IBM. So, everything just kind of organically, one thing led to the next. I found myself as a young woman in a suit selling newer technologies to middle aged men at credit card company, and at the same time, that was when my life was otherwise changing. I had stopped drinking and begun to be introduced to this volunteer experience where I could help other people just as I was. Learning how to sort of shift my life around and that was, I got this hint of fulfillment in that that prompted me to go back to get my master’s in social work. I get my master’s in social work. I promptly get married. I am expecting my firstborn Christopher. And I’m offered a job in the field, and I am morning, noon, and night sick, and I can’t take it yet. And I’m about to get started after, not long after he’s born, and I realize he’s colicky. He needs me. I’m not going to make as much as I would make spending it on a baby. I mean, the whole thing just suddenly seems silly. I had the privilege and opportunity to be a full-time mom for a while, and I’m so glad that I did. So I, it wasn’t until Christopher was in. He was going off to college that I, I’d let my license lapse. I thought I’m using this anyway in my day-to-day life, all of what I learned in social work school, and I don’t recommend letting your license lapse because it took me quite a bit of work to restore it. But again, organically as my kids were getting older and I was coming up with, what was my next chapter? I found that this is what I was always meant to be doing, and even though I kind of chuckled about the fact that here I was specializing in addiction and, and getting a certification to be specialized in addiction, when I felt like I was already personally pretty specialized. I then was faced with this choice. Do I want to help people that are struggling with addiction or not? And it turns out one’s experience moving through this really can help other people. So it was a gift for me to be able to find my way into becoming a, A therapist.
Terry: Take us down the road to how you ended up writing Reaching For Beautiful.
Sally: Well, I. Lost my beautiful son Christopher at the age of 21. He and three other boys were, um, partying on a, I guess it was a, maybe it was a Sunday night, um, during their holiday break. And, um, they all decided to go out into a frozen lake in a canoe, and none of them survived. And so. I was, needless to say, extremely decimated, and a Facebook friend suggested that I begin journaling and I’d had plenty of recommendations to journal. During the course of my recovery, but I’d never really done so. But there was something about yearning for Christopher, not knowing where he’d gone, that had me striving to connect with him in such a way that I ended up texting on my phone to him in journal entries, sharing about what I was experiencing in real time. That over the course of many years and many drafts and a writing group to support me and various classes and coaches, and an editor became my memoir reaching for Beautiful.
Terry: How did you find the courage to navigate sharing such intimate emotions and experiences with the rest of the world?
Sally: I’m just beginning to. The book comes out April 1st, and so I’m just beginning to contemplate, um, how exposed, um, that makes me feel and. At the same time, I felt so strongly that Chris, the only advice that I felt like I was hearing from my son was to speak the truth and to then help others. And so if in fact, sharing my story will achieve some of that, it will have been worth it. I’m lucky too because having. Grown up in communities where people are more encouraged to be vulnerable. I know that the risk of vulnerability has its rewards.
Terry: Very hard to believe sometimes though, isn’t it?
Sally: It is. It is. And one of the things along the route of raising Christopher, I remember feeling was. Such judgment because he was a, a wild um, child. He was, some people might have used the word, he was a bad boy. he, I remember, and I think I write about this in the book, I remember, one parent sort of finding out that one parent was gossiping to another about why can’t Sally control her son any better than she does, and. and, and the shame that I felt was, immense. But I think I’ve always also overcompensated, um, for feelings of shame by just saying, yep, you better believe it. This is me; this is my son. I’m not going to, and it’s hard in a context of a type A community where many people are such strivers, and many people sort of keep those things closer to the vest. But I just, um. Sort of recklessly was like, oh, was, I mean, I remember teachers struggling, uh, with my son in class and just being able to say, I know he is not easy. I know he’s not sitting still. I know he’s. He’s not focused, and, um, I’m sure he is acting up in your, I, I just wasn’t going to do the whole, oh, not my boy, because it was pretty, and, and he made it pretty self-evident that that would’ve not been the case.
Terry: Christopher sounds like a guy who lived life at full speed. Give me a memory of him that best captures that spirit.
Sally: I’ll give you a couple. Terry. He was actually running by nine months, and so he was in motion. So much so that we made numerous trips to the er and I am a fairly squeamish person when it comes to blood, but by the time he got a little bit older, I was able to be able, like, I could sort of ascertain whether or not, oh, that’s going to need stitches. That’s not, I mean, I really couldn’t believe the number of times that there were. he’d, he’d climb things and, and fall down. And in fact, the very first time we were to be separated when he was about two and in preschool, they had all of the mothers go sit in the room next door to see if the kids could manage being separated. Five minutes later, he’s already. Climbed up some structure fallen down and I am literally running with him gushing blood to the emergency room where he needs to be straight jacketed. You know? So it’s just kind of that, that is, that is, you know him. The other thing that is him is that he had a heart that was wide open, so. I remember one Christmas we were sitting down at dinner and I’m thinking, oh my gosh, what a, what a joy. I’m sitting here with each of my kids, my oldest, who’s so hard to pin down. We’re just going to have a little bit of time together, and we just wrapped up our meal and Chris gets a text. He finds out that one of his fraternity brothers is. At home, or excuse me, in the fraternity house by himself without family. So immediately, Hey mom, I’m going to go and, um, do we, let’s take all of our food. We’d barely finished eating. Let’s take everything. We’ve got his leftovers. We piled it onto a plate. We hastily tried to wrap, some sort of semblance of a, a gift that he could bring to his friend, his buddy, and he was back off to his college fraternity house. An hour and a half away.
Terry: Was he a lot like you were at that age?
Sally: The truth is between my husband and me, each of our children, there, there was just no chance of not having become energetic, a certain degree of willfulness and living the way that that Christopher did. My husband has severe ADD. My boys, certainly. I’ve got a, a younger son and a, um, a, a daughter. All of them have variations on, on our theme genes. The genes are, um, pretty, pretty powerful.
Terry: And you talk about that in reaching for beautiful. How did your family’s history with addiction? Exploring it help you understand Christopher’s struggles.
Sally: I will tell you that growing up as the daughter of an alcoholic who ultimately died of the disease, um, I, I should have appreciated the power of our genes. I thought when we did have children that we would just. Nurture them to pieces and that potentially they could not find themselves addicted. Even before Christopher picked up a drink or a drug, he was so impulsive. So reckless. So in the moment that I worried and there was something about what I’d experienced in my relationship with my alcoholic father, that. That compounded my fear around Christopher becoming addicted and so. Rather than immediately benefit me. I think it actually sort of was a trauma, I was in fight or flight a lot of the time while raising my children.
Terry: We all are something you can’t escape. Right. And I love the metaphor you were talking about when you saw him fall for the first time and you ran to the er, probably by time number seven, you were saying just put a bandage, stop the bleeding, send it back to class.
Sally: I felt so sorry for my youngest because he too would have, we, we literally got to this point, as you do once you’ve been through this enough times where you’re sort of like, you know it because he’d also cry wolf sometimes just to get out of something. So it was really hard to determine, it was, it was a very time that he’d broken his wrist that we were kind of like, you’re fine. Don’t worry about it.
Terry: Grief is such an individual process as both a mom and a therapist. How did you approach your own grieving process?
Sally: in some ways I’ve said this, that being a therapist didn’t necessarily give me a leg up. However, I do think that my, all of my life experience up to the point at which Christopher died did make a big difference to me. I had a spiritual foundation and I also recognized the importance of resourcing myself. I already had a therapist that I was seeing. I already had a support group that I was participating in, and then when. Chris died. I really had to step up my game in a big way. I had to begin to actually take my own advice, and I found myself wanting to be strong in a traditional sense, which meant sort of push through, do grief, right? Carry myself with grace. I, I don’t know if it’s sort of my. Wasp ancestry, but we, we kind of, this is how we do it. And I really had to allow myself to experience this. And it’s, grief is so messy and true. Strength means accepting help. it means entering the darkness. It means being willing to, and, and really I had but no choice. it’s easy for me to say like, oh, try to be willing to, and I’ve got some. People that I work with where they, they can’t touch into their pain, but my, my pain saturated me. And so one of the things that I know my therapist suggested at the time was the importance of becoming extremely compassionate with myself and loving myself like never before. And I did, I did do that. I, I, I let this be a permission slip to do this in a way that I hadn’t yet done. How it really is a practice because some of us, and I think maybe all of us humans, we have this egoic internal voice that would have us, you push through and be strong and, and, um, and come on Sally, just do this and, and yet. It’s such a balancing act, right? Because, um, in some ways to be compassionate with myself meant, when I did end up, I took time off of work. Um, and I did just allow myself to lie on the couch. And truth be told, cute grief can be so physiological. That I had, I literally, everything I was, I was like molasses. I could not really move, and I just had to drag myself. And I do, I do sort of, I. Appreciate my husband’s being in motion, because one of the things that was most healing for me during those early days was to actually get off of the couch enough. so I’m, I’m being compassionate. I’m letting myself have that, but then I’m also balancing it with, this is hard, and you have to do it anyway. Your. Son’s friends are hosting you at a service to, to honor your son. You’ve gotta go, and then in going in doing those kinds of things, I was able to develop loving relationships with his peers and that helped carry me. Tricky balancing act, isn’t it?
Terry: Did you find that some of your friends who you thought might be supportive, backed away because they didn’t know what to do?
Sally: I do think that pain that is this great is not easy to tolerate. It does, and especially grief over the loss of the child is so alienating because you are a walking representation of most parents’. Greatest fear. I did experience discomfort when I, I mean, I was doing things like trying to get my cheerlead, my youngest son who was on the lacrosse field. And I remember standing there and I remember not knowing what to say and having nobody else know what to say and understanding, but also being hurt. So we were really fortunate and there were so many people who were willing to. Bear witness to our pain, but I know they had to pace themselves over time because this is a pain that lasts for a very long time. And, and one of the things that I write, I think it’s in the afterward of my book, is that I, I, I think it did take something like over seven years to really feel like myself again. And there’s no timetable. I’m going to grieve Christopher my entire life. It does lighten, particularly relative to the willingness to let it do what it needs to do and to sort of not be afraid to enter what is still continues to be grave darkness when it does happen. But it’s, it’s a long, in my field diagnostically, they talk about, wanting us to be. It starts to become prolonged grief, after not too, and I think they’ve actually changed the diagnosis, but the point being everybody does. They want us to just be better. And so we, we have to love ourselves enough to just be where we are.
Terry: Many parents live in fear for their children, especially those who take risks. What advice do you have for parents struggling with that fear?
Sally: This has become my mission in a sense, Terry, because Christopher brought me to, um, a spiritual course that really speaks to attempting to find one’s way beyond fear and rising above it to the extent that we are purely in a place of giving love. This is a really high ideal. People would have to be heavily enlightened to get to that. I strive towards it, and I was even striving during the course of Christopher’s life. He had three years of sobriety, which was such a really blessed place where he was. Able to be free from, he could be his very best self. I sort of picture it like, Michelangelo’s David, you sort of just take all of the, the stuff of addiction that super imposes itself and makes a person tougher to be around. And he was free of that. And in many ways after that, when he decided he wanted to be like everybody else. Which is very much like his, his mama, very social and wanting to not be different. He went off to college and he was partying again and not able to control it again. I was in fear again and I probably still was in fear. I don’t know that I ever had, but I began to resource myself to think in terms of. To go of it. And one of the things that I would say to parents, because I think all parents, especially in my generation and thereafter are, we look at parenting, maybe because many of us. Mothers, like we start out in the workforce and then we have children, and then we, we apply the same kind of high standards to raising our it. It becomes this job where we have to get an A and so we start to micromanage and then the fear, and then you look at, there’s so many other contributing factors to the fear that is percolating in our world. There’s so many layers of it, I don’t even know parents. It’s funny, someone. After Christopher died, a friend of mine said. She’s friends with a mother whose son was friends with Christopher, and they were friends when they were young and, and this mother told my friend, I don’t really want Chris to influence my, my child, because he might encourage him to be parting and all of that. And I was just kind of chuckling because this was a kid who, if, if I had to guess. Was just not headed for danger. But we do that even when there are kids who give us no reason. And, and Christopher gave us loads of reason to worry. He had something like three near death experiences even before he did go. So, but what I began to really learn and understand deeply is that when we’re in fear as parents. We can’t be as emotionally present. And so after Christopher died, as an effort to forgive myself for any of my own trespasses, so to speak, I made an amends to him and my other children for being so strung out with fear that it, it ended up interfering with my ability to be my very best as a mother. I don’t know how to get there. I just know that certain things have crystallized for me. I’ve been granted a perspective, um, I’d rather have my son back. But but having lost him, there’s so many things that just seem so clear to me. And one of them is, is that we are simply here to learn and grow. And how our kids best learn and grow? Well, they have to meet challenges. They have to struggle. I mean, I know everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned the hard way. And I have to continually remind myself with my living children, oh, I can see that train going down these tracks. Oh, I would love to protect you from that. Oh, that’s going to hurt. And being increasingly willing to build enough tolerance for that distress to just love them so that when they do, hit a wall, they know where they can come.
Terry: If you could talk spiritually to Christopher today, what would you say to him and what do you think he’d say to you?
Sally: Such a good question. Often, I reach for him each morning and I, when I sit here at my desk in my office and work with my clients, I, I feel him whispering in my ear. One of the things in early grief that I needed most was to know that my love for him was landing. I think it’s because as a little girl, I didn’t feel. And probably accurately so that my father really had the capacity to love me, I wanted to give each of my children what I hadn’t felt secure in. This poor son of mine in spirit endlessly hears me, letting him know that I am proud of him, that his wide open heart is something that is magnificent, that I am so grateful for the way that he shines, and the fact that I got to be his mom, even though. It was challenging. Um, and I hope what he would say to me is that he’s, he’s proud of me and that I’m, I’ve done my best to honor him.
Terry: One of my favorite maxims is something I learned from a grief counselor who works in South Central LA. When someone comes to her and says, “How do you expect me to go back to normal?” She says, “You can’t go back to normal. All you could do is take the Legos that remain. Build something beautiful.” What are you building now?
Sally: I am, I love that grief expert David Kessler talks about, he talks about finding meaning in this, and I was fortunate enough to take his Grief Educator certification course and I, I just feel very much aligned with him and it was really. Crazy to me that here he was this grief expert and then he loses his 21-year-old son at around the same time that I do anyway, I felt like I was meant to take his course and. Try to aspire to find meaning. And my husband and I, we love Christopher and continue to so fiercely, um, that we try to honor him both the anniversary of his death and on his birthday and by supporting organizations that were close to his heart and his name. But we, we want to. Celebrate him and every day carry out a purpose to help other grieving parents feel less alone. For me, it’s the mothers too who’ve, who’ve had to raise a challenging child. That in and of itself can be such a hard road and just impart whatever, whatever we can from having gone through this.
This conversation has been lightly edited for format.
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