Grief and fear. Many of my clients are faced with some degree of both of these. There’s a way they often entangle that isn’t always obvious. Some may be stirred up by world events. God knows there’s no shortage of those these days! And, often, some intensity of that feeling can be rooted in early experiences in life.

Many of us as children lived with some degree of not knowing if our needs would be met, from the extremes of hunger, neglect, or abuse; to the more nuanced needs of attunement and emotional support. There’s some level of fear that comes with that — “will I be okay?”

For a very young child, our society’s emphasis on individualism and self sufficiency before they may be ready is actually terrifying and confusing. I hear it in my office often. “My mom took long trips for work, and no one really prepared me before or repaired with me afterwards. I was too little to understand on my own!” “My dad was mad at me all the time. I didn’t mean to be bad!” When I ask what this client had done that was bad, the answer was, “I was making noise and running around.” You know, the things normal little kids do. Or, I’ve heard, “I had to be in the hospital for a few days and my mom couldn’t stay with me. I was frantic! I’d never been away from her before! I didn’t understand!”

I’m not going to unpack here the conditions that lead to parents not having the skills and space needed to be with their children differently. Those conditions deserve to be unpacked! I want to be clear, though, I’m not trying to heap blame on parents. Briefly, suffice it to say, parents have not had adequate support for generations. Some of you have heard or read me state that the nuclear family is a failed experiment. And, here we are.

What I do want to unpack is the effect of the childhood experiences of fear and shame that is left in us as adults. That’s the healing we’re asked by life to do for ourselves. When we don’t do that deeper tending, we often find we’re more reactive in our adult lives, replaying familiar patterns with partners or coworkers, unaware of why that’s happening.

The fear we experience when we are physically or emotionally unsafe as children is overwhelming to a young nervous system. Our nervous systems are remarkably flexible networks that are designed for survival, not for happiness. When a little one is overwhelmed and her caregivers are unaware or ill equipped to meet her and help her soothe, she will find ways to protect herself from being flooded with feelings that are too much for her.

That’s part of the magic that happens with a good counselor or other trusted healer. The patterns of fear and overwhelm that get stuck in our bodies can be uncovered and rewired with loving, attuned attention. We may not be able to change what happened in childhood (or ancestrally), but we can tend to the parts of us that hold the memories.

That’s where grief comes in. When we learn to protect ourselves from overwhelming feelings, part of that is often some form of denial. “It wasn’t really that bad.” “I had all my physical needs met, I was never hungry and I always had good clothes.” Or, “It was bad, but I survived. I’m okay. Others have it so much worse than me!” When those patterns of denial start to soften, when there’s enough safety to acknowledge deeply that the parts of our childhood that were hard, were really that hard…

Then we grieve the truth of that. Grief is a natural wave of sadness that often comes with a deep acceptance. It may not feel fun, but most people can identify that there’s something important and meaningful in feeling it fully. Acceptance is a relaxing of the protections that we truly needed as children, but that as adults we can learn to let drop. A softening.

I’ve heard it said that grief is a form of love. You can learn to love the little child that you were, who needed more than was available at the time. You can learn to love yourself, knowing that you did what you needed to do to survive.

You deserve support in this journey. Whether that’s me, or another trusted healer, lean into that. Be tender with yourself and know that it’s okay to have needs, to want help with unwinding the places where your heart is knotted by the past.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 9th, 2024 at 12:14 am and is filed under Grief, Life on Life's Terms, Spiritual Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.