The pain is unbearable. It feels intolerable. I feel as if I am experiencing the pain of the entire world in my body. There are no words, no thoughts. I am only feeling, feeling so much I can’t stand it. I question if I can make it through like this. This is what it felt like after losing each of them.
I did make it through, and have survived other days of almost similar intensity. I even welcome them now. I sometimes encourage them. This notion may sound strange, as our culture, our families, even our own natural protective instincts encourage us to avoid our painful feelings. The goal of life is to feel good and be happy! Thus we find ways to avoid, deny, distract, repress, dissociate, forget. And yet ultimately these defenses are not helpful, bringing us pain anyway. I truly believe then, the saying that we must go through the darkness, not around it, in order to get to the light. The grief work has been intense, but it placed me on the path to healing. I feel strongly at this point that one of the most powerful ways of healing is through tapping into the grief of our child self. This is how we reconnect with who we really are. This is how we grow towards Wholeness. In some ways, this deep inner work has felt like an awakening. I have experienced pain, fear, excitement, pleasure, loss, anger, power, sadness, clarity, understanding, love. I have felt young, fragile, wounded, wise, brave, strong, proud. I have tapped into buried emotions and connections, years of denial and confusion now leading into insight and clarity. I continued to flow with the process, inquiring inside, reflecting, digging, searching, feeling, writing, reading, expressing, allowing. I gave myself permission to explore and be in it, to push myself to the growing edge while giving myself assurance that I am safe and able to hold what was to come up. I have thus been able to feel my young child’s pain and loss, while my woman self has held her hand with comfort and soothing knowledge of healing. I have learned I am big enough now, to dive into the darkness. The work I have been doing - the young trauma - includes lover loss, emotional caretaking, sacrifice of self, unmet needs, double messages, confusion, emotional repression, denial, disempowerment, . . . all weaving together to encompass the core of my wounding. The ‘factual’ puzzle pieces I may never ‘know,’ but through the process of opening up to my core issues, the puzzle pieces of my self and my psyche have begun to fit together to present glimpses of the Whole. Jung understood my desire to journey and the significance of our inner child. “In the adult there lurks a child--an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and that calls for increasing care, attention, education. This is the part of the human personality that wishes to develop and become whole". And I am drawn to the healing powers of grief work, especially grieving the losses of our childhood and our child selves, because I have personally experienced the immense transformation that occurs when we open up to it. During this time, I cried and screamed and went mad. But I believe the permission I gave to myself to do this, to dive to the depths of places that I had never allowed myself to go before, allowed for a strength and fullness to emerge. Through our grief, we can feel the incredible bittersweet beauty that comes with life lived in depth. Through my own grief, I experienced this profoundly. Ironically, through tapping into my loss, I now experience a fuller sense of completeness inside of me. I have always been fortunate to experience self-love, but through my deep pain an even deeper more expansive self-love and self-compassion were tapped into. Connection to my Highest Self became more solid than I have ever known. And in grieving my child wounds, my authentic voice became louder, clearer, more solid, unafraid of the whole Tami Walker who is here on this earth to be who she is. I agree with John Bradshaw in the belief that we are all born with a sense of wholeness and completeness, even though we are not fully developed yet. We are valuable and special as no one is exactly like us. “The story of every man’s and every woman’s fall is how a wonderful, valuable, special, precious child lost its sense of ‘I am who I am’” he said. As most of us are not completely accepted or unconditionally loved exactly for who we are, we may disconnect from our full sense of self. During the time of our infant and child development, this connection to our Self appears--and essentially is--less important than the real or imagined emotional abandonment that may occur if we retain the parts of our selves that are unacceptable. “To the child, abandonment by its parents is the equivalent of death” (Peck cited in Abrams). Thus the choice we have then appears, and often is, conflicting. This means choosing to identify with the “false” self in order for survival. Our false self is the part of us that emerges for our protection. When our parents have not worked through their own childhood wounds, they continue to have unconscious needs. Our child selves then intuitively sacrifice our own self-realization in order to gratify them and thus maintain connection. Often, rather than the adult parents meeting unconditionally the needs of their children, it is the children who unconditionally meet the needs of their parents. It is understandable then that a pattern thus unfolds throughout the generations . . . until courageous members begin to face their grief and thus begin to break the cycle. Until then, we see the tragedy of the loss of our beautiful complete authentic Selves. Jung said, “If parents because of their own insecurity cannot accept sufficiently the basic nature of the child, then its personality becomes damaged. If it is beyond the normal bruising of life the child becomes estranged from his center of being and feels forced to abandon his natural pattern of unfoldment”. Thus the goal of our adult selves is to reclaim that natural path of unfoldment, to travel to and remain in the “center” of our being. It is possible to reconnect with who we really are--the complete authentic self we were born as that may still be hidden underground. And this is the transformation that occurs through our child’s grief. Alice Miller strongly affirms this when she says, "The true self has been in 'a state of noncommunication,' as Winnicott said, because it had to be protected. The person never needs to hide anything else so thoroughly, so deeply, and for so long a time as he has hidden his true self. Thus it is like a miracle each time to see how much individuality has survived behind such dissimulation, denial, and self-alienation, and can reappear as soon as the work of mourning brings freedom from the introjects." The painful difficult work this entails is worth it. I can validate the experience. Thus, I feel fortunate that when my dam broke from my losses I had the courage to continue swimming in the waters of darkness. For many of us, including myself for years, the fear of drowning, of the currents, of the imagined engulfing never-ending river of our emotions is too great to allow us to do more than splash with our toe and run back to the “safety” of land to dry off. Others of us, are still unaware of the water. We remain disconnected or dismiss our childhood experiences through minimizing their impact. This is how I lived for many years. This is how many live, denying their inner child’s wounded experience and thus continuing, maybe unknowingly, to suffer. We do this because most of us believe what we intuitively knew in childhood--that we cannot handle our pain. Although now as adults we can learn to efficiently hold our pain, we still imagine, . . .that we will die, or go crazy, or that the pain or discomfort will be unending, or that we are wrong or weak for having those feelings. So we try to protect ourselves. We ignore, deny, or discount our feelings; and in so doing, we abandon our inner Child. And we unconsciously imagine that somehow by continuing to disconnect from the pain of our child self, we will not experience pain. This, for me, was where the passion to help was born, and I decided Psychology for my career path. Much of our unnecessary emotional pain is due to the pressure that comes from not releasing stored up energy that has accumulated throughout our lives. I believe, further, that without the release that comes through our grief work, we may be holding so much deep inside that it can effect us emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually. As our bodies, hearts, minds, and spirit are interconnected, when we experience wounding, it is a wounding to our entire being. And as I myself have physically experienced, our emotional trauma is stored up as energy in our bodies. When not processed, this can have a great effect on us. As Whitfield had said, “When we are not allowed to remember, to express our feelings and to grieve or mourn our losses or trauma, whether real or threatened, through the free expression of our Child Within, we become ill”. I believe this “illness” can and does take on many forms. And not only do we possibly suffer when we do not allow our grief, we also simply may not experience the full depth of our experiences. By repressing or ignoring our childhood experiences and our still living inner child, we are limiting our consciousness and our ability to experience life. Through our grief work we can begin to live in a more full, rich, deep way. It has been claimed that when we repress one emotional aspect of ourselves, we then dim all of the others. If we are afraid to dive into our pain, we may not be allowing ourselves to experience the full intensity of our joy. Along with love and peace and beauty, the Universe(or you can insert God) made pain and loss and suffering. Our ability to fully appreciate life depends on our willingness to sometimes feel sad and angry about our own and others’ misfortunes and difficulties. The tools of grieving are gifts from Universe that enable us to integrate and grow from life’s inexorable hardships, and then to return to gratitude for its wonders. Thus it is clear that the ungrieved pain of our child self can effect our adult lives in deep ways. I believe that much of our adult suffering stems from our ungrieved past. Many of our issues stem from the core of our inner child’s wounding and the still neglected pain that silently, somewhere, yearns to be felt. It just takes a significant new trauma to tip the cart, such as a fresh new grief from the loss of a loved one. So how do we get from this place of minimization and denial to a place of acceptance and feeling and then healing. As John Bradshaw says, “In order for grief to be resolved several factors must be present. The first factor is validation. Our childhood trauma must be validated as real or it cannot be resolved”.Such is true with the grief of losing someone precious to you. I know this was very true for me. As I sat in lost silence, I felt my childhood a puzzle in which many of the pieces were missing. And I realized I needed to build that puzzle, filling in the pieces in whatever way I could. My desire for growth and health outweighed any fear or defense. I started by validating my experience, and began to finally help lift my protections. Rather than numbly thinking about it feeling as if it were the life story of someone else, I finally began to realize--to feel--that this was in fact, sadly, my life story. Now I was ready to meet her, my vulnerable hurt little girl. Once we begin to understand that our experiences and emotions are important and valid , we then seem to allow ourselves the permission to acknowledge and feel them. I have seen with my former clients that as I mirrored their experience and continue to validate them, and especially take their experience seriously on a feeling level, their true emotions begin to awaken. Once the tragedy of my situation was named and acknowledged from outside sources, I began to open up to the reality of the experience of my child within. And for me I noticed that once I made this conscious choice to accept her, she began to come to me. A flood of tears emerge, coming from a deep, deep place inside...the core of my being. I feel transported to another time/place . . . I feel like an infant, helpless and small. My heart feels broken, as if I have lost a part of myself, or the closest thing to me. It hurts . . . I feel sad defeat . . . very deep and alone . . . The denial has lifted--I lost the loves of my life. And this is very, very sad. I allowed myself feeling the emotions of this sadness. Intuitively, I knew the healing power that feeling my feelings could bring me. I thus called to my little girl self, encouraging my wounded child to come out from hiding after these many years. I needed to remind her of her experience in order to help her into her feelings. I wrote in my journal: "You are integrating . . . able to hold the deep connection and love of a husband and wife, and at the same time the tremendous painful loss and absence. Both are true. Both are real. Both can give you power.” During this work, most of my grief was experienced as painful sadness and expressed through tears. This is an extremely important aspect of grief work. Our emotional pain is stored up energetically in our bodies. Through the act of crying we can finally begin to release this stored up energy. When we are able to let go and open up to our pain and cry--not just silent tears but deep bodily sobs--we are naturally healing ourselves. When we give ourselves the space to sit in the pain and allow it to move through us physically via unrestrained tears, we are being there for our child self. We can surrender to our bodies and allow them to do the work, shaking and releasing “primal” sounds from deep down, carrying the hurt out of our body. And yet most of us are not familiar with this deep core crying. Most of us are afraid to let go of “control” and trust enough to allow our bodies to experience deeply. But when we open ourselves to the experience, the healing that takes place through this grieving process is truly transformational. This of course takes much strength and courage. Sometimes during a “grief session” I am amazed that I--that one person--could be holding so much pain. The reservoir that I tap into has seemed bottomless at times, yet I dive in anyway, certain in the healing aspects that come with the experience. A few months ago, after doing all of this internal work from losing my husband, I had another tragic loss of a love.....raw....devastating....crushing.... again my child self was triggered. My adult self inconsolable. For days...then weeks, I cried, sobbed, and released primal sounds that came from deep within my center. My body shook, trembled, contracted and released. My emotional pain and physical pain seemed to merge, I was unable to differentiate them. I could physically feel the energy releasing out through my mouth via sounds, and course through my body eventually releasing out of my feet and hands. This healing work is profound and powerful, yet simple: we need not “do” anything . . . just allow ourselves to be open to the experience and be with it. Hold the hand of our hurt little child and let her deeply cry. I do not know what I would have done without the love of a good friend Anna, though she was not with me physically, she was with me night and day, for as long or as much as I needed. My children, my lifelines to maintaining sanity. How could this happen to me again? In the process of grieving, experiencing and expressing our child’s anger is just as important as releasing our sadness through tears. “We are learning that in healing our Child Within it is appropriate and healthy to become aware of and to express our anger”Whitfield said. But many of us are not aware of this. As we move through our grief process, we may experience blocks at any phase, and I see this is especially true for the experience of anger. I know this was true for me. During my own process, I knew somewhere inside I must be angry, yet I had a difficult time touching into those feelings. How I could be angry with the Universe. But intuitively, I also understood that intentions are not relevant in this work, what is relevant is what I actually experienced. In fact, you have to be angry if you want to heal your wounded inner child. . . Thus I did open to the experience of my anger. I did get in touch with a lot of anger towards the Universe during this time. And eventually I was able to experience anger for the experience of being abandoned and the unfairness of not having the man who loved me. For me, this was just as healing. Allowing and experiencing our anger during grief work is necessary in many ways. As with allowing our tears of sadness, feeling and expressing our anger helps us to release the stored up emotions that have accumulated inside due to our childhood experiences. This process is extremely important. Otherwise, in our adult lives we may continue to hurt ourselves or others with our unconscious behaviors that come from old unresolved anger. When we work through our past anger, we are less likely to carry anger in our adult lives. When we attempt to deny it we then allow it to come up unconsciously and this is when it turns against us--becoming rage, suicidal depression, creating violence in the world. I agree with the Guru's that most of us fear our anger and hide from it, as we are afraid of this energy and of its seeming power to damage us. Ironically, it is truly damaging only when we do not embrace it. And thus we see the necessity of allowing our anger to manifest during our grief work. But not only is our experiencing of anger necessary, it can also be extremely beneficial. Many possibilities for transformation occur when we embrace our anger and work with it. Angering unlocks our joy. Anger empowers us. It releases our fear so that we can more fully embody ourselves and feel more free to express who we are. It allows us to hold boundaries. It gives us assertive strength, without the need for aggression. It builds confidence. Interestingly, it may even create more peace within us. Our relationships and interactions may also shift. Some find their anger actually helped him to feel safe enough to risk being vulnerable with others. And during grief work we need not fear our anger as there are many healthy nonviolent ways to explore and express it. It is important to understand that almost always the least helpful way to express our anger is actually releasing it directly towards others, even the person we our angry with.
Through using our feelings therapeutically,experiencing our anger frees us from our fear of it, and we come to learn that our expression of anger is not always dangerous—it can be safe and healing. And as Walker had said “What a wonderful paradox that the safe letting go of control actually insures us that control will not be lost destructively! Safe angering insures this won’t occur because it prevents rage from becoming an explosive pressure cooker without a release valve”. We may feel guilt or shame. We may feel, as I myself did at various points, that by feeling our anger and blaming, we are “bad.” We may find it easier to blame indirectly and feel anger towards the unfairness of the experience, as I have. In cases of unintentional hurt (death, illness), I believe this may be just as helpful. Yet also, as I used to remind my clients, as I did myself, that acknowledging the difficulty, does not have to take away our appreciation. We can hold both. Our pain falls within the experience of our love. This feeling of love then expanded into compassion then culminated in an authentic feeling of forgiveness. Our stored up pain is released and the energy of the emotions has moved through us, and thus real acceptance and love can be available. Yet if we “forgive” before we feel our blame, we may carry our child’s hurt and anger around forever. Not until we fully experience our anger, do our resentments begin to fall away. Not until we fully express our blame, do we release it and open our hearts to truly seeing, accepting, and loving. We also discover that there is only one person that can assure that we get the nurturing we need, and that one person is us . . . . We are our own nurturer . . . . We may at times get others to help us get what we need, but basically we are the only one that can attend to our needs. My nurturing mother self was there for me and with me in an unconditional way that was profound. She was big and strong, validating, encouraging and full of love. She can love me and fulfill my needs like no other separate human being can. I/she am a very strong girl. My Higher self, or mother self, nurtured me as I tapped into a large well of self-compassion. I believe the most beautiful aspect that occurs through our grief work is the awakening of true self-compassion. This seems to occur naturally as we awaken to our pain. Stephen Levine says, “We seldom let go of our judgment and make room in our heart for ourselves. How can we so lack compassion for this being we feel suffering in our heart? If we fully acknowledge our pain, it would be difficult not to be swept with a care and compassion for our own well-being”. As we begin to contact our inner child, we can separate her painful wounds from other aspects of ourselves. In doing this, what was once the shame we have taken in from identifying with our young experiences and our external environment, transforms into a new perception of our innocent self. This holding of our child naturally elicits a loving self-compassion within us which then may replace self blame and criticism. Our relationship to our self shifts. We can learn to contact our nurturing parent inside, and begin to reparent ourselves by giving and receiving the complete acceptance that we couldn’t possible get from another yet so much deserve. We begin to find True Love. We begin to truly heal. Nelson Mandela’s inaugural speech, a powerful assurance of this message:
‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.’
When I remember this, that being in my self and my power is actually coming from a loving intention, which it always is, then I realize it is not only okay but ‘good’ and even necessary. This is how I grew through grief, becoming my own full self. In my experience, the broken heart that has been healed through grieving is stronger and more loving than the one that has never been injured. Every heartbreak of my life, including the brokenheartedness of my childhood, has left me a stronger, wiser, and more loving person than the one I was before I grieved. I believe this is true. Thus this is the work I see as powerfully healing, leading us towards love and authenticity. I can feel the gift of the pain I have suffered from my own past, as it has helped to fill my heart and create the fullness of who I am. Also, I am who I am, and the therapist I am, because of my past. I have decided to get back to being a Therapist again, in a way that fits with who I am today. In therapy, for clients to . . . accept the experience of the child usually depends upon therapists who have done these things in their own lives. Therapists who have wrestled with their own survival personality and faced their own wounding seem best equipped to mirror the wounding of another. And what an incredible gift to be witness to others growing through grief and becoming their wiser more loving authentic selves. I feel incredible gratitude for my grief work as now my life path leads me to continue to accompany others on their own amazing journey of healing. Last night, from a simple but lovely post, I felt the pings of sorrow....of missing loved ones terribly....I discovered it was the sudden awareness of something I "wanted" was to be walking down the aisle this month of June....like I was supposed to. After soothing the hurts, I found myself looking up rare flower types lol. I am after all, Just Me.
Namaste~
Tami