Let’s say when you were a child your parents refused to listen to you and it hurt you. Now, in adult life you notice that you still hide your feelings from most people. This secretiveness may be your lifelong over-reaction to an original injunction from parents who were afraid to know you. Now you are afraid to let others know you and it shows in your automatic reactions during communication.

To heal this wound, we must allow the hurtful events of the past to become neutral facts by fully grieving the pain and letting go of them. This process is called grief work. It can be applied to any negative experience that happened and stayed with you in form of obsessive thoughts of hurt, altering your behavior in ways that you do not benefit from. Grief work is not done once, because usually new levels of hurt appear. Let it not discourage you, because each time it is done it unleashes portions of psychic energy from the blockages and it in turn makes you a more conscious, fulfilled and able person. In this sense, grief is truly a lifelong work that have unlimited value.

There are five stages of mourning your loss:

1.     Reminiscence out any pain, abandonment or abuse we felt or saw.

2.     Full acknowledgement, experiencing, and expression of feelings (e.g. sadness, hurt, anger, fear), so that resolution (catharsis) occurs.

3.     Healing of memories by re-experiencing them with compassion (for our parents and ourselves) and with power, by imagining ourselves speaking up self-protectively to abuse.

4.     A ritual of your choice that shows what we have felt and accomplished in our grief-work.

5.     Getting on with our life, not as victims of the irreversible past, but as adults who have engendered an “inner nurturing parent”.

Let’s walk through step 3 together:

 1. Remember your loss and allow yourself to feel sadness or anger. “Loss” includes any non-fulfillment of a need or any abuse, humiliation, rejection, or neglect that you experienced.

2.    Thank the experience because it made you begin to learn self-reliant ways to compensate for your loss. Although betrayal and hurt are never justifiable, they often are what every human needs in order to become an individual, to develop sensitivity, depth, fortitude, self-reliance and empathy.

3.    Imagine yourself speaking up assertively and effectively in that traumatic moment. Picture yourself successfully protecting yourself in the past. This re-experiencing will help you to get out of the victim state.

4.    After anger and sadness have been intentionally fully experienced, the forgiveness of the person in fault can take place. Try to find compassion in yourself toward the abuser, this will signal to your mind that your feelings have been resolved.

5.    Now you are ready to drop the expectations that others will fulfill this previously unmet need for you. Watch yourself in your communications so that automatic patterns don’t get a hold of you.

6.    Take care of this need for yourself now as abundantly as you can.

 

Example:

• I am and feel sad and angry that my parent(s) failed to stand up for me.

• I am thankful that thereby I began to learn to stand up for myself.

• I imagine speaking up successfully in childhood.

• I forgive my parents for failing to stand up for me.

• I drop the expectation of getting others to stand up for me now (though I appreciate it when they do).

• Now I stand up for myself with full power and effectiveness.

Adapted from: How To Be An Adult by David Richo.

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