When Grief Strikes

If we understand grief, then we understand that it works just like pain does. When you break an arm, the pain indicates there is a real problem. Grief indicates pain unrealized, loss unnoticed, and the consequences of abuse.

Grief unidentified leaves us brokenhearted and living in dull depressive states. When you befriend grief and ask what it’s mission in your life is you begin to heal. Bitterness begins to evaporate and time is more meaningfully spent.

Grief should not be blocked. Western society has a way of telling us that healing should take us no longer than a year or so.

Wait, what?

Western society believes that to be living your best life you get healed right away. What a bunch of horse shit that is. So, you live in years of abuse, but you believe that abuse is healed with a couple of counseling sessions and a visit to the sheriff’s office?

I think we are all smarter than that.

Grief is unwelcomed for sure. Which one of us likes it? But, it is so necessary when healing from childhood wounds. It is the first ingredient to healing. It moves in a way that we believe in. We can feel it — which is something that many of us have lost.

Don’t deny grief. Make it your friend.

We got home, I put the kids to bed, and rushed to take a hot bath. Tears swollen with grief of years past steadily flowed. Tantalized with my new life with my children, these memories threatened to bring that to an end. It was the onslaught of the pending tidal wave. I had little power over the process or when the memories stopped. I turned the water off and the phone rang.   My middle sister, Chrissy, asked, “Are you okay?” I asked why she called because it was late at night. She said, “I just felt like something was wrong with you.” And, indeed, there was something wrong with me.

Chapter 7 – Phantom pain, a prisoner by no crime of my own

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