I’ve been on a path towards Healing since 1986. I never thought so much would be involved, and to be truthful – I really didn’t have much hope of success in the beginning! But I have come to a point where many things are now self-evident. I don’t think that someone could have explained it all to me in the beginning, so that I could have had a clear path ahead of me. The reason for this is in the nature of our childhood injuries. Emotional injuries during childhood rob us of some of our awareness! They give us a sort of emotional tunnel vision that does not allow us to see others being hurt in the same manner as we were hurt. We minimize the pain that we suffered in the Past, so we minimize the pain that others are experiencing in the Present! And those “Others” are usually children! So we may witness life-changing events right in front of us, and never know them for what they are!
So how do we regain the awareness that we lost? Watch a child who falls and scrapes his or her knee. First they cry, and if they got hurt through the action of another, they rage. Their feelings flow immediately and un-fettered. Rage leaves first. A caring adult attends to their needs, both physical, and emotional. Kind words, bandage, and antiseptic are applied. A “fully aware” adult never tells the child that their injury doesn’t or shouldn’t hurt! A “fully aware” adult will never interrupt the child’s tears. Tears may come again if the child bumps the injury. Gradually over time the tears subside. That is how the grief process works, when it is allowed to work. Grief is our built-in process for getting past emotional injuries without permanent damage. It works at the time of an injury, and still works years later, as we “uncover” childhood injuries that were “buried” where the grief process was never allowed to complete.
Child abuse causes some of the worst injuries that exist. What is worse than loss of awareness? What is worse than being betrayed by those we love? What is worse than being taught by adults who hit, or sexually abuse us that we really don’t own our own bodies, so that others may do as they please with us? How much crying is justified when we have been raped or beaten, or brainwashed as children? How angry should we get?
The grief process is uncomfortable. We avoid it like the Plague. Society tells us things like “Men don’t cry”. We are pressured to “forgive”. We are told anger is a sin. But the bottom line is that those things that “Society” tells us about grief are either not true or, at best, half-truths. Society is not made up of a majority of “fully aware” adults, but mostly of “the walking wounded”! Their lack of awareness does not allow a fully flowing grief process in others, because to allow it in others would bring it up in themselves! And like I said before, we avoid it like the Plague.
Why do we avoid it so? Why do we avoid something as natural as our own breathing, a natural process that we were born with? Because we were taught to! By abusers, and by caregivers who couldn’t stand to witness our grief because it reminded them of their own!
There is an important ingredient to this grief process that I haven’t mentioned. A caring, empathetic witness is needed, especially when it is a child who needs to grieve. When the child has no witness, it is not safe enough to allow their grief, because their grief feels much bigger than they are! That experience becomes their own way of looking at their own grief. Every un-grieved childhood injury adds to their avoidance. They become adults who cannot allow their own grief process to flow, nor can they stand to witness the grief of children who need them to be a caring, empathetic witness.
You may ask at this point, “How do I grieve now, for each and every time I needed to grieve in the past?” The answer isn’t black and white. I spent years in therapy, where my biggest injuries “came up”. I grieved, and each time I seemed to be grieving for more than just the one injury I was focused on. I re-experienced the same pain that I felt as a child, and gradually learned that I would always survive my grief. I learned to allow my grief when I felt safe, and to “put it away” when it was not safe enough. My witnesses were my therapists, safe friends, other survivors, my wife, and countless sheets of paper where I have recorded my feelings from being abused as a child. My website allows many witnesses, and my writings are as angry or as sad, or as frightened as I really was as a child. They are an act of defiance in the face of those who would tell me to bury the past. To bury the past is to lose myself forever. To express my grief is to find myself, and to move towards a place where what happened to me no longer pains or angers me. In that place where I have fully found myself, I find forgiveness both for many of those who hurt me, and for myself, having taken so long to arrive.