by Pete Walker
Grieving also supports recovery from the many painful, deathlike losses caused by childhood traumatization. Key childhood losses - addressed throughout this book - are all the crucial developmental arrests that we suffered. The most essential of these are the deaths of our self-compassion and our self-esteem, as well as our abilities to protect ourselves and fully express ourselves.
Grieving The Absence Of Parental Care
As our capacity to grieve evolves, we typically uncover a great deal of unresolved grief about the deadening absence of the nurturance we needed to develop and thrive. Here are the key types of parental nurturing that all children need in order to flourish. Knowing about these unmet needs can help you to grieve out the unreleased pain that comes from having grown up without this type of support. Moreover, this knowledge can guide you to reparent and interact with yourself more nurturingly.
1. VERBAL NURTURANCE: Eager participation in multidimensional conversation. Generous amounts of praise and positive feedback. Willingness to entertain all questions. Teaching, reading stories, providing resources for ongoing verbal development.
2. SPIRITUAL NURTURANCE: Seeing and reflecting back to the child his or her essential worth, basic goodness and loving nature. Engendering experiences of joy, fun, and love to maintain the child’s innate sense that life is a gift. Spiritual or philosophical guidance to help the child integrate painful aspects of life. Nurturing the child’s creative self-expression. Frequent exposure to nature.
3. EMOTIONAL NURTURANCE: Meeting the child consistently with caring, regard and interest. Welcoming and valuing the child’s full emotional expression. Modeling non-abusive expression of emotions. Teaching safe ways to release anger that do not hurt the child or others. Generous amounts of love, warmth, tenderness, and compassion. Honoring tears as a way of releasing hurt. Being a safe refuge. Humor.
4. PHYSICAL NURTURANCE: Affection and protection. Healthy diet and sleep schedule. Teaching habits of grooming, discipline, and responsibility. Helping the child develop hobbies, outside interests, and own sense of personal style. Helping the child balance rest, play, and work.
My book, The Tao of Fully Feeling, contains extensive guidelines and encouragements for identifying and grieving the losses of childhood. Sandra Bloom’s article: “The Grief That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Part II, Dealing with The Ravages of Childhood” also identifies childhood losses from trauma in a very specific and compelling way. [Please see www.sanctuaryweb.com].
It is often difficult to become motivated to grieve losses that occurred so long ago. Many of these losses seem so nebulous that trying to embrace grieving is a bit like trying to embrace dental work. Who wants to go to the dentist? But who doesn’t go once the toothache becomes acute?
Soul ache is considerably harder to assign to the losses of childhood, yet those who take the grieving journey described below come to know unquestionably that the core of their soul ache and psychological suffering is in the unworked through losses of growing up with abandoning parents.
These losses have to be grieved until the person really gets how much her caretakers were not caretakers, and how much her parents were not her allies. She needs to grieve until she stops blaming herself for their abuse and/or neglect. She needs to grieve until she fully realizes that their abysmal parenting practices gave her that awful gift that keeps on giving: Cptsd. She needs to grieve until she understands how her learned habit of automatic self-abandonment is a reenactment of their abject failure to be there for her.
Mourning these awful realities empowers our efforts to develop a multidimensional practice of self-care. As we grieve more effectively, our capacities for self-compassion and self-protection grow, and our psyche becomes increasingly user friendly.
GRIEVING AMELIORATES FLASHBACKS
“Pain is excess energy crying out for release.” – Gerald Heard
Grieving sometimes seems sacramental to me in its ability to move me out of the abandonment mélange, that extremely painful and upsetting amalgam of fear, shame and depression that is at the emotional core of most flashbacks.
A survivor can learn to grieve himself out of fear - the death of feeling safe. He can learn to grieve himself out of shame - the death of feeling worthy. He can learn to grieve himself out of depression - the death of feeling fully alive.
With sufficient grieving, the survivor gets that he was innocent and eminently loveable as a child. As he mourns the bad luck of not being born to loving parents, he finds within himself a fierce, unshakeable self-allegiance. He becomes ready, willing and able to be there for himself no matter what he is experiencing - internally or externally.
Griefwork also releases you from the impatience and frustration that can arise when you get re-stuck in an inner critic attack. This is especially important during those “monster” flashbacks when the critic can bully you into wanting to give up. At such times, angering and crying at this terrible intrusion from your past can rescue you from forgetting how far you have come and how much safer you are now.
Inner Critic Hindrances To Grieving
The greatest hindrance to effective grieving is typically the inner critic. When the critic is especially toxic, grieving may be counterproductive and contraindicated in early recovery. Those who were repeatedly pathologized and punished for emoting in childhood may experience grieving as exacerbating their flashbacks rather than relieving them.
I have worked with numerous survivors whose tears immediately triggered them into toxic shame. Their own potentially soothing tears elicited terrible self-attacks: “I’m so pathetic! No wonder nobody can stand me!” “God, I’m so unlovable when I snivel like this!” “I f*ck up, and then make myself more of a loser by whining about it!” “What good is crying for yourself – it only makes you weaker!”
This latter response is particularly ironic, for once grieving is protected from the critic, nothing can restore a person’s inner strength and coping capacity like a good cry. I have defused active suicidality on dozens of occasions by simply eliciting the suffering person’s tears.
Angering can also immediately trigger the survivor into toxic shame. This is often true of instances when there is only an angry thought or fantasy. Dysfunctional parents typically reserve their worst punishments for their child’s anger. This then traps the child’s anger inside.
Critic management is often the primary work of early stage grief work. This work involves recognizing and challenging the ways the critic is blocking or shaming the processes of grieving. As disidentification from the critic increases, grieving can then best be initiated with low intensity verbal ventilation. Over time verbal ventilation can be allowed to gradually increase in sad and angry intonation.
Once the critic has been sufficiently diminished and once thought-correction techniques have made the psyche more user-friendly, a person begins to tap into grief’s sweet relief-granting potential. He learns to grieve in a way that promotes and enhances compassion for the abandoned child he was and for the survivor he is today – still struggling in the throes of painful flashbacks.
Defueling The Critic Through Grieving
Fear drives the toxic inner critic. The critic feeds off fear and flashes the survivor back to the frightening times of childhood. She gets stuck seeing herself only through her parents’ contemptuous, intimidating or rejecting eyes. She then imitates them and scornfully mocks herself as “defective”, “ugly”, “unlovable”. She scares herself with endangerment scenarios and abhors herself for insignificant imperfections.
Because fear is a core emotional experience, emotional tools are needed to manage the fright that runs haywire during a flashback. Healthy angering and crying can short-circuit fear from morphing into the flashback-triggering cognitions of the critic. I have seen grieving bring the critic’s devastating programs of drasticizing and catastrophizing to a screeching halt on thousands of occasions.
It appears that children are hard-wired to release fear through angering and crying. The newborn bab
y, mourning the death of living safely and fully contained inside the mother, utters the first of many angry cries not only to call for nurturance and attention, but also to release her fear.
In the dysfunctional family however, the traumatizing parent soon eradicates the child’s capacity to emote. The child becomes afraid and ashamed of her own tears and anger. Tears get shut off and anger gets trapped inside and is eventually turned against the self as self-attack, self-hate, self-disgust, and self-rejection. Self-hate is the most grievous reenactment of parental abandonment.
Over time, anger also becomes fuel for the critic and actually exacerbates fear by creating an increasingly dangerous internal environment. Anything the survivor says, thinks, feels, imagines or wishes for is subjected to an intimidating inner attack.
Here are some common anger-powered critic attacks. They are presented in the first person voice, which the critic inevitably acquires: “Why did I ask such a stupid question?” “Could I have had an uglier expression on my face?” “Who am I kidding? How could an undeserving loser like me wish for love?” “No wonder I feel like sh*t; I am a piece of sh*t!”
Recovery is enhanced immeasurably by co-opting this anger from the critic and using it for the work of distancing from and shrinking the critic, as we shall see below. As you become proficient at grieving, you will notice that your critic’s volume and intensity ebbs dramatically. In fact, without the aid of effective grieving, progress in critic shrinking can only go so far.
THE FOUR PROCESSES OF GRIEVING
Grieving is at its most effective when the survivor can grieve in four ways: angering, crying, verbal ventilating and feeling.
1. Angering: Diminishes Fear and Shame
Angering is the grieving technique of aggressively complaining about current or past losses and injustices. Survivors need to anger - sometimes rage - about the intimidation, humiliation and neglect that was passed off to them as nurturance in their childhoods. As they become adept at grieving, they anger out their healthy resentment at their family’s pervasive lack of safety. They become incensed about the ten thousand betrayals of never being helped in times of need. They feel rage that there was never anyone to go to for guidance or protection. They bellow that there was no one to appeal to for fairness or appreciative recognition of their developmental achievements.
My first book, The Tao of Fully Feeling, Harvesting Forgiveness Out Of Blame, explicates in great detail a safe process for angering out childhood pain in a way that does not hurt the survivor or anyone else. In most cases, survivors do not have to directly anger at and blame their living parents. The key place to direct it is at your internalized parents - the parents of your past. The most common exception to this occurs when a parent is still abusive. This and other exceptions are explored in depth in my first book.
Angering is therapeutic when the survivor rails against childhood trauma, and especially when he rails against its living continuance in the self-hate processes of the critic. Angrily saying “No!” or “Shut Up!” to the critic, the deputy of his parents, externalizes his anger. It stops him from turning this anger against himself, and allows him to revive the lost instinct of defending himself against unjust attack.
Additionally, angering rescues the survivor from toxic shame. It rescues him from blindly letting his parents’ venomous blame turn into shame. Angering redirects blame back to where it belongs. It also augments his motivation to keep fighting to establish internal boundaries against the critic.
Angering can be done alone or in the presence of a validating witness, such as a trusted friend or therapist. Over time the vast majority of angering needs to be done silently in the privacy of your own psyche. This is the anger-empowered thought-stopping of shielding yourself from inner critic attacks.
Many survivors are so identified with the critic that it becomes their whole identity. Such survivors typically need to focus on fighting off the critic until they have established the healthy ego function of self-protection.
Angering also serves to rescue a person from the childlike sense of powerlessness that she is flashing back to. It reminds her that she inhabits an adult body with which she can now defend herself.
Through all these functions, angering serves to reduce or antidote fear. It reawakens and nurtures the instinct of self-preservation. With practice it increasingly builds a sense of both outer and inner boundaries. These boundaries increasingly move us out of harm’s way. They offer safety from the bullying of others, and safety from the most damaging bully of all – the inner critic.
Finally, angering can also empower the myriad thought corrections and substitutions needed to establish the survivor’s belief in her own essential goodness and in the lovability of discriminately chosen others. Angering bolsters her for the long-term, gradual process of wrestling her self-image away from the critic and reeducating the psyche to make it both user- and intimacy-friendly.
Angering Helps Deconstruct Repetition Compulsion
Survivors need to resuscitate their instinctual anger about parental maltreatment or they risk blindly accepting others’ reenactments of these behaviors.
A meek, visibly fearful client of mine suffered devastating sexual seductions by trusted male figures on three occasions in her adult life. Over time we traced these back to a childhood betrayal by a trusted uncle, the only seemingly kind caretaker of her childhood. She was emotionally abandoned by her parents, and he preyed upon her loneliness. He gradually took appropriate physical affection, one increment at a time, into contact that became increasingly sexual.
My client was helpless with her uncle because her ability to say “no” was parentally extinguished by the time she was in pre-school. The ability to say “no” is the backbone of our instinct of self-protection. Consequently, she was unable to protest his sexual violations.
On subsequent occasions in her life, a minister, a doctor and then a therapist exploited her via a reenactment of this original scenario. She was so lost in flashback all three times that she did not protest their exploitive betrayals. She could only react to the situations later by turning her anger inward, and blaming and shaming herself for not stopping it.
Eventually during our work together, she was able to engage in the angering process of grieving. After about six months of my witnessing and validating her anger at her various perpetrators, she came in one week glowing with pride. She welled with tears of joy and relief as she described her success in stopping an office predator who was in the early stages of a similar seduction.
This was the stage of seemingly friendly touching. But unwanted pats on the back gradually escalated into mild sexual innuendo, lingering touches on her hand and then her forearm. These were the first inappropriate advances that she had never been able to protest with her previous abusers. She was thrilled – in awe of herself – that she was able to say, in the presence of another worker no less: “Please don’t touch me. I don’t like it when you touch me, and I don’t want you to touch me anymore”. The seduction was immediately terminated.
2. Crying: The Penultimate Soothing
In grieving, crying is the yin complementary process to the yang process of angering. When we are hurt, we instinctively feel sad as well as mad. The newborn child, hurt by the loss of the perfect security of the womb, howls an angry cry.
Crying is also an irreplaceable tool for cutting off the critic’s emotional fuel supply. Tears can release fear before it devolves into frightened and frightening thinking. In fact, crying is sometimes the only process that will resolve a flashback. I have witnessed my own critic wither into innocuousness hundreds of times after a good cry. On thousands of other occasions, I have seen my clients dissolve their fear, shame and self-abandonment with the solvent of their tears. I have also seen them then surface into a healthily angry place, determined to confront a current unfairness that they now find unacceptable.
A client who left a year-long therapy to move elsewhere recently wrote to me about an experience that she
had with crying. She was hospitalized with terrible stomach pain and soon learned that she had cancer. She had wisely cut off contact with a toxic family, but was all alone in her new living situation. She was beside herself with fear, and felt like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She wrote: “I know you think that all that talking you did to me about crying didn’t get through. So did I in fact, but at the moment I was feeling the most hopeless, some of your words came back to me, and a rainstorm of tears fell out of me. It scared me at first, but I soon started feeling this amazing sense of relief, and that I would be OK if I let them operate on me. It’s now twelve months since then and many tears later [not to mention a bit of barking at God] and I seem to be well and truly in the clear.”
Here is another testimony to the power of tears. It is excerpted from an e-mail of a male client who wrote to me six months after we finished a year long course of therapy. “I think it’s the tears..... crying so much of late.....you were right! It’s great; I love it, tears of sadness, tears at the beauty in the world, tears of grief and loss, and tears of gratitude that my life is finally becoming manageable and even intimate. I’ve cried more in the past couple of months than I have done the past couple of decades. I am actually opening up to life, it’s become less narrow, it’s not just pain, shame, guilt.....there’s something else, something quite beautiful.”
An additional benefit of crying is that unabashed tears stimulate the relaxation response of the parasympathetic nervous system. This counterbalances the excessive sympathetic nervous system hyperarousal we experience in a flashback.
As we learn to grieve effectively, we allow ourselves to mourn about the lack of positive parental attention in our childhoods. We feel sorrow about the horrible reality that parental attention was typically negative and dangerous. As recovering progresses, we also cry for the child who not appreciated and reflected as special, worthy, and easy to love.