The grief of unhealed childhood wounds

In my other post, Healing in Poetry, I write about unclaimed or rejected feelings states. In this one I am going to focus on an example of an unclaimed feeling state, a disenfranchised grief.

When we think of grief, we will tend to think of the death of someone loved. At best, grief is a painful process. When a grief is disenfranchised, it becomes a much more difficult process and can often be more painful. I will get more into what the term means a little way in. The specific example I’m going to focus on is one that is so multilayered and complex it has proven a challenge to write about.

The grief I want to talk about here is a grief associated with loss that occurs through our relationship with one or both parents. It’s rare for anyone to have a perfect childhood, or perfect parents, I’d go so far as to say it’s absurd to think parents will be perfect. But there can be difficulties in the relationship, and during our childhood, that result in a grief that is difficult to approach or even recognise. That grief comes from when critical needs were not met at critical times by our parents (or caregivers), or the context of the parent-child relationship was such that we, as children, ended up feeling rejected, abandoned, unseen, or unloved.

It is not uncommon for parents to claim unconditional Love for their children. But Love is more than an idea in the mind of the one doing the loving; it is how it is felt by the one receiving the love. If a child does not feel loved, no amount of the parent saying they love the child will change that. Sometimes we will have a very real sense that our parent’s love was in fact quite conditional. Our child self instinctively will recognise when this is the case, even if our older self does not or cannot conceive of such a thing.

When we learn as a child that our parent’s love is conditional, we will work to meet those conditions. It’s not a choice, but a biological and instinctive imperative. A bond of emotional attachment to our parents is of critical importance for our survival such that we are specially attuned to detect threat to that attachment bond. This means an acute attunement to our parent’s state of being and learned adaptations to maintain the greatest strength of the bond possible. We will, in fact, sacrifice anything else to feel that bond, and this will include our authentic Self and authentic expression.

The effect is that we can learn we need to suppress, conceal, or reject entirely parts of our Self that risk our parental attachment bond. Where shame is involved, we can learn to even hate parts of our Self. We will adapt our relational behaviour and this will generally form a foundation for lifelong patterns of relating. Our child version of self is instinctively intelligent in its adaptation, but for the overall human being it is immensely damaging and can have long term detrimental impacts, depending on the nature of those adaptations.

When this happens so early in life, we don’t realise we’ve done it. We grow into our adolescent and our adult self, not consciously knowing that we have lost our authenticity and replaced our Self with a series of distorted beliefs and behaviour adaptations to maintain bonds that, while we no longer need them in the same survival sense, they are still significant and important to us.

There are multiple additional losses that come from this. The most profound and obvious is the loss of connection to Self, the loss of our authenticity. But we will often also feel a loss to recognise that critical developmental needs went unmet by a parent; that we will never have the chance to experience having had those needs met, meaning a feeling of loss of who we might have otherwise been; the image that we held of our childhood to maintain the attachment bond; the image we held of our parents. The loss of who we were before we saw what was previously unseen. The grief from this exists in complex and interwoven layers.

The disenfranchisement comes in layers too. Culturally, this disconnection from Self is normalised. Not normal mind you; normalised. It is common, and because it is common there is an automatic implication that it is somehow a correct and unavoidable thing. We call something ‘normal’ because it is prevalent, it is not prevalent because it is ‘normal’. It is important to understand this difference here.

Part of the ‘normal’ in our culture is the suppression, oppression, and rejection of the deep feeling experience inherent in the human being. This is the place where intuition and true wisdom of the Self come from, and where connection with the Self resides. It is the feminine human aspect. It has long been denigrated, shamed, and reviled.

Really, I would argue it is inconvenient and disruptive to our modern power structures, and the structures on which the modern ones were built. It gets in the way of human production and consumption; it inherently defies the ‘norms’ on which our economies are built. You may note I don’t say societies; it is economies we now live in. People are things in economies, means and units of production, dehumanised; while societies are collectives of people and reflect more people-based culture, and ideally, maintenance of humanity. Things don’t feel. People feeling is a frustrating reminder of the fact that humans are not things and are in fact Human Beings.

Our parents, and grandparents, and so forth back up the ancestral line, they were immersed in these cultural norms for as long as they have been in effect. They reflect their part in maintaining these cultural norms, the economic focus, the dehumanisation, the denigration and loss of Self. We are culturally and familiarly conditioned not to even recognise this loss. If we do, we violate the norms of our family and broader culture. This will meet with resistance at best, and more realistically some form of criticism or punishment. More so, I would hope, in the past than the present, but plenty still in the present.

Then there is the deep emotional connection that we have with our parents, and this running up against the recognition that our parents acted, unwittingly or no, to cause us harm and a wounding loss of Self. There are cultural norms around family too, around familial bonds, and respect and honour of family and particularly parents. How, against all of this, are we to feel entitled to grief over a profound loss of Self, if we manage to even perceive it in the first place?

This is the core of disenfranchised grief; it is a feeling of anguish we simultaneously feel is unjustified, or that we are not entitled to it, or we feel guilt or shame to acknowledge it, and others would likely dismiss or criticise us if we were to try and express it. It is taboo in some way, and we might keep it small and secret as a result. But it doesn’t make it not real, and it doesn’t make it go away.

All of this, for our own experience in it, and our parents and ancestors’ participation in it, is, at its most fundamental, a dance of Love and fear. Love that comes from our natural human inclinations, and fear comes from a familial, social, and cultural conditioning. Not to discount or belittle the latter, it is no small thing. At times in history this has included, and does include, violent oppression and the very real threat of torture and death. The present tense included there in recognition that there are very big and current examples of this going on in our world right now. We did not become an oppressed, disconnected people for no reason, nor did our parents and ancestors, neither collectively nor individually.

But let’s return to the current individual, as that is where our most profound work and focus lie.

From all this we will have built internal resistance or protection against truly facing and feeling any pain, loss, and grief associated with our childhood and our relationship with a parent. It is disenfranchised within us. We may try to talk ourselves out of believing in it, or try to invalidate our feelings, with questions like ‘is it the absolute truth?’ or ‘is it the only truth?’. And realistically no, it isn’t. But it is still A Truth, a felt truth, a lived and experienced truth. It doesn’t cease to exist by only focusing on other truths or perspectives.

And other truths and perspectives won’t disappear just because we give this one attention. It is something that needs to be consciously felt, because on some level it is being felt anyway. When it is only in the unconscious it might get up to mischief and cause problems, and it won’t be able to continue doing that once we have it out in the open, under the bright light of our attention.

What putting it in our focus means is that we can fully engage in the feeling experience. Instead of it remaining trapped and static, it can start to move, and through movement, it can start to change, transform, or maybe it will even clear. New possibilities open up for us, and a new reality can be found on the other side of allowing the moving, living process to happen. It is useful to appreciate the unknown aspects of this process, the unknown of where it will lead for example, as that unknown around such significant relationships and life experiences will form part of the resistance to engaging with it.

What can be helpful to start with is having an example of it to engage with. I have crafted this poem (Purging) as a reflection of a process of fully conscious engagement with a repressed and disenfranchised grief of this nature. Sometimes, seeing such a reflection can help us move past some of our resistance to meeting our own pain or grief or whatever feeling is there to feel. It can help it feel more ‘enfranchised’.

Claiming our otherwise unclaimed feelings is important, as it allows us to be more whole. It moves us ultimately towards the most integrated version of our Self. The more we reflect our true Self in the world, the better we can live out our best and highest purpose; to be the most Self that we were born to be, free from distortion of learned erroneous or damaging beliefs about who we are, and who we can be.

I’ll end this with two excellent quotes about why pursuing such a thing is significant and meaningful for us individually, and for the collective, and for the world. Find the light that is ‘I’, and SHINE.

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