How Grieving Your Childhood Hurts and Losses Can Actually Create More Joy!

By Audrey Hardin, MS LPC

Do you struggle with confidence?
Do you struggle to fully express yourself or say what you need the moment you need it?
Do you expect your body and mind to work on command no matter how little rest you’ve given it?
Is it hard to give yourself grace when you blow it?
Do you tend to blame others when something doesn’t go as planned?

Believe it or not, these are all indicators that we have not done our “grief-work”.

If you said yes to any of these questions, it can indicate that our needs were not fully met by our caregivers or hurts and losses that occurred never got resolved.

What do we really need to develop healthy self-esteem, emotional regulation, and strong healthy relationships as adults?

Think from birth until age 12 especially…yet, we all need these in our relationships today as well.

Attunement -my caregivers were aware, noticed, and responded to my needs and emotions —and they delighted to acknowledge and know me. Attunement involves pursuit to know and be a student of someone.
Containment -my caregivers created a safe space for me to feel, express/say what was on my mind, they empathized with me, gave me consistent attention without distraction, and set and held clear boundaries to keep me safe. Containment honors the receiver by respecting and protecting who he or she is.
Repair -when the relationship ruptured, I could trust that my parent or caregiver would take ownership and seek to repair the relationship/the connection. Repair ascribes value to the receiver as it communicates that he or she is worth staying connected to.

Here’s an example of healthy attunement, containment, and repair that a parent provides for their child:

One common instance of this correlation occurs when a child is attacked and hurt by a bully at school. His body/brain immediately goes into a hypervigilant, fearful state until someone steps in to insure him he will not be re-victimized and helps him begin to release the hyperactivation in his nervous system.
If the child has learned through experience that he can trust at least one of his parents when he is scared, hurting, or needing help, he will tell mom or dad about it. With them, he will GRIEVE the temporary death of his sense of safety in the world by verbally ventilating “getting out loud” with his feelings, crying, angering, etc.
Next, his parents will take the necessary steps with the school to report the bully and assure this won’t happen again. Soon after, the child can fully release that trauma and reenter a relaxed state in his body and in his relationships.

Grieving helps us return to a safe, trusting, and relaxed state in our body and mind, making room for the abundant life God intended.

Yet, so many of us (and the majority of our parents) did not know the importance of grieving to get back into our skin and fully live out of who God created us to be. Therefore, we took on layer after layer of self-protection.

Instead of flourishing in our gifts, building confidence, resilience, fully expressing without fear, and giving our bodies self-compassion along the way, we moved to self-doubt, high control, and fear.

This survival strategy (Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn) is adaptive to a degree. It does help us to stay emotionally safe in an unsafe environment. After all, you don’t leave all the windows and doors open during a severe rainstorm or everything you own gets damaged. Eventually, though, we are called to open back up and engage with the world in order to flourish.

The problem is, when don’t do our grief work, we act as if we still live in the rainstorm. We keep living out of our fears of getting hurt again. We stop growing and stay stuck in survival mode

…and worse, we tend to attract the very environments and people that hurt us…scary right?

“Grief-Work”

First of all, who wants to do it? No one wants to feel the pain of our deepest losses and unmet needs –especially from childhood. No one wants to relive that pain. It hurts! What good will it do? I heard a friend say once, “I don’t want to dwell in what I can’t change!”

Grieving is not dwelling on the past. It is honoring you, what you lost, and freeing you up to be more present and healthy in your present.

Consider this, Jesus didn’t look forward to suffering death on the cross. He sweat tears of blood he felt so anxious, asking God for another way! But he pushed through the pain to bring forth LIFE –for all of us. In Isaiah 53, it describes Jesus as a man of great sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief! If Jesus felt it, we know it’s meant for us too!

When we don’t face our past pain, our life gets short-circuited by our brains into living reactively –trying to control our world, instead of living freely and abundantly!

So many clients and workshop attendees tend to deny their unmet needs and deep hurts. They’ve buried them down so deep that many of them don’t remember their childhood or even say if they made it out in one piece, “it was great!”

-Sound familiar?…

There is NO perfect parent, and many of us got caught up in the throws of siblings and job transitions, death, financial strain, and our parents’ own emotional immaturity, therefore we did not receive consistent attunement, containment, and repair to help us know our worth, work through our emotions, and trust that the people we belonged to were safe and loved us no matter what.

The good news is, our story doesn’t end with the hurt, losses, and our protection strategies… we can begin to get curious about them, acknowledge them, and grieve them.

Tears and Anger will begin to release you from the power of your pain (past and present).

Therapeutically, let me offer you 4 areas that you NEEDED from your parents growing up to develop and thrive and in turn, invite you to consider grieving what you did not receive.

WHAT TO GRIEVE

First and foremost, we need to grieve the loss of Belongingness. Perhaps we were unfairly deprived of our birthright to be welcomed into a family that cherished us.

From parents/caregivers:

1. Verbal:

Eager participation in conversation with child
Generous amounts of praise and positive feedback
Willingness to entertain all questions
Teaching, reading stories, providing resources for verbal development

2. Spiritual:

Seeing and reflecting back to the child his or her essential worth
Guidance to help integrate painful aspects of life
Nurturing child’s creative self-expression
Frequent exposure to nature
Instilling hope beyond self

3. Emotional:

Meeting child consistently with caring, regard, and interest
Welcoming and valuing 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
Using humor

4. Physical:

Consistent affection and protection
Teaching healthy diet, sleep schedule, grooming, discipline, & responsibility
Helping child develop hobbies, outside interests, and own sense of personal style
Modeling and teaching the child how to balance rest, play, and work.

Just like the child at the beginning of this article needed to grieve out what was hurt and lost, we too need to grieve the unreleased pain that came from growing up without this type of support.

Grief is an expression of injustice.

Though your parents more than likely just “did what they knew” with the resources they had, if we do not name: i.e. tell the truth of what was lost, we bear the weight and shame, believing it was our fault, blaming ourselves for what we lacked instead of releasing It so we can heal.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you FREE.”

When we grieve well, not only will we grasp a more thorough understanding of our self-esteem challenges and behavioral patterns, but we will make room to receive the healing that God offers…this includes more comfort and joy!

Matthew 5:4 explains this concept well: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” -We get more, not less, when we grieve.

and in the Message translation:

“You’re [ironically] blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.”

Over and over, grieving reinforces our intrinsic value as a human being created by God himself. When we grieve, we get more of him and connection with others.

Although suffering is a part of our fallen world, it was never meant to define us; instead, to point us to the Perfect Father, who can accurately tell us who we are, cancel our shame, and reveal how deeply we are loved by him.

Because of Christ and in Christ, we belong.

Audrey Hardin is a Therapist, Speaker, and Workshop Leader at Hardin Life Resources in Dallas and McKinney, TX.

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