Why Grieving May Be The Most Important Step Of Your Recovery
Grief is one of those emotions that we all understand to be a logical and appropriate response to loss, especially when it comes to death. We get it. When a person dies, we grieve the loss of them. We cry, mourn, gather with loved ones, spend time alone, and are often reflective and somber as we work through this important stage of death. However, we may unintentionally evade grief when it exists outside of the death realm.
Grief Helps Us Face Reality
Grieving the loss of something or someone is our psychological way of acknowledging the permanent absence of a person or thing (yes, you can grieve things!). What makes the experience of grief difficult is fairly obvious: It hurts. Grief is painful. Your body aches, your shed oceans of tears, and you are facing something irrefutable. Nothing can or will bring back the person or thing you’ve lost. That’s hard.
What’s even harder is grieving the loss of someone who’s still alive, which many adult children of narcissists face when they register the reality of their narcissistic parent. And to add to the challenge is when we must look back on our childhoods and grieve what was never provided to us by our parents and the wounds we’ve carried over into our adulthood.
The reason why grieving may be the most important step in your recovery is that it will allow you to face the painful reality as it is (or was) and give you the chance to move forward with new information. By allowing your grief to move through you, you also have to be willing to let go of defenses that keep grief out of your awareness such as: intellectualizing away the experience, rationalizing the pain, and minimizing it’s impact. Any defense that keep grief from fulfilling its mission, which is to help you acknowledge loss and so that you may move forward, will have to be relinquished.
Do I really have to feel it?
As the saying goes, “you have to feel it to heal it”, which is about as on the nose as you can get. Understandably, a lot of us want to find ways around our grief so that we don’t have to go through the actual act of grieving.
What often trips people up is the idea of “moving on” or “letting go”. We tend to equate these two notions as intellectual acts that require sheer willpower and some kind of mantra that will convince our brains to no longer be affected. This is not grieving.
This is thinking about grieving. Imagine if you only thought about exercising. Would you get any results? Of course, not! Grieving is a physical action, just like exercising. We cannot think our way out of grief just like we cannot think our way into physical fitness.
If grief stays stuck in the intellectual realm, you’ll likely find yourself increasingly frustrated, agitated, depressed, anxious, and overall feeling stuck. Many people think they have grieved the loss of their childhoods, when in reality they’ve only thought about their childhoods as being sad. To grieve is the most natural thing in the world. It’s easy (easy in the sense that it comes natural to the body, but of course it’s not easy in that it hurts), primal, and requires very little thinking.
Narcissism = Only One Person’s Feelings Matter
Like a lot of individuals raised by narcissists, you were discouraged from having your feelings. You were taught that to feel was to be “weak”, “too much”, or a burden. So, you found a solution: don’t have them! Do literally anything other than feel. Now, it’s time to come back to your natural, inborn capacity to feel. It’s there, it hasn’t gone away, you just have to be willing to approach your feelings again and again.
How to Know You’re Grieving:
1. You feel the loss, the pain, the tragic reality of your past or present physically. Your body registers the pain. It’s unmistakable when grief is present in the body. Your throat may clench up as you start to cry, your eyes well up with tears, you feel a heaviness in your whole body, and then you release.
2. When you’re done grieving, you feel better. Not as in happy, but lighter. Its cathartic qualities help to relieve your body of pain and tightness. You’ve also done what is required: Allowed it to move through you.
3. You notice other complex feelings coming up. It could be anger at all of the injustices you faced and/or memories of pleasant experiences that elicit joy and bittersweet longing for closeness.
4. Over time, the grief becomes less and less and you find yourself capable of integrating new things into your life again. You might return to a hobby, engage socially again, or simply feel more connected to your life.
How to Know You’re Not Grieving:
1. You haven’t felt the feeling physically. Instead, you’re stuck in intellectualizing about the past, doing things like trying to convince yourself that you’re okay. You may also be ruminating on anger to keep the sadness and loss outside of your awareness.
2. You feel worse after. This is likely because the grief stayed in the cognitive realm. Other defenses like rationalization, i.e. “it wasn’t that bad, my mom was just doing the best she could” might have shown up when you started to get close to your feelings. You may have started to ruminate on the loss, going in circles, getting nowhere.
3. You ignore other feelings that arise, keeping them out of your awareness where they cannot be healed.
4. You end up becoming depressed, anxious, and disconnected from yourself, your friends, and your life.
The good news is that feelings come natural to all human beings. None of us were born without them and all of us can go towards them when we see the value they bring to us. Of course, it’s so important to do this work with a therapist who can help you move toward your feelings and work with any barriers that might come up.
The good news is that all feelings, when felt fully, pass naturally. They have no need to hang around. When feelings aren’t felt, they then fester in the mind and body and come out through all kinds of back doors and usually in ways we don’t like. Feelings have importance. They are vital to our wellbeing and survival. Your grief will help you heal. You just have to be willing to go towards it.
(Information provided on the site is for educational purposes only, and does not substitute for professional medical or therapeutic advice.)