Experiences of grief, the grieving process

I am reading a lot about grief and the grieving process right now in my life and listening to this great podcast about grief called "coming back: conversations about life after loss".

This is not necessarily entirely about loss of a loved one, I think that loss is much more expansive and that in the human experience we have a variety of types of losses that trigger the grieving process and this process in itself doesn't get talked about a lot because of its painful nature and the fact that nobody wants to lose anything but that loss is simply an aspect of life that we will all experience in one form or the other.

What have you grieved? How have you moved through the process and the pain? I want to open the discussion about this and I may post my thoughts as I go through this myself.

For me, I am grieving my childhood wounds and the sense of loneliness and isolation it has caused me. I've avoided grief through self denial and drug use to numb the pain but I have realized that I must now go through the pain and remember all of the old hurts that I buried and tried to forget because they were too painful. I must face my loss to move forward and wonder how some of you have dealt with it .

 

Would love for you to link it here if you feel comfortable that sounds like it would really add to the conversation

 

Yeah the book heartwounds seems to be saying a very similar thing to this.

It's interesting because one of the main themes is self validation is necessary to move through the experience of grief or any sort of intense negative/difficult emotion. Acceptance, maybe. That can be challenging for people to do who were taught that their existence and expression itself was inherently unworthy.

What did you do to "face it"?

 

Thank you for sharing. I think that is this a complex topic that isn't really discussed... For good reason, it's painful and nobody wants to think about it. It's strange how our society seems to want to suppress discussion of certain topics because they're unseemly. Most indigenous cultures don't look at emotions in such a negative light, western culture has seemed to fetishize emotional numbness and avoiding discussions of high tension topics. Strange because it's okay to be emotional about politics but it's not okay to talk about your emotions.