Loss is the absence of something we were once attached to. Grief is the rope burns left behind when that which is held is pulled beyond our grasp…. Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal, begins to soften the holding and tension around it.
Stephen Levine, `Unattended Sorrow: Recovering from Loss and Reviving the Heart´
Engaging with our grief is a form of self-nurturance and liberation from neediness. Paradoxically, to enter our wounded feelings fully places us on the path to healthy intimacy.
David Richo, `How to Be an Adult in Relationships´
The process of (human) development entails many moments of discomfort and frustration. Indeed, some frustration of the infant’s wants by the caretaker’s separate comings and goings is essential to development — for if everything were always simply given in advance of discomfort, the child would never try out its own projects of control…. The child’s evolving recognition that the caretaker sometimes fails to bring it what it wants gives rise to an anger that is closely linked to its emerging love.
Martha Nussbaum, `Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions´
Neediness, Martha Nussbaum argues, is central to our developmental process as human beings. Much like frustration is essential for satisfaction, neediness becomes essential for our sense of agency and control.
What happens, however, if the naturally needy child gets wounded – through cruelty, neglect, or humiliation – in the process of developing her sense of control? My recent inner work deals precisely with this topic.
The memory in question, which prompted me to look deeper, appears to stem for my fourth or fifth year.
During our annual family holiday in the beautiful, expansive, wild countryside of the West of Ireland, we were returning from a day trip to the beach. This entailed an hour’s drive each way across blanket bog, past impressive mountains, and along spectacular serrated shorelines.
In the late afternoon, just before reaching our isolated holiday home, – a spacious fishing lodge perched on the bank of the Owenduff River, – my Dad drove up between the two final hills, a drive which unveiled behind us a sweeping vista of the ocean in which we had been swimming some hours before. He pulled in at the farmhouse on the right side of the road, which also served as a shop offering a limited selection of farm produce and basic groceries.
Some ingredients for the evening meal apparently needed to be picked up. Mammy was not with us, meaning that Dad was the only adult present. The rest of the crew was made up of myself, the youngest, and three or four of my older siblings.
We followed Dad into the shop area of the house, which I found cold, dark, and dank. Mrs McAndrew greeted us all heartily and, as Daddy engaged in conversation, I wandered outside again into the yard, to enjoy the spaciousness under the vibrant sky, the brightness and warmth of the July sunshine, and the music of the blanket bog. The mood was carefree; we were all a bit tired, perhaps also hungry, at the tail end of the long day trip.
The next thing I realised as I looked across the yard, was that the rest of the crew was quickly piling into the car. Before I could react, the motor sounded and the blue Opel station wagon pulled out of the yard, where I remained rooted to the spot, left behind.
A sense of panic set in. Eyes widening, my chest tightened, bringing my breathing to a sudden halt. This was followed by a degree of deflation that threatened to have me disappear into the ground. Petrified, it took more than one attempt to get into motion to run after the car.
When I finally succeeded, and emerged onto the road, I saw that the car had halted in the curve some 20 yards up ahead. I hurried towards it, a back door opened, and I climbed in. I was greeted with a combination of jeering, laughter, and celebration, as if I had succeeded in some form of challenge or had come through a ritual of initiation in the form of a practical joke. Confused, angry, and relieved, I was bereft of any sense of identity and control. All that remained was the pain and the shame. That’s where the memory ends.
Memories like this seem to have latched onto the undercarriage of my psyche. I had been aware of this one in tiny flashes from time to time, feeling traces of the original pain, shame, and confusion, without sensing the need to address or process it. Up to this juncture, that is. This new impetus for action had, as so often, come from the world of dreams.
Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, with no clear insights into the details of my nocturnal adventures, a memory will have moved centre stage along with a hunch that the time has come to take a closer look. This is exactly how it happened in this case.
The `memory´, it should be pointed out, is not simply of an intellectual quality. It tends to be very visceral, accompanied by familiar smells, sounds, and deeply rooted somatic states underpinning the cerebral content. This is the clear prompt that the time has now come to explore deeper.
I am grateful to have the opportunity to work through such material in therapy sessions, of which I currently avail for one hour every two weeks or so. This is not the first time I have utilised the help of professionals. In fact, my first foray into depth psychology work (Jungian analysis) was in my early thirties, when my children were infants, and I was finding the fulfilment of my family and professional responsibilities very stressful.
In the meantime, I have had the opportunity to avail of many different approaches and modalities, which now form the toolset of resources on which I draw, as needed. These include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, various forms of Body Work, NLP, Kinesiology, Yoga, Qigong, the Twelve Step Programme, PQ Mental Fitness, Ecstatic Dance, EMDR Trauma Therapy, and most recently EFT, or Emotional Freedom Technique. This modality uses an array of tapping and imagination techniques to reconnect with and reframe deep-seated, long-embedded experiences, thus lessening the grip the wounds of the past have on the present.
The central theme of all this psychological and spiritual work is grieving. Years ago, I was convinced that grieving was an activity which was beyond me, due to a lack of resources and knowledge on my part. Now I know that grieving is not something to be done, but rather a state of being we can learn to embrace.
As David Richo points out in `How to be an Adult´: Our problem is not that as children our needs were unmet, but that, as adults, they are still unmourned! In fact, neediness itself tells us nothing about how much we need from others; it tells us how much we need to grieve the irrevocably barren past and evoke our own inner source of nurturance.
What was missed can never be made up for, only mourned and let go of. We are grieving the irretrievable aspect of what we lost and the irreplaceable aspect of what we missed. Only these two realizations lead to resolution of grief because only these acknowledge, without denial, how truly bereft we were or are. From the pit of this deep admission that something is irrevocably over and gone we finally stand clear of the insatiable need to find it again from our parents or partner. To have sought it was to have denied how utter was its absence.
In my most recent therapy session, the reframing culminated in an imaginary scene of my father stepping out of the car, coming towards me, picking me up lovingly, and, on the way back to the car, sincerely apologising for what he had just done. That was helpful.
In the days that followed, it was healing to recognise my father as a fallible human being, for the `mixed bag´ he was, – as we all are, – and to accept, without resentment or regret, that in real life, such an apology was never forthcoming.
Even more important, however, was the recognition of my own internalisation of the kind of emotional abuse I had experienced as a child. Over a period of 26 years, from my mid teens to my early forties, I was engaged in a pain avoidance strategy in the form of daily self-medication using substances such as alcohol and marijuana. My binge mode of consumption regularly culminated in blacking out. Once per month over this period would equate to about 300 blackouts. In fact, the total may have been a multiple of that.
In recent days I could feel my way into the sensation of waking up out of these blackouts and discovered that they were very similar to those I felt that day when Daddy decided to engage me in his `experiment´. This was an epiphany moment for me. `So that’s how it works´, I thought to myself. It dawned on me that, later in life, I had abandoned myself, left myself behind, frightened and confused, hundreds of times.
Thankfully, I have been sober and living in recovery for over twenty years now. My last blackout would have been in September 2003. It has taken this long to come to a clear recognition of the effect my own behaviour has had on my Inner Child. When the penny dropped, I was initially mortified.
Using the resources of mental fitness which I have built up over recent years, I quickly move through that to a state of empathy. Empathy for the boy who took upon himself a burden of shame in a moment of crisis. Empathy for my father who could not resist the sadistic temptation, for all my family, back through generations. True empathy can, by nature, never be selective.
I now honour the reality of my Inner Child’s pain and loss during childhood, taking responsibility for my own subsequent abusive treatment of him. More importantly, my `living amend´ is to never again treat him in this fashion for the rest of our days.
We will continue to grieve together those patches of the irrecoverably barren past and evoke our own inner source of nurturance. This approach of awareness, leading through grief, forgiveness, and self care, brings into effect a powerful shift from neediness to abundance.
