Stuck Grief (from daily ACA email)

"Grief is loss that is stuck beneath denial, willful forgetting, and the fear of being perceived as dramatizing the past. Grief is the built-up defeats, slights, and neglect from childhood."

We might have thought of grief as something we experience only from overt losses such as death of a loved one, divorce, or a devastating illness. With recovery, we also experience grief as something that comes from the loss of our identity in childhood. We're exposed to many suggestions of what those childhood losses might be, such as being regularly and unfairly criticized by a parent, being compared to a sibling who was more well-behaved, being told we were bad, dumb or inferior, being told to keep secrets - the list goes on.

Just as it's valuable to handle more overt losses by grieving in a healthy manner rather than avoiding, numbing, and dissociating, we learn to practice loving ways to grieve our childhood losses, By working the ACA Steps and learning to have a dialog with our Inner Child, we discover that our bodies and minds remember the neglectful and shaming acts of the past. Unearthing these memories and facing the feelings buried within them isn't easy, but we discover an amazing payoff on the other side of this grief - being fully self-expressed and feeling alive, perhaps for the first time.

On this day I will be aware of and focus on one of the losses I experienced in childhood and practice a loving and compassionate way to grieve that loss.