Unexpressed Grief

At Solid Ground on Monday 21 September, our opening reading looked at unexpressed grief and the losses we can carry without necessarily recognising them as grief.

When we think about grief, we usually think about bereavement. But there are other losses that can be much harder to recognise, particularly when they happened gradually or were simply part of the environment we grew up in.

We can grieve a childhood in which we had to become responsible too early. We can grieve the relationship we kept hoping we would eventually have with a parent. We can grieve years spent managing somebody else's drinking, behaviour, moods or crises. There can be grief around opportunities we missed, relationships that were damaged, or parts of ourselves we pushed aside because there was always something more urgent to deal with.

The difficulty is that we may never have thought of these things as losses. If something was normal in our family, we adapted to it. We learned what to expect, what not to mention and what was likely to cause trouble. Some of those adaptations were useful. They helped us get through situations we had very little control over. The problem comes when we carry them into situations where they are no longer useful.

We might still feel responsible for keeping everybody happy. Conflict can feel far more threatening than the situation in front of us warrants. We may avoid asking for help, struggle to trust people, disconnect when things become uncomfortable or become angry without immediately understanding what has been touched underneath it.

That does not mean every difficulty we experience today can be blamed on childhood. We are adults now, and we are responsible for what we do with the patterns we have developed. But responsibility becomes much more useful when it includes understanding. There is little value in repeatedly criticising ourselves for reacting a certain way while refusing to look at where the reaction came from. Grief can be part of that understanding.

Sometimes we are grieving something that can never be repaired in the way we once wanted it to be. A parent may never acknowledge what happened. A family may continue to minimise it. Someone may have died before a conversation could take place. We may eventually have to accept that the explanation, apology or recognition we wanted is not coming.

That acceptance can hurt because it closes the door on the hope that somebody else will eventually make the past right for us. It also leaves us with a different question: what do we want to do with our life now?

We can acknowledge what was lost without making the loss the centre of everything that follows. We can understand why certain patterns developed while still challenging them when they damage our lives or our relationships. We can talk about what happened without needing everybody else to agree with our version of it before we are allowed to take it seriously.

Unexpressed grief does not always announce itself as grief. Sometimes it is buried underneath anger, avoidance, exhaustion, resentment or the determination that we should have been over something years ago. Perhaps the work is not to force ourselves to get over it, but to understand what we are carrying, decide what still belongs with us, and begin putting down what does not.