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When children experience the death of a parent or caregiver, they tell themselves a story about it to make sense of it and cope. As Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
The story we tell ourselves after a loss can feel like protection at the time. Don’t get too attached to people because they’ll inevitably abandon; get too attached to someone not worthy of our love, and don’t let go no matter what so that we’re not abandoned. This story can limit our ability to experience loving relationships later in life.
The death of a loved one can be so devastating that our whole orientation in life feels lost. A loss that big can feel like an out-of-body experience. We leave ourselves behind, and for years afterward, we may have difficulty feeling anything at all. Our mind and body have become disconnected, and our mind has sectioned off the part of itself that can love and feel loved because it’s too painful. It’s our mind’s way of protecting ourselves from the trauma we experienced.
The surviving parent or caregiver may be too busy with their own pain to be sensitive or aware of our needs. Even a caregiver with the best intentions may not see our trauma. We go forward, still needing the healing exchange with the person who wounded us. The past can have a powerful pull on us when we have highly negative emotions such as resentments and regrets—regrets about things we didn’t tell our parent before they died, or regrets about how we processed that death at the time it occurred.
To heal, we have to take ourselves back to when the wounding took place and provide ourselves with the message our parent failed to provide. This means identifying our childhood wound and giving ourselves the missing experience that has the power to heal us. We must find a new truth, a new message that will offset and replace the limiting belief that we developed as a child. This new truth is a message we needed to hear back then. Hearing that message now, even so many years later, can be a liberating experience.
The key to healing is experiencing the emotions that we weren’t able or allowed to feel at the time. Anger, sadness, grief, and fear are painful, and we often choose to suppress them rather than feel them and work them out. If we don’t process our emotions when they occur, they become stuck in our mind and body, and they will keep showing up in our lives, in some form of dysfunction or unhappiness, until we resolve them. When we deny and run from our feelings, the underlying trauma never gets resolved.
By using mindfulness, we can get in touch with our inner world and bring what’s been unconscious into our awareness—reconnect with our thoughts and feelings, get past our limiting beliefs, and heal. When we finally process our trauma, we open ourselves up to new, healthier, loving relationships. We allow ourselves the mental and emotional space to both feel loved and give our love to others. People who have experienced profound loss are often more thoughtful, loving, compassionate, and resilient.
It’s never too late to gain awareness of the thoughts, beliefs, and emotions that are lurking in our unconscious, determining the path of our life even when it is one that we don’t want, one on which we are surviving rather than thriving. No matter how long ago the trauma occurred, with mindfulness, it’s possible to finally mourn our loss and experience the feelings that have been residing within us, beneath the surface of our life, the whole time.
Because our own life is worth being the best it can be, despite someone we love no longer being with us, we must replace what we lost—unconditional love and support, healthy attachment. This requires allowing ourselves to fully grieve the parent we lost and let go of the expectation that we can find someone to fill their shoes in exactly the same way. It requires self-awareness of our needs and the willingness to reach out toward others, like family members, friends, or therapists. We must have self-compassion and patience with ourselves as we find a new way forward.
Those we have loved and lost will always be with us because of who we became by being with them; they truly are part of us and live on through us. We can honor their memory by living our best life, strengthened by the love they gave us.
