"MINDFUL GRIEF means mourning and letting go of the past without expectation, fear, censure, blame, shame, control, and so forth. Without such mindful grief, neither past nor person can be laid to rest. When we grieve mindfully, we mourn every one of the disappointments, insults, and betrayals of the now irrevocably lost past. We mourn any abuse—physical, sexual, emotional. We mourn for how our parents just did not want us, did not love us, or could not get past their own needs long enough to see us as the lovable beings we were and allow our unique self-emergence. We mourn every way they said no to the gift we sought to give them: full visibility of our true self, not the self we had to manufacture to please or protect them. We mourn all the times they saw how scared, forlorn, and sad we were and yet did not respond, relent, or apologize. We mourn because even now, after all these years, they still have not admitted their abuse or lack of compassion.
Why mourn for what we never had? Because we had an instinctive sense of the five A’s of good parenting (attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, allowing) and of their absence in our lives. We grieve our loss of birthright. We mourn because our parents had that same sense and somehow ignored it. We mourn because we were hurt by those who loved us: “Look at how I was wounded in the house of those who loved me” (Zech. 13:6).
Mourning is a process. It goes on all our lives as we discover new levels in the pain and losses we felt in the past. One lifetime will not suffice to let it all go. It is enough to do our best at releasing our pain so that the energies fixated in the past can be reinvested in the present.
Grief’s favorite position is piggyback. If I am abandoned in the present and allow myself to grieve the abandonment, all the old abandonments of the past, which have been waiting their turn, jump onto my grieving shoulders. Also included in the piggybacking are the griefs of the human collective, what Virgil calls “the tears in things.” These are the givens of relationship: the sense of something missing, the fugitive intimacies, the inevitable endings. We carry sensitivities to all those in our hearts, and our personal griefs evoke them. What a way to find out we are not alone! We carry the heritage of the archetypal past and enrich it continually with our personal experience.
Jung suggests that working on our childhood issues is a necessary first step toward spiritual consciousness. As he puts it, the “personal unconscious must always be dealt with first… otherwise the gateway to the cosmic unconscious cannot be opened.” We cannot make up for losses, but we can learn to tolerate them and contain them. This is what the soulful journey of mourning is about.
Mourning is an action not a transaction. It is our personal responsibility, so we do not do it with the perpetrators of our losses, including our parents. We interrupt our own healing as long as we still have to tell our parents how bad we think they were.
Some of us are not yet ready to face what really happened to us; we suspect or even know that we do not have the strength to follow the process through to its painful conclusion. It is important to respect this hesitancy and honor our own timing. Some tears may be shed today, some next year, some in thirty years. The inner child of the past tells her story a little at a time, lest we have too much to handle all at once. “Hurry or delay is interference,” D. W. Winnicott says. The fact that grief takes so long to be resolved is not a sign of our inadequacy. Rather, it betokens our depth of soul.
A cognitive recounting of the past may only be a memory of a memory unless it is connected strongly to a bodily feeling, because every cell in our body recalls every event that impinged upon us in childhood. The body, more than the mind, is the real human unconscious, storing both the memory of pain and our attempts to avoid it. The work, then, is to find the accurate sense of what we felt and not necessarily a story line of exactly what happened. In fact, the content of the memories is less crucial than the conflicts they represent and the reenactments we are still caught in. These are the true targets of grief, not the memory of what happened.
Actually, we may never know what truly happened in our past, not because it is so lost in oblivion but because it is continually shifting in our memory. At each phase of life, it rearranges itself to fit our new sense of ourselves and the world. Memories are selections from the past. Thus, our goal is not so much to reconstruct memory but to restructure our overall sense of the past to fit our changing needs."
- David Richo
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