TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently asked me in a comment on this YouTube channel, “How can I help a friend of mine grieve?” I have a friend who so, so, so needs to grieve. It’s so clear, and I want to do something to help them grieve. What do I do? I don’t know any more about this situation than the person asked me about, but my intuitive answer is, well, the only thing you can really do is be a good role model.
We actually can’t really do much to help other people grieve. We can be a friend, we can listen, we can care, we can be someone who is honest. But the best thing that we can do is shine our own light through our own emotional healing process.
Also, when we see other people who need to grieve, when I see people out in the world who need to grieve, that is when I see pretty much everybody out in the world. I also see myself in a mirror because I have more grieving that I need to do. And so, I don’t really even remember who it was that wrote me this comment, but I would guess that person is probably like me, someone who has more grieving yet to do.
A lot of times, I think we don’t even recognize how much grieving we have yet to do. And I think it’s because it can be really, really difficult to see how traumatized we still are. And I’m going to universalize that. I think this goes for everybody. The reason being, it’s very hard to know how we were traumatized, especially when we were very, very, very young.
Yes, some traumas may be obvious. Some traumas we may remember when we were young, but a lot, when we were really young, before we even had an ability to put very clear memories into our mind and keep them in our psyche, it’s hard to know what happened. Especially if we have parents or other adult figures back when we were young who lie about what happened, lie about what they did, or even may be in denial themselves about the awful things that they did to us or that they witnessed happening to us. It’s very, very difficult to know.
And yet, if we ever are going to heal from these bad things that happened to us, if only neglects, if only things that we really needed that we didn’t get from the people whose job it was to love us the most, to nurture us the most, if we ever are going to heal, we have to grieve. Yet, how do we do it?
This brings me back to the question that the person asked: “How do I help somebody else grieve?” Well, I would say the real question is, how do we help ourselves grieve? And then, the more we can figure out how to grieve, how to access our pain, our anger, our frustration, our hurt, our rage, even our bitterness—all these things that family systems don’t like in children—all these things that societies and religions and school and social networks don’t like in people: bitterness and rage and anger, negative feelings, things that they want people to push away, disassociate from, bury. They want you to forgive immediately, just let it go, be happy, be positive, learn how to put on a happy face, be functional, be productive, make money, etc., etc., etc. Work hard, not sit with these terrible, painful feelings and confusing feelings and cry.
These are the things that we need to find if we are going to really process these ancient historical traumas. And for what reason do we even need to process these ancient historical traumas? Especially if all these negative, rageful, sad, hurt feelings can even make our life more dysfunctional? Because grieving really can—the process of grieving can really screw up our lives.
Well, if we want to heal, heal being taking the lost and abandoned sides of ourselves, the sides of ourselves that long, long ago, when we were children, toddlers, babies, maybe even before we were even born, when we were in our mothers’ wombs—these split-off sides of us, these are the sides that we need to bring back to ourselves so that we can become more whole people.
I think about my grieving process. It’s been going on now for decades, probably about 30 years or so. How much more whole I am now, how much more of a full and integrated person I am than I was 30 years ago. 30 years ago, I was sort of a shell of a person. Yes, I had some strong sense of self in there, but it was shallower, it was thinner, it wasn’t so filled out. I wasn’t so wise. I didn’t know myself so well. I still had a lot more split-off immaturities and screwed-up sides and buried rage and sadness than I do now. But all these things are still in me, and so my job is to keep looking, keep going into myself, keep staying away from my traumatizer—that is my parents, them being my primary traumatizer—keep staying away from them so I can have the safety to be able to look inside myself and, well, see what they did to me that really was not in my best interest.
Bringing all that up, and the more that I bring that up, the more that I process it—all of this being part of the grieving process—seeing what I lost, feeling what I lost, and giving myself love in these ancient historical split-off, denied, and abandoned parts of myself. The bigger I become, the louder and more clear and more honest my voice gets. The more my eyes radiate truth, I think it shares a message out there with the world. It spreads some energy quite beyond my desire to do it or not desire to do it. It just happens spontaneously.
And with some other people out there who are ready, who are open, who are perhaps hungry or thirsty for this, waiting for this, they pick it up, and it inspires them. And I know that because I’ve had people who are healing do this for me. Their energy has transmitted to me, sometimes in person, sometimes through videos, sometimes through books, sometimes even through other people telling me about them. Somehow that energy is powerful, and it comes to me, and it inspires me.
So that’s how other people have helped me grieve. And then I’ll say some people may not be ready. It may be too painful. They may need it desperately. Oh, people, they need to grieve. People say this a lot. Or another thing I hear people say, “Oh, so-and-so needs therapy. They need it.” Well, they may need it, but the better question is, do they want it, or are they ready for it? And I don’t think we can make people want anything. I don’t think we can make people be ready for anything, especially this long and painful and protracted healing process that can sometimes, in terms of our functionality out in the world, go against our best interest. We really have to be ready for this.
That’s why I don’t want to push anyone to grieve. I don’t want to tell anyone, “You need to grieve.” It’s like, no, let people find out from within themselves when they are ready, when they want to engage in this long and confusing and sometimes dysfunction-producing process.
And so again, the best I can do is look within, do my healing process at any given time, any given day, to the best of my ability, and be a role model by doing, to the best of my ability, what I’m doing here, which is sharing this message.
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