Could Grief Be the Reason You Struggle with Self-Confidence or Anxiety?
“Failing to grieve can affect more things than you think.”
By Audrey Hardin, MS LPC
By Audrey Hardin, MS LPC
Do you struggle with confidence? Self-esteem?
Do you struggle to fully express yourself or say what you need the moment you need it?
Do you expect your body and mind to work on command no matter how little rest you’ve given it?
Is it hard to give yourself grace when you blow it?
Believe it or not, these are all indicators that we have not done our “grief-work”.
When we wrestle with any of these questions, it indicates that our needs were not fully met by our caregivers or hurts and losses that occurred never got resolved.
One common instance of this correlation occurs when a child is attacked and hurt by a bully at school. His body/brain immediately goes into a hypervigilant, fearful state until someone steps in to insure him he will not be re-victimized and helps him begin to release the hyperactivation in his nervous system.
If the child has learned through experience that he can trust at least one of his parents when he is scared, hurting, or needing help, he will tell mom or dad about it. With them, he will GRIEVE the temporary death of his sense of safety in the world by verbally ventilating “getting out loud” with his feelings, crying, angering, etc.
Next, his parents will take the necessary steps with the school to report the bully and assure this won’t happen again. Soon after, the child can fully release that trauma and reenter a relaxed state in his body and in his relationships.
Grieving helps us return to a safe, trusting, and relaxed state in our body and mind.
Yet, so many of us (and the majority of our parents) did not know the importance of grieving to get back into our skin, fully living out of who God created us to be. Therefore, we took on layer after layer of self-protection.
Instead of flourishing in our gifts, building confidence, resilience, fully expressing without fear, and giving our bodies self-compassion along the way, we moved to self-doubt, high control, and fear.
This survival strategy (Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn) is adaptive to a degree. It does help us to stay emotionally safe in an unsafe environment. After all, you don’t leave all the windows and doors open during a severe rainstorm or everything you own gets damaged. Eventually, though, we are called to open back up and engage with the world in order to flourish.
The problem is, when don’t do our grief work, we act as if we still live in the rainstorm. We keep living out of our fears of getting hurt again. We stop growing and stay stuck in survival mode
…and worse, we tend to attract the very environments and people that hurt us.
“Grief-Work”
First of all, who wants to do it? No one wants to feel the pain of our deepest losses and unmet needs –especially from childhood. No one wants to relive that pain. It hurts! What good will it do?
Consider this, Jesus didn’t look forward to suffering death on the cross. He sweat tears of blood he felt so anxious, asking God for another way! But he pushed through the pain to bring forth LIFE –for all of us.
When we don’t face our past pain, our life gets short-circuited by our brains into living reactively –trying to control our world, instead of living freely and abundantly!
So many clients and workshop attendees tend to deny their unmet needs and deep hurts. They’ve buried them down so deep that many of them don’t remember their childhood or even say if they made it out in one piece, “it was great!”
-Sound familiar?…
Therapeutically, let me offer you 4 areas that you NEEDED from your parents growing up to develop and thrive and in turn, invite you to consider grieving what you did not receive.
WHAT TO GRIEVE
First and foremost, we need to grieve the loss of Belongingness. Perhaps we were unfairly deprived of our birthright to be welcomed into a family that cherished us.
From parents/caregivers:
1. Verbal:
Eager participation in conversation with child
Generous amounts of praise and positive feedback
Willingness to entertain all questions
Teaching, reading stories, providing resources for verbal development
2. Spiritual:
Seeing and reflecting back to the child his or her essential worth
Guidance to help integrate painful aspects of life
Nurturing child’s creative self-expression
Frequent exposure to nature
Instilling hope beyond self
3. Emotional:
Meeting child consistently with caring, regard, and interest
Welcoming and valuing child’s full emotional expression
Modeling non-abusive expression of emotions
Teaching safe ways to release anger that do not hurt the child or others
Generous amounts of love, warmth, tenderness, and compassion
Honoring tears as a way of releasing hurt
Being a safe refuge
Using humor
4. Physical:
Consistent affection and protection
Teaching healthy diet, sleep schedule, grooming, discipline, & responsibility
Helping child develop hobbies, outside interests, and own sense of personal style
Modeling and teaching the child how to balance rest, play, and work.
Just like the child at the beginning of this article needed to grieve out what was hurt and lost, we too need to grieve the unreleased pain that came from growing up without this type of support.
Grief is an expression of injustice.
Though your parents more than likely did the best they could with the resources they had, if we do not tell the truth of what was lost, we bear the weight and shame instead of releasing It so we can heal.
“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you FREE.”
When we grieve well, not only will we grasp a more thorough understanding of our self-esteem challenges and behavioral patterns, but we will make room to receive the spiritual healing that God offers.
Matthew 5:4 (The Message) explains this concept well:
“You’re [ironically] blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.”
Over and over, grieving reinforces our intrinsic value as a human being created by God himself.
Although suffering is a part of our fallen world, it was never meant to define us; instead, to point us to the Perfect Father, who can accurately tell us who we are, cancel our shame, and reveal how deeply we are loved by him.
Because of Christ and in Christ, we belong.
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Audrey Hardin is a Therapist, Speaker, and Workshop Leader at Hardin Life Resources in Dallas and McKinney, TX.
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