Relational trauma + Grief
All relational trauma has grief.
If you experienced any developmental traumas where you never got the love, support, safety, and attunement you needed and were left to cope with and fill in for these lost experiences on your own, you may need to spend some time healing these early injuries.
Complex histories from childhood when left unresolved can impede your ability to love well, live well, parent well. Unresolved grief and trauma can also block your grieving and healing process for present day losses. This is because for many people they can only really connect to pure grief AFTER they have processed some of their unresolved trauma and attachment injuries from early childhood.
When healing traumatic childhoods there is a lot of loss and corresponding grief that is really centered on what was missed or never experienced and how these traumatic experiences have affected one’s emotional life and relationships. With relational trauma and dysfunctional family environments, you did not have one loss, you had hundreds of losses, and the cumulative effect of loss.
The grief here is not to be underestimated. It is enormous to think about how different your life would have been had you received the love and attention you deserved as a little child. It requires grieving all the time in your life you have felt unloveable, unwanted, or broken.
Grief is not a problem to be solved rather a human experience that needs tending to. There’s not a right way, there's not a shortcut, there's no moving faster through this.
Mindfulness practices can help you experience your grief more clearly by bringing the attention to what is happening in your bodymind moment by moment. With this presence you are able to actually feel and experience all the dimensions of grief and your lived experience more fully. Grief life is a stream of constantly changing experiences. Trying on an attitude of mindful acceptance toward whatever it is you are experiencing makes it possible for you to move with the grief and for the grief to move through you.
The brain is magnificent in that it doesn't actually need to go back in time literally to reclaim those childhood experiences. The beauty of your brain is that it's not actually invested in actual reality. It's much more invested in your survival. It is totally possible to go into a missing experience, get the brain to send out those signals as if you are right back there, and then you can drop in and provide that missing experience to yourself.
You can come back and embody that secure attachment that allows that healing to occur even decades later. There are so many ways to recreate the missing experience to heal in that moment from a childhood loss. There are different approaches you can use to get you to connect to your young parts and the feelings they hold for compassionate witnessing, unburdening, and healing through corrective experiences.