If internal strength and emotional fortitude were visible like muscles, I’d look like a bodybuilder. How about you?
When I was 10, I moved from England to Barbados, a lovely little island in the Caribbean. I’d been living with my dad, step-mother, brother and baby half-sister in England and I moved to another country with just my Mum.
Before we left, I remember one of Mum’s friends telling me, “You’ve got to be strong for your Mum now. You’ve got to look after her.”
It turns out that Barbados wasn’t the idyllic tropical life the brochures promised and I had ample opportunity to experience lots of grief. My Mum did, too.
But I’d been told to be the strong one, and so I was.
Grief myth #4: be strong
This repeated throughout my life through many losses.
Our visas weren’t renewed in Barbados and we had to find a new home. I took charge, helping my Mum make decisions, stuffing away my own pain.
In my teens and 20s, I moved so many times I became an expert at packing my home into boxes. I knew how to move and keep on moving. By the time I was 26, I’d lived in 17 houses in 3 different countries. (Moving can be a significant loss.)
When my now-ex-husband attempted suicide, I continued being the strong one, raising 2 young children, while dealing with post-partum depression and earning a living to keep us housed.
Being strong doesn’t help you heal
Here’s the thing about being strong. You might develop mighty muscles from holding up the world, but it’s exhausting. Plus, it doesn’t help you heal.
That hard outer shell you learn to develop doesn’t ever allow you to be vulnerable, to be soft. We’re not made to be hard-shelled people. Emotions are messy and squishy. They need room to breathe. When you create a strong façade, an impenetrable outer shell, everything that’s going on underneath isn’t able to be resolved and find peace. It just keeps churning around in there.
The other way we often attempt to be strong is by learning to stuff our emotions away inside ourselves. These packages of unprocessed emotions then tend to work their way out, or at least try to get our attention, as physical complaints, issues and illnesses. That’s because they want our attention to become resolved.
Unresolved grief is negatively cumulative
When we try to be strong for others, we’re neglecting our own needs, much to our own detriment.
When I tried to be strong for my kids and husband in the wake of his suicide attempt, I didn’t allow myself to address my grief about how my family life and marital relationship had changed. Admittedly, it felt like it took every ounce of my energy to just keep going. But it broke my marriage.
By the time I was able to look at the pain I felt as a result of the loss (almost 2 years later), it had become too late to heal it in a way that would allow my marriage to continue.
This resulted in more loss, for me, my kids and my ex-husband, due to our subsequent divorce.
Unresolved grief accumulates. It makes it harder to deal with life and the losses that naturally occur. And then those losses add up and accumulate, too.
Healing from loss
There is good news: You can start to undo this messy ball of grief and loss you’ve been carrying around with you and adding to throughout your life.
Just like grief accumulates one loss at a time, you can begin to resolve your grief one loss, one relationship at a time.
The way I’ve found that works best to do this (and I’ve tried a lot of different things) is the Grief Recovery Method®. It’s a surprisingly simple, clear set of instructions and exercises to re-learn how you think about and react to loss, discover the unfinished emotions of the path and complete them.
Rev. Joanna Bartlett is a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist® certified by the Grief Recovery Institute® and offers one-on-one and group sessions using the Grief Recovery Method® to help you move through grief and live a full life again.