When someone you have a difficult relationship with dies, it can be just as hard as the loss of someone you love.
Sound strange? It’s true.
Consider this scenario. Your dad has never been the father you needed. He’s emotionally distant,or alcoholic and raging, or sexually abusive. Growing up, your needs weren’t met. You weren’t even sure if your needs — whether they were emotional or physical — were even considered most of the time.
It hurt, throughout your childhood, but you learned to survive and cope in your own way. You eventually made your own rules. Perhaps, as a teenager, that was by breaking his. But you did what you felt you had to do to make it.
As an adult, you’ve come to accept that your father isn’t capable of being a real dad. Not the kind that you need and want.
Perhaps you’ve distanced yourself from him, physically and emotionally. Perhaps you no longer even try to have the kind of closeness you’d really like. You can’t trust him with your heart. He’s shown you that over and over again.
It hurts. You pretty much accept that this is just the way things are. But it hurts.
Emotionally incomplete relationships cause pain
Your relationship with your dad is emotionally incomplete. It’s a wound that hasn’t healed. Maybe you can’t even fathom how to go about healing it. Or maybe you’ve worked on fathering yourself, as best you can.
This entire relationship is one in which you already feel loss. Loss of connection, loss of trust, loss of your hopes, dreams and expectations around a relationship with your father. Even when your dad’s still alive.
Now imagine that your dad died today.
How do you feel?
Death doesn’t help you find completeness
All those unresolved hurts still hurt. Probably more. Because they feel like they’ll never be healed now.
Gone is your chance for a good relationship with your father. Gone is the possibility for reconciliation, for forgiveness, for making it right.
While you may not grieve the “not-so-loved-one” who’s died, you grieve the loss of all the things that could have been, that should have been, that now will never be.
Replace “father” in this scenario with “mother,” “grandmother,” “granddad,” “aunt,” whoever you’ve had a difficult and unresolved relationship with. Or even “ex-husband,” or “estranged sibling.”
When people you have strained and painful relationships with die, it leaves you with a ton of unresolved, conflicting feelings, otherwise known as grief.
You weren’t able to find healing, clarity and resolution in the relationship while they were alive. It was too hard. One or both of you weren’t willing. You didn’t know where to start of have the right tools.
When they’re dead, it doesn’t feel any easier. If anything, it might hurt even more, because now you feel like you’ll never get the chance to figure things out. There are probably so many things you wish could have happened differently, and aspects of the relationship you wish could have been better.
My mum and I had a tumultuous relationship, at times very close, at times very painful. One of the reasons I felt a lot of grief when she died is because I’d lost the chance to ever resolve our differences and be able to have an easy-going, friendly relationship with her as an adult child and parent. The kind of relationship I’d always dreamed about it and felt like I was starting to have when my kids were born.
But then she died. And, with her death, went the possibility of those fun experiences together. We were still too locked into a relationship dynamic, and I was still in too much pain from my past wounds with her, to really enjoy our relationship together.
There’s a way to let go of the pain
This pain doesn’t have to be. Whether your no-so-loved one is still alive or has died, you can resolve what hurts.
By taking the actions in the Grief Recovery Method, you can gain awareness of what’s incomplete and painful in your relationship and take steps to let go of the pain.
It won’t change the past. It may not even change the relationship if the other person is still alive. But it can change your emotional present and future. You can stop hurting and wishing for something that may never be, and let go of the pain of what was and wasn’t that still hurts you.
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