Inner Work Notes

Tag: grief

  • Crying at the Television

    Some people cry at small things. They cry at somebody else’s sadness. They cry watching TV, and once they start, the tears keep coming. This happens a lot to people who cannot accept their own feelings — people who hold back what they feel about their own lives.

    Crying like that means a great deal of sadness has built up inside. That sadness comes from a loss in their own life that was never mourned. To mourn a loss is to weep over it until you can accept it and let it go. Because that never happened, the loss is still unresolved, and the sadness from it is still there.

    Why the tears come out in front of a TV drama

    When you cry like that in front of the TV, the tears are not really about the drama. You are crying about your own life.

    When thinking about your own life is too painful or too shameful, you hold the feeling back. In front of a drama, though, you can cry. The sadness moves onto the story on the screen, and you end up watching your own life in it. You cry for the character, but the force of the tears comes from your own loss, which the scene has stirred up. If that loss had been mourned, the sadness would not have to come out through a drama.

    Therapy helps a person accept what they could not bear

    Mourning, then, is about accepting: letting a painful fact in. That is also what therapy does. The tears come from a loss that was never accepted, so therapy helps the person let in the painful fact they have been keeping out.

    People often think therapy works by breaking down a person’s defenses. A defense is the way a person wraps themselves up tight so they do not have to feel something. But the wrapping is there for a reason: at the time, some fact or feeling was more than they could bear. Therapy does not try to strip the wrapping away. Instead, it helps the person accept the very thing the wrapping was keeping out.

    It sounds like a paradox, but that is what heals: accepting the very thing the person could least bear to accept.

    The same scene, every time

    Some scenes are sad for everybody. A child longs to see a parent and cannot. Anyone watching would be moved by that. That kind of crying is ordinary; everybody shares it.

    The crying I am talking about is different. The tears keep coming in one particular kind of situation. Whenever that situation turns up, or anything like it, the tears come again.

    When the tears keep returning to the same kind of scene like that, they are coming from a wound in the person’s own past.

    Knowing a painful fact is not the same as accepting it

    To mourn a loss is to accept that it happened — and you get to that acceptance by weeping over it.

    Say someone did not get their mother’s love. Something that should have come to them never came, and that is a loss. So what they have to accept is this: “I did not get my mother’s love.”

    But that fact will not sink in. In their head, they may know their mother never gave them that love. In their heart, it still does not feel final, because they keep hoping that one day she will change and notice their pain. So each time she lets them down, it does not feel like “that is just how she is.” It feels like being rejected all over again. That is why they keep ending up frustrated and hurt.

    Here is how that looks. A woman said to her mother, “My arm hurts.” Her mother said, “Go to the doctor.” The daughter was upset by that, and the two of them ended up arguing.

    Why did “go to the doctor” upset her so much? Because she was not only reporting a pain. She was asking her mother to care. This mother had never paid her much attention, and the daughter was still hoping for the attention she had missed as a child. So a sensible, practical answer felt like one more refusal. The argument was not really about the arm. Underneath it was an old request that had never been met: “Notice me. Care that I am hurting.”

    The daughter knows her mother is not going to change. She will say so herself, and say she has stopped trying. But in the way she actually lives, she is still clinging to that hope, still asking to be loved. When the love she hopes for doesn’t come, she is hurt, and the asking gets louder. That is how “My arm hurts” turned into an argument.

    Never having had something is a loss too

    People usually distinguish between two things. Deprivation is when something you needed was never there and was never given to you. Loss is when you had something and then it was gone. I count both as loss. An example will make this easier to see.

    Picture a child who has had no mother from the day he was born. There was never a mother in his life. He is raised somehow, and he grows up. Is that child hurt by having had no mother, or not?

    He is. He carries it with him all his life. The absence of a mother is itself the wound. A growing child needs a mother, and for this child she never came.

    The same goes for babies adopted right after birth, too young to know anything about it. Even for them, the fact that they were adopted will not sink in. Adoptive parents are advised to tell the child early anyway, because children do find out, and finding out later makes it worse.

    An adopted child at least has adoptive parents. A child left without parents at birth and raised by substitute caregivers instead never knows what it is to have a mother in those early years. He never had a mother to lose. Even so, I count that absence as a loss.

    And this kind of loss does not happen only to children with no mother at all. It also happens to a child whose mother was in the kitchen every day and never once looked at him. A child whose mother died can point at the empty chair. This child has nothing to point at — and the hole is the same size.

    So this is a loss too: “I wanted to be loved, and the love never came.”

    This loss has to be wept over

    You have to weep over it — really weep.

    The weeping is about particular moments: “Where were my parents when I needed them? When I was in pain, where were they?” You weep over those moments until you can accept them as they were. Then, little by little, you stop clinging — you stop going back to the same parent again and again for the care they were never able to give.

    If you keep clinging instead, this is what happens. First comes anger at the world, and behind it the thought: “My parents never looked after me.” Then, as that anger keeps coming back, people go different ways. Some sink into frustration. Others hold on even tighter, like the woman with the sore arm, and go on asking to be loved.

    A therapist’s job is to help a person accept that the love they needed never came. But accepting it takes strength. Think what it costs to say out loud that your mother never loved you, and not take it back an hour later — to sit still with it, not phone her, not decide it wasn’t that bad after all. You need to be standing firm inside before you can take in something that heavy. So therapy builds that inner strength first. The weeping comes after.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Mourning the Parent You Never Had

    You’re driving home from work when you catch yourself mid-argument, out loud, with your father. What you’re saying is what you should have said to him in the hospital, and you’ve said it to an empty passenger seat a few hundred times by now. He died four years ago, the house sold last spring, and everybody agrees you handled the whole business remarkably well.

    Or maybe your situation is different. Both parents are alive and healthy and texting you about the weather, and something in your chest still goes cold whenever anybody mentions them.

    From the outside it all looks settled. But your life keeps drifting somewhere you never actually chose, and you get close to something good and then trip yourself up on the way to it. You skip meals, you stay awake until three in the morning for no particular reason, you let the small repairs pile up until they turn expensive.

    You thought you’d let go of the past. Have you?

    What do you picture when somebody says grief?

    Most people picture a funeral, somebody who died, and the years since. They think of someone saying, “It’s been six years and I still can’t let my father go.”

    But grieving someone, or mourning them, is more than being sad. It is your mind finally accepting that the person is really gone — not just as a fact you can mention at dinner, but so deeply that you no longer half-expect it to be them when the phone rings.

    Crying hard doesn’t finish it, and neither does time. Mourning asks for more than either. In your ordinary day, the person you lost is still the one whose number you never had to look up, the one you keep arguing with in the car on the way home, the one you were always going to prove something to. Mourning means noticing each of these, one by one, and learning to get through your day without that person in it. When that work stalls halfway, the loss never moves into the past. It stays in the present tense: years later, it is still happening to you.

    Why do you start turning into the person you lost?

    When mourning stalls, you may keep the lost person present by copying them rather than accepting that the relationship has ended.

    You start using their phrases. You hold your cup exactly the way they held theirs. You feel what they felt and want what they wanted. You never decide to do any of this; it simply happens. Some part of you is keeping them alive by becoming them. There’s a name for this: identification.

    That sounds tender, and usually it is. The trouble starts when mourning stops there and goes no further.

    Because now the two of you overlap, and whatever was happening to them keeps happening inside you. If they were going downhill, you go downhill with them. And because they died, some part of you wants to die as well. That’s why depression settles in and stays for people who never finished mourning, and why some of them, in the worst cases, attempt suicide.

    From the outside, skipping meals, refusing help, or damaging a stable life can look unrelated to the loss. From the inside, getting better may feel like disloyalty: if the person you lost suffered, recovering can feel as though you are abandoning them. Continuing to suffer becomes a way of staying connected.

    Not every depression, and not every wish to die, comes from unfinished mourning. If you feel deeply depressed, have thoughts of dying, or can no longer manage everyday life, get professional help now. Your safety comes before any explanation of why you feel this way, including the ones in this piece.

    But what if your parents are still alive?

    Here’s the harder case. The grief that costs people the most is usually not for somebody who died, but for parents who are alive, well, and picking up the phone on the second ring.

    You’ll want to argue with that. How do you mourn somebody who is sitting right there in front of you?

    You can, because the one you have to let go of is not the person sitting there. It’s the parent from your childhood — the one who stood in the kitchen when you were nine and said something you’ve never repeated to anybody. And harder still, it’s the parent you made up back then, the one you wished you had. The mother who would have noticed what was happening to you. The father who would have come when you needed him.

    Neither the parent from your childhood nor the one you wished for is the tired, older parent across the table asking whether you’ve eaten. You already know this, and you ignore it anyway. You look at the tired parent in front of you and keep expecting the one you wished for, and afterward you wonder why every visit ends in the same disappointment.

    Everybody carries a picture in their head of the parent they needed. It isn’t a memory of what happened. You drew it as a child, out of longing: a mother who would notice, a father who would protect you, a parent who would apologize and mean it.

    Even when the real parent lets you down again and again, the hope you had as a child can hang on. So you visit again, hoping that this time they’ll understand. You explain yourself one more time, and you leave hurt by the same response. The disappointment keeps repeating because part of you is still waiting for the real parent to become the parent in the picture.

    So what you may not be able to let go of isn’t only your actual parent. It’s the expectation that this person will someday give you what was missing.

    What’s left when you let go of the parent you wished for?

    Only when you let go of the parent you wished for do you get to meet the parent you actually have.

    Not the one in the picture. The one in the chair, smaller than you remember and slower, limited now in ways that aren’t going to change, repeating the same three stories every single time you visit. Somebody who didn’t give you what you needed and is never going to, because they never had it to give.

    Never getting what you needed from them is a loss. A real one, with a weight of its own. Mourn it the way you would mourn any other loss.

    Is that the same as forgiving them?

    No, and the difference matters more than almost anything else here. Nobody’s asking you to understand what they did, or forgive it, or reconcile, or send a warm message on their birthday. You can let go of the picture and still keep every inch of the distance you carefully built. You can even mourn somebody you’ve already decided never to see again.

    Before mourning can begin, it asks one thing of you, and only one. Admit that the parent you wanted isn’t coming. Not next year. Not once you finally do well enough to earn it. Not at the very end, at their bedside, when they finally say the words you’ve been waiting for.

    Admit that, and mourning can finally begin. Refuse, and it can’t even start. You stay stuck in the life this piece began with, the one that quietly works against you: skipped meals, nights awake until three, tripping yourself up just before something good.

    Why does giving up hope hurt so much?

    Because hope has been protecting you from the full loss. As long as you believe your parent may someday understand, apologize, or put you first, you don’t have to face the fact that what you needed as a child may never come from them.

    When you give up that hope, you also give up the future you have been imagining, the one where they finally make up for what happened back then. That is why it hurts the way grief hurts, rather than feeling like a calm, tidy decision. But what you are letting go of is not your love for them. It is the hope that the past can still be put right.

    Two lines on one sheet of paper

    Take one sheet of paper and write two lines, one underneath the other.

    The first line: the parent I wanted would have ______. The second line: my actual parent ______.

    Fill in both lines and cross out neither. Don’t judge either line, and don’t soften the second one by adding that they were doing their best with whatever they were given. Understanding them is a different job for a different day, if it is your job at all.

    Seeing the gap between those two lines with your own eyes is how you start to admit that the parent you wanted isn’t coming. That is where mourning begins. Today, all you have to do is look at that gap. A picture you’ve been holding since you were a child doesn’t drop out of your hand the first time you loosen your grip, and it was never going to.

    I write these pieces as notes to think with, not as treatment. A page can’t see your face or ask you the next question. So, fair warning about the second line: it’s the one that tends to hit hardest. People sit down braced for sadness and get something else instead — a flare of rage at somebody they have spent years defending, or a numb flatness that frightens them more than the rage would have. If that feeling is still with you at bedtime, don’t carry it alone and call that strength. Take the two lines to a therapist and read them out loud, both of them, in the order you wrote them. Half of what makes those lines bearable is that somebody else has finally heard them.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board