One of the things we learn about in our Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings and readings is the concept of Unexpressed Grief. In an alcoholic or dysfunctional home, the chaos often causes family members to “numb out” in order to survive. I was one of those folks for a long time and I still periodically forget to grieve.
Allow me to make a jump here…
I believe that Americans have yet to fully comprehend and grieve the lives lost during the pandemic. Furthermore, I don’t think we have ever processed as a nation the many other feelings/trauma that came with that experience.
I include myself in the group of people who has tried to move on without stopping to fully feel what happened to me and to those around me.
A little history…
When I was a young man, I did not express my feelings very well. They stayed pent up for months or years and led to other behaviors and conditions. First, I tended to isolate. Second, my body started to hurt. And third, I took it out on others.
This can happen to families and, I believe, countries, when they don’t do their grief work. And it gets more complicated when it piles up as it has in the USA.
As Americans, we have never fully explored the historical grief we have inside us from our extermination of millions of indigenous people who populated this country before us. We also have not properly grieved for the millions of Africans we enslaved on these shores.
Denial is the protection we put around our feelings.
I mention this history because there’s a pattern of here worth seeing. First, we are isolating from one another these days. We no longer communicate well either people who do not share our beliefs. Second, our denial has led to extremely painful schisms over social issues and a lack of trust in our institutions, just to name two. Last, we are feeling the lingering pain of this in ourselves. This is because we are trying to return to normalcy without processing the pain. We are a nation in need of therapy.
What I see most in our country is anger, the brother vs. brother that defined the civil war. Underneath that, I sense sadness and fear.
John Gray, the author, once wrote about the layers of feelings we need to work through to return to love in our relationships. According to Gray, there is no shortcut that’s effective. Each layer must be processed in order to get back to the business of loving one another and being emotionally healthy. It’s the hardest work I know of!
It also helps me when someone is angry to recognize that there are layers of unexpressed feelings below the one I’m seeing. Sometimes, when anger is projected at me, my first reaction is freeze up or want to flee, but I usually come back around once I have a shield in place. That’s when the real spade work begins.
This isn’t a book, so I’ll stop there. I pray that each one of us has the courage to take time and invest more time into feeling. It’s worth it and we’re worth it.
