The Need To Grieve

I spent the weekend thinking about my recent catharsis, the healing from shame.

I felt a physical release deep in my gut, as I mentioned in the previous post. I thought maybe that was all I needed, just to release that and let it go. But in church yesterday, I felt the need to actively grieve.

It seems odd, needing to grieve when I’ve let go of something so painful, something that’s been weighing me down in every single possible way for decades. Grieve for it? Why? Shouldn’t I be happy, joyful?

I am happy. I am joyful.

But I still need to grieve.

It’s difficult to verbalize, but it seems to me that I need a chance to mourn the person that I was – to cry for her, for the pain she was in, for the darkness she was in, for all the ways she was repressed, strapped down, hiding, buried. So many years went by without her seeing life and interacting with life the way she was meant to.

Talents unused, desires unexpressed, skills unpracticed and undeveloped.

Living as half a person, half a soul, in some ways.

That’s a loss, every bit as much as being molested in the first place. A loss of innocence, a loss of self, a loss of power, a loss of light.

The other part of the grieving is cleansing. Crying, weeping, mourning – the physical act of crying is cleansing. I can’t remember where I heard it, but I seem to remember a quote that said something to the effect that each tear carries away with it a finite amount of emotion. I always liked that because of the sense of release and clearing that it carries.

And I think, in my own experience, that it’s true. Something can still be painful after a good cry, but it’s more manageable somehow, after that physical act of grieving. Somehow the situation feels better after tears have been shed over it.

I had an emotional, visceral response in church yesterday when part of the hymn we were singing talked about Jesus dying for my sin and shame. That word, that explicit word really evoked a shit-ton of emotion within me despite how much lighter, how much more relaxed I’ve felt since having my catharsis last Thursday.

And so I know I need to cry.

And I will, when I can arrange some time to be truly alone. I find that I’m looking forward to it, in a way – looking forward to the release, to the cleansing.

It seems like the more healing I do, the more darkness I dig into and set free, the more I look FORWARD to the next round of healing and the less afraid I am of the pain. I am, in fact, able to celebrate the pain, because it means freedom is around the corner.