Have you ever stood in the shadow of your own unmet potential, feeling the weight of the person you might have been if ltrauma hadn't left its mark?
This is a reality many face, and in our latest podcast episode, we journey into the process of grieving what trauma stole from us as a way to journey into deeper healing.
Together, we confront the raw emotions of anger and rage that emerge from the unnamed sorrow we carry.
We look at practical writing exercises that can be powerful tools for recovery. We will examine how to craft letters that articulate the deep-seated grief of what we might have become without the trauma we experienced.
We also celebrate who we are today and learn how to see the beautiful qualities about who you are now.
Yes trauma stole so much from so many of us and we need to grieve that. And as we grieve we can also learn to see, fully love, and accept who we are now. And it is from that place that we can start walking into the all the beauty right now in this present moment.
0:00 - Introduction: The Impact of Unresolved Grief 0:59 - The Concept of Grieving Potential Selves 3:55 - Healthy Grieving vs. Staying Stuck in the Past 4:39 - Understanding and Initiating the Grieving Process 5:36 - The Dual Nature of Grief: What Wasn't Given and What Was Taken 6:26 - Exploring the Five Stages of Grief Related to Lost Potential 7:57 - Practical Steps to Grieve Who You Might Have Become 8:51 - Exercise: Writing a Letter to Your Future Self 10:12 - Exercise: Writing a Letter to Your Present Self 12:02 - Moving Towards Acceptance and Letting Go 13:28 - Celebrating the Person You Are Today 14:20 - Final Exercise: Recognizing Your Current Strengths and Qualities
Have you ever stood in the shadow of your own unmet potential, feeling the weight of the person you might have been if ltrauma hadn't left its mark?
This is a reality many face, and in our latest podcast episode, we journey into the process of grieving what trauma stole from us as a way to journey into deeper healing.
Together, we confront the raw emotions of anger and rage that emerge from the unnamed sorrow we carry.
We look at practical writing exercises that can be powerful tools for recovery. We will examine how to craft letters that articulate the deep-seated grief of what we might have become without the trauma we experienced.
We also celebrate who we are today and learn how to see the beautiful qualities about who you are now.
Yes trauma stole so much from so many of us and we need to grieve that. And as we grieve we can also learn to see, fully love, and accept who we are now. And it is from that place that we can start walking into the all the beauty right now in this present moment.
0:00 - Introduction: The Impact of Unresolved Grief 0:59 - The Concept of Grieving Potential Selves 3:55 - Healthy Grieving vs. Staying Stuck in the Past 4:39 - Understanding and Initiating the Grieving Process 5:36 - The Dual Nature of Grief: What Wasn't Given and What Was Taken 6:26 - Exploring the Five Stages of Grief Related to Lost Potential 7:57 - Practical Steps to Grieve Who You Might Have Become 8:51 - Exercise: Writing a Letter to Your Future Self 10:12 - Exercise: Writing a Letter to Your Present Self 12:02 - Moving Towards Acceptance and Letting Go 13:28 - Celebrating the Person You Are Today 14:20 - Final Exercise: Recognizing Your Current Strengths and Qualities
And when we don't deal with grief, it can turn into anger, it can turn into rage, and a lot of what we're carrying as trauma survivors is that anger, that internal rage from what was taken from us and what was stolen from us, and the future that was stolen from us as a result of what we experienced. Hello friends, it's Jerry and welcome to the Permission to Love podcast, a podcast that's dedicated to helping people understand how to heal their relationship with themselves, because when we heal our relationship with ourselves, everything in our life changes. How we feel about ourselves changes, the relationships that we have changes and what we manifest in our life totally changes. You can live a life where you're at peace with yourself, you have healthy relationships in your life and that you're manifesting the things that you so deeply deserve and desire for your life. So I'm glad you're here and I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
Speaker 1:
Today I want to talk about the subject of grieving who you might have become, or grieving the loss of who you feel like you might be without all the things that have happened in your life. When we experience trauma, it impacts everything in our life. We store it in our bodies. It becomes a part of our thinking. It often becomes a part of our identity. We carry around the feeling that there's something wrong with us, and we build all these mechanisms, these coping mechanisms around us that served us at one point, but now they don't serve us any longer Things like self-sabotaging, people-pleasing and all of the other topics that we talk about on this podcast. But one of the things that we don't talk about a lot, or talk about enough, is the grieving process of who you might have become without the trauma that you've experienced, the sense that you carry that your relationships might be normal, that you'd be in a healthy relationship if you hadn't experienced that, that you'd be more confident, that you'd be able to show up at your workplace or in your career with more confidence and you wouldn't be limited by all these beliefs that you have about yourself. And many of us carry that feeling that we're grieving something, but we haven't given words to it, we haven't been able to put our finger on it, but we carry a sense of sadness. We carry this sense of what we might have become, and so today, I want to put words around that, I want to talk about it. I want to put words around that, I want to talk about it. I want to honor it and then I want to give some things that might help you in your journey in that space.
Speaker 1:
I want to take a quick moment and talk about my book Returning. It's a collection of meditations and reflections on self-love and healing. I designed this book to help you on your journey of moving from shame to self-love. It's divided in three sections. The first section is about seeing seeing that you're not alone. The second section is about understanding that healing is possible. And the third section is designed to remind you and to show you that loving yourself is the path back to yourself. I've heard from a lot of people that they're using it as a daily reflection guide, where each day they're selecting a passage, reading it, meditating on it, journaling on it, and it's really helping them in their healing journey and helping them understand that they are worthy of love, that they can heal, that they're not alone, and I know it can do the same for you. So if you haven't picked up a copy yet, please take a moment to do that, and if you have picked up a copy already, it would mean a lot to me if you'd take a moment and review the book, because the more positive reviews the book gets, the more likely people are going to become aware of it and benefit from the work. So thank you, thank you for picking it up, thank you for reviewing it and thank you for passing it along. Maybe when you're done with it, you can pass it along to somebody else or pick up a copy for somebody else that you know could benefit from the work. You can get it on Amazon or you can simply see the show notes in this episode to get your copy.
Speaker 1:
Now the first thing I want to say is that it's really healthy that you grieve that part. You're not being weak, You're not living in the past, you're not feeling sorry for yourself. You're not doing anything wrong by grieving the person that you might have been. Now the challenge is we don't want to get stuck there. We often do get stuck there, and the way that we get unstuck from that is allowing ourselves to go through that grieving process. But before we can go through that grieving process, we have to be aware that that's what we're carrying, that's what we're sensing, and then we need to allow ourselves, and give ourselves the permission to do that, to grieve it. So how do we allow ourselves to grieve who we might have become.
Speaker 1:
How do we allow ourselves to grieve something that we haven't had versus grieving something that we have had, the loss of something that we have had? Because we see it as a very normal process of life to grieve the loss of something that we once had a loved one or a part of our life, or a relationship, etc. That feels okay, to allow ourselves to have the permission to grieve that. But grieving something that we didn't get or that we don't have feels a little hard to get our hands around. How do we do that? Well, I want to let you know that it's really the same process, because the reality is you did wrong, lose something. It was the loss of a couple of things. One it was the loss of things that you did not get, that you should have got, that you had the right to have A loving parent, a safe home, a safe relationship, a safe environment. Those are things that you should have had as a part of your life, as a part of your environment. So it's okay to grieve that you didn't get those things.
Speaker 1:
The second thing that we're grieving is what was taken from us the sense of being normal, healthy, whole, the sense of innocence that was robbed, the sense of joy and peace and the ability to learn how to manage our lives All of the things that were taken from us because of trauma, the ability to look at people as safe that was taken from you. The ability to feel at peace in an environment, the ability to have your nervous system feel safe taken from you. So I want you to honor the fact that those things one were not given to you and two, there were things that were actually taken from you mentally, emotionally, physically and in your environment and the way that you learned to live and do life. So let's talk about grief.
Speaker 1:
Grief is that human emotion, or that sense that we carry when we've lost something or, in this case, when we've lost something that could have been, and we need to honor that that there is a loss of what could have been, and so we carry it. We carry it in our systems, our emotions, our bodies. It's a holistic part, but you have to give yourself permission to know that you are grieving, that, that that's a lot of the feeling that you're carrying inside of you, and when we don't deal with grief, it can turn into anger, it can turn into rage and a lot of what we're carrying as trauma survivors is that anger, that internal rage from what was taken from us and what was stolen from us and the future that was stolen from us as a result of what we experienced. And often what happens is we get wrapped up into dealing with our anger and thinking that how do I deal with my anger? How do I get past that? Or maybe you've shut that anger down and you've shut down all of your emotions because you're not allowing yourself to grieve and you've become numb. Well, what often happens is we start trying to deal with those symptoms. Why am I so angry, or why am I so numb? Why am I so depressed, or whatever the stages are? So let's just talk real quick about the five stages of grief, the first one being denial, the second one anger, the third one bargaining, the fourth one, depression, and then the fifth one, acceptance. And those five stages of grief can also happen as a part of grieving who we might have become.
Speaker 1:
So how do we begin to deal with this grief of who we might be or who we might become as a result of what's happened to us? Well, the first thing is that we need to give voice to it. We need to honor it. We need to allow ourselves to have those feelings and to not shame ourselves for them, to not see ourselves as weak, to not see ourselves as broken that we can't deal with it. It is very real, it is very common. You're not alone in it. The second thing is we need to provide space for it. We can't continue to push it away. We can't continue to mask it with anger and numbness and trying to numb ourselves out of it, because grief is one of those things that we're going to keep trying to numb ourselves away, because grief can be very painful to enter into. There is a process that the body and the emotions and the heart needs to go through in order to deeply experience that and then to let it go, to release it from our systems.
Speaker 1:
And here's a couple of practical exercises that you can do to make space for that grief. The first one is to write a letter to your future self, who you imagine that you might have become without the trauma that you experienced. And the reason this is important is because it's allowing you to hold space for the version of you that you feel like you might have become, the version of you that you feel like has gotten lost and you're honoring that part. You're giving words to it, structure to it, personality to it or whatever to allow you to actually see it on paper. You're actually writing about a lost part of you that right now just lives in your head and it's hard to put your hands around that. It's hard to grieve something that just kind of lives in your head and it's just a feeling. So writing it out and writing a letter to that person allows you to put some skin on it right, allows you to put some reality around it, to what it is that you're actually grieving. And it can be as simple as writing out. I wonder what I would have been like if and write that out. Or it could be a letter about who you hope they are. I hope that you're in healthy relationships. I hope that you feel this way about yourself. I hope that this is the person who you've become, because what that's doing once again is it's allowing you to put some framework around what you have inside of your head that you're grieving.
Speaker 1:
And the second exercise is to write a letter to your present self. What you feel like your trauma robbed you from the challenges that you believe that you have now that you wouldn't have had if you hadn't experienced that trauma. Really, write it out, get to it Really, begin to feel what it is that you're grieving, what you feel like you've lost as a part of who you are today because of the trauma that you experienced, and try to be unedited in this as you're writing it. Don't start making excuses in your head as to why you shouldn't feel that way or why that's no big deal. Really, let it out.
Speaker 1:
Really, honor it to the future version of who you think you could have become, but you feel like you're not going to become that because of the trauma that you experienced and the present version of yourself who you feel like you're not going to become that because of the trauma that you experienced and the present version of yourself who you feel like you're not because of that trauma. And the reason I like to do it in that order is because when we start to write about our future self, there's still some distance in that and that allows us to move towards present self. Because sometimes, if we start writing about present self, the emotions are too much and we move away from it because it's too painful. But if we can start by thinking about who we could have become. That still has a little bit of distance in it, it's a little bit easier to write about, and then we can move to present self and really begin to feel the loss of who we are and who we might have become as a result of the drama. So after you're done with that process you've really written it out, you've really connected with it I want you to at some point, whenever you're comfortable, to do some type of ceremony or some type of honoring of letting that version of yourself go, letting go of the version that you have in your mind of who you're supposed to be or who you think that you're not going to be because of what you've experienced.
Speaker 1:
Now you don't have to do that, but if you want to do it, I'm inviting you into that process, that process of letting that go and then moving into a place of accepting accepting who you are today, accepting your life for where you're at right now and the beautiful version of who you are today. Because as long as we're holding onto who we should be, who we could be if that hadn't happened to us, it blocks us from seeing who we are right now. We're holding onto a story in our head that the current version of us is less than what it should be, and that's just not true. And even though we've experienced trauma and even though we've dealt with some very painful things, and you might feel limited and you might feel challenged and you might feel like there's a lot about you that's broken and shouldn't be that way what I'm hoping is that this exercise of writing this out and then letting go of that version of you will unburden you from that and allow you to begin to put your focus on who you currently are and begin to see the beautiful pieces of who you are right now, because the reality is that, no matter what has happened to you, no matter what you went through, you still are beautiful. You're a beautiful person, beautiful soul, a beautiful being.
Speaker 1:
But we have a lot of trouble seeing that when our entire focus is on who we could have been or who we should have been if we hadn't experienced that. And it's hard for us to move from that place or to let go of that unless we grieve it from that place, or to let go of that unless we grieve it, unless we honor it, unless we really feel it and learn to say goodbye to it. Learn to say goodbye to the version of yourself that you think you should be, and what that's going to do is it's going to allow you to see all of the beautiful things that you are right now. So here's a final exercise, or a final letter. So we've written a letter to our future version about who we think that we might have become, or who we believe that we could have become. We've also written a letter to the current version of ourselves, honoring the things that were stolen from us, that were robbed from us.
Speaker 1:
Now I want you to write a letter to yourself about all the beautiful things that you are, the beautiful person that you are right now, unburdened from who you're supposed to be, who you're not, because of what you've experienced. I want you to write a letter about who you are because of what you experienced in a beautiful way, to find beautiful things about your personality, the person that you are, the way that you treat other people, and I'd like you to not stop until you've come up with at least five things about yourself that you believe are beautiful about you as a person, because what we want to do is we want to start shifting our attention away from who we think we should be, accepting who we are and finding beauty in who we are today and allowing ourselves to go through the pathway of grief and acceptance. Letting go and then seeing who we are today can allow us to start to move on and to get unstuck. And, as you do all these exercises, as always, be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself, okay, well, that's it for today and thank you for joining me for another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I'm always so grateful that you're here.
Speaker 1:
Now.
Speaker 1:
I want to remind you if you've not yet had a chance to subscribe or to follow this podcast, take a moment to do that, because that's going to keep you updated on when new episodes come out. Take a moment to do that, because that's going to keep you updated on when new episodes come out. Now, if this podcast is having an impact on you and your healing journey, I want to ask you to share it with other people. I want to ask you to share it on social media on Instagram, facebook or wherever you're at and let people know about this podcast, because if it's helping you, I know it'll help other people, and that's the primary way that this podcast grows is by you sharing it with other people.
Speaker 1:
So thank you for doing that. Thank you for sharing it. And just another quick reminder if you do need additional resources for your healing journey, you can go to jerryhendersonorg. You'll find a lot of resources there, such as a free self-assessment guide and a 30-day guide to a healthier relationship with yourself. You'll also be able to sign up for my free newsletter, where I share healing tips and other resources as they come available, and you'll also find information on my coaching services that I provide. So you can find all those resources and more at jerryhendersonorg. And finally, I want to remind you as always, you are worthy of your own love.