Gone, by Choice

The complex grief of estrangement is all around us. Whether it’s adult children, parents, siblings, friends, maybe even entire communities we were once were part of, many of us know what it’s like to have a loss of connection with people we might have once called “close” in terms of emotional intimacy and time spent together. We might have found major pieces of our own self-identity in these relationships. Perhaps these are people we counted on to be there for us to celebrate our happiest times or to support us through our hardest ones. But something changed in the relationship, and now it is unrecognizable.

Sometimes this kind of distance happens suddenly after a conflict, but often it is a slow slide over years of misunderstanding, unspoken pain, or unmet needs. The absence of these relationships from our lives is a loss, complex and painful. This is true even if we were the ones to make the choice to pull back or cut off contact.

We might be grieving a parent or a child who no longer speaks to us, the friend who walked away, or the community that no longer feels safe. These kinds of losses are hard for us to talk about with others because often our pain is met with a push for a resolution which includes not only forgiveness, but reconciliation. But healing doesn’t always require reconciliation, sometimes it means learning how to live fully while holding unanswered questions.

Healing can also mean offering compassion to yourself for the ways you tried to make things work and the sorrow you might feel for what might never be again. Healing does indeed ask us to acknowledge to ourselves what was true for us in the past and what is true for us now in the present. These changes, both within ourselves and in our relationships, are at the heart of our grief. At the upcoming grief retreat we make time and space for what has been waiting to be felt. We honor those feelings through quiet reflection, prayer, conversation, movement, music and art and we find the grace to live with our loss.

Sara Watne, MA, LPCC is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor. At Mount Olivet Counseling Service she provides individual therapy to children, adolescents and adults as well as facilitates the grief support group, “The First Years without Them.”

Over the next month, leaders of the April 11 Growing Through Grief day retreat will be reflecting on the many different ways grief shows up. Register for the retreat HERE, and subscribe to future blog posts below.