We Are Always Connected To The People We Are Born To

Therapy Session

Me: I just want to be free of them [my parents]. I don't want to be attached to them anymore.

Therapist: We are always connected to the people we were born too, especially when there is trauma.

It felt like a punch in the gut when she first said it. I had spent the last 30 days listening to healing, healthy attachment, and cord cutting meditations hoping to relieve myself of a connection to my parents. I just didn't want to be attached to them because, for all the happy moments we shared, the pain and the trauma overshadows all of those moments. I had finally come to the point of accepting that I would never receive what I needed from them as a child and what I wanted from them as an adult. In my dreams the depth of trauma and abuse had resurfaced to solidify that no contact was the best option for me. I had finally be able to meet the reality of my lived experience. I thought that once I accepted all of it that I could break free of them.

Turns out that I can't escape the connection to the people we were born too. So, what now?

Well, I started to feel a lightness after I let it settle. I guess if I can't escape this connection then I can stop fighting it.

Where does that lead me to now?

I return to grief and reflect in my journal. I know that putting my safety first is what is best for me. I know that's it's okay to long for and grieve the relationship with my parents or people I've let go of along the way. Grief means that I loved them (I loved them at some point, I think I stopped loving them long ago) and that I cared and still care. Grief represents attachment, unfulfilled expectations, sadness, anger, confusion, discontent, gratitude, and acceptance.

To be full of grief, I am now coming to understand, is to be full up of a broad range of emotions that circle back to love.

You do not grieve what you do not love.

You do not grieve what you did not want.

You do not grieve what you did not long for.

You grieve because your heart has become undone and you feel the weight of change.

We grieve what we cannot change and we grieve what does change.

Our lives - I think - are a perpetual cycle of grief.

Grieving means that we are alive and we are participating in our lived experiences.

So, I grieve. I grieve that I have a connection that requires distance to maintain my safety. I grieve for a connection that I cannot break, a connection that does not bring more life, a connection that is painful. I grieve for wanting to change the timbre of that connection and seeing that love is not present here. It is a spiritual obligation of sorts. So, I grieve for the lack of mutuality. I grieve for the lack of love. I grieve for a connection that remains although there is no life there.

So, I grieve.