Unresolved Grief Quotes

I know why she cried like that. She cried because she wasn't finished grieving the loss of me. When someone has an exaggerated emotional reaction to something in the present, it's usually because they haven't resolved something in their past.

of unresolved grief, large and small, of others assuming that he, beautiful Black person in gorgeous Black body, was born violent and dangerous; this assumption, impossible to hide, manifesting in every word and glance and action, and every word and glance and action ingested and internalized, and it’s unfair and unjust, this sort of death

Unresolved grief inside a person is tragic; unresolved grief inside a nation is catastrophic.

Everyone grieves differently. No one handles the loss of a loved one the same. Some put on a brave face for others, keeping everything internal. Others let it all out at once and shatter, only to pick up the pieces just as quickly as they came apart. Still others don't grieve at all, implying they are incapable of emotion. Then there are the ones like me, where grief is a badge we wear, where it's hard to let go because we don't want to. We probably wouldn't know how even is we wanted to. There's unanswered questions, unresolved feelings. Tere is anger that this person could even conceive of leaving us behind. We are the furious ones, the ones that scream at the injustice and the pain. We are the ones who obsess and slowly lose rational thought, knowing it is happening but unable to find a way to care. We are the ones who drown.

I had once thought that I came from a line of Gods, and I had punished myself for failing to be Godlike. But we were not Gods, and I was not the avatar for our family’s unraveling. I was just another product of inherited trauma, unresolved grief, and reactive survival mechanisms, like everyone else who came before me. We were mortals who felt ashamed when we failed to appear omnipotent. Now I see that my job was to release my ancestors from this burden, to allow those who come next the freedom to be ordinary.

Spiritual bypassing—the use of spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs—is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed. The spiritual ideals of any tradition, whether Christian commandments or Buddhist precepts, can provide easy justification for practitioners to duck uncomfortable feelings in favor of more seemingly enlightened activity. When split off from fundamental psychological needs, such actions often do much more harm than good. ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters

Could there be grief so unresolved and potent that it continued on, flowed into the next life as powerfully as a birth defect or a birthmark, where still it could not be shaken?

When we have unresolved grief, we often live with overwhelming rage.

Your pain may never be adequately acknowledged by those who injured you. Profound feelings of grief might strike you as you work through unresolved feelings of resentment or disappointment.

We live quite happily with a thousand unresolved mysteries that occupy our minds for ten minutes in the morning and are then forgotten without leaving so much as a tremor of grief, not a trace.

Time does not heal all wounds. If it did, there would be no unresolved grief and no hurt from long ago that still upsets you from time to time. Pain that is not faced does not go away, it stays inside and festers. If each time you have a loss you deny it, you will end up with a pile of unresolved grief, making each loss harder and harder to cope with. When people are afraid of being hurt, often because they have not dealt with their unresolved grief, their life becomes narrower, their fear becomes greater, and choices become more difficult to make. With unresolved grief running the show, it is difficult to get close to people and hard to trust anyone.

ambiguous grief.” It can be a life sentence. It’s a kind of unresolved grief. You might feel it if you have a child or another family member who is mentally impaired. You might mourn the person you think they could have been if things had turned out differently. That person is physically present but psychologically absent. Conversely,

Pain and grief have been kept buried for ages, bred in secrecy and shame, wrapped by an ongoing conspiracy of smiles and well-being. Pain and grief are most healing and ecstatic emotions. Yes, sure, they can be hard, yet what makes them most devastating is the perverted idea that they are wrong, that they need to be hidden and fixed. The greatest perversion I can conceive is the idea that illness and pain are a sign that there is something wrong in our life, that we have unresolved issues, that we have made mistakes. In this world everyone is bound to get ill, experience pain and die. The greatest gift I can give to myself and the world is the joyful acceptance of this. Today I want to be real, I will not hide my pain as well as my happiness. I will not care if my gloomy face or desperate words cause concern or embarrassment in others. I do not need be fed with reassuring words about the beauty of life. The beauty of life resides in the full acceptance of All That Is.

I would love to help you experience freedom from the past, freedom from failures and fears, freedom from anger and mistakes, freedom from regret and unresolved grief—and the freedom to enjoy the full, rich feast of life. We cannot choose to have a life free of hurt. But we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter what befalls us, and to embrace the possible. I invite you to make the choice to be free.

There’s a term we use for it: “ambiguous grief.” It can be a life sentence. It’s a kind of unresolved grief. You might feel it if you have a child or another family member who is mentally impaired. You might mourn the person you think they could have been if things had turned out differently. That person is physically present but psychologically absent. Conversely, and this is what happens in cases of abduction, or more commonly in divorce, the child or the person is psychologically present but physically absent.

La familia que existe en la cabeza de las personas es más importante que la que se registra en su libreta de tomador del censo...La experiencia de la inmigración proporciona una visión especial sobre cómo las personas aprenden a prescindir de aquello a que estaban acostumbradas para poder adoptar lo nuevo.

I just finished reading it [Tanner's Grief] and found it showed many sides of grief...often never talked about. Shared it with two friends yesterday...one has a friend that has been grieving many losses but too busy to stop and feel it. Personally I have believed unresolved grief is what's behind all of the anger, mass killings, hate etc.. So many are crying out but not allowing themselves to really cry through the inner pain and anguish as we are created to do as humans. I have seen this working with kids in schools...with hospice patients as chaplain, in spiritual direction one-on-one and pastoring a church. This is the first novel\book I have ever read Abby that deals with grief in a way that can help those reading it have hope they can do this...and not believe they have to do it alone or with those in their family or friends. Getting the help they need isn't being unfaithful to anyone. --A Retired Minister

It’s hard not to let negative emotions take over and leave their mark, but it seems that our lives depend on it; the reality is that stress kills. When it goes unresolved, stress can lead to chronic disease, causing premature death. The elevation of the stress hormone cortisol lowers immune system functioning, increases blood pressure, and cholesterol, and increases the risk of heart disease, cancer, and various other diseases. However, grief doesn’t last forever, despite how devastating and all-encompassing it can be. With the right help, support, and outlook, recovery will bring the body and mind to a new place of healing. We will never be the same again, but we will be stronger versions of ourselves. It’s important to remember to approach recovery with some level of gratitude for the beauty of life—it’s important to always express, accept, and learn from ourselves.

One form of insecurity of attachment, called "disorganized/disoriented", has been associated with marked impairments in the emotional, social, and cognitive domains, and a predisposition toward a clinical condition known as dissociation in which the capacity to function in an organized, coherent manner is at times impaired. Studies have also found that youths with a history of disorganized attachments are at great risk of expressing hostility with their peers and have the potential for interpersonal violence as they mature (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobwitz, 1999; Carlson, 1998). This disorganized form of attachment has been proposed to be associated with the caregiver's frightened, frightening, or disoriented behavior with the child. Such experiences create a state of alarm in the child. The parents of these children often have an autobiographical narrative finding, as revealed in the Adult Attachment Interview, of unresolved trauma or grief that appears as a disorientation in their narrative account of their childhoods. Such linguistic disorientation occurs during the discussion of loss or threat from childhood experiences. Lack of resolution appears to be associated with parental behaviors that are incompatible with an organized adaptation on the part of the child. Lack of resolution of trauma or grief in a parent can lead to parental behaviors that create "paradoxical", unsolvable, and problematic situations for the child. The attachment figure is intended to be the source of protection, soothing, connections, and joy. Instead, the experience of the child who develops a disorganized attachment is such that the caregiver is actually the source of terror and fear, of "fright without solution", and so the child cannot turn to the attachment figure to be soothed (Main & Hesse, 1990). There is not organized adaptation and the child's response to this unsolvable problem is disorganization (see Hesse et al., this volume).

THE INTERCONNECTION OF MEMORY IMPRINTS THAT FORM COLLAGES OF SHAME As shaming experiences accrue and are defended against, the images created by those experiences are recorded in a person’s memory bank. Because the victim has no time or support to grieve the pain of the broken mutuality, his emotions are repressed and the grief is unresolved. The verbal (auditory) imprints remain in the memory, as do the visual images of the shaming scenes. As each new shaming experience takes place, a new verbal imprint and visual image form a scene that becomes attached to the existing ones to form collages of shaming memories. Children record their parents’ actions at their worst. When Mom and Dad, or stepparent or caregiver, are most out of control, they are the most threatening to the child’s survival. The child’s amygdala, the survival alarm center in their brain, registers these behaviors the most deeply. Any subsequent shame experience that even vaguely resembles that past trauma can easily trigger the words and scenes of the original trauma. What are then recorded are the new experiences and the old. Over time, an accumulation of shame scenes is attached.

One of the things we know about grief resolution is that grief is one of the only problems in the world that will heal itself with support.” (For a clear and concise discussion of unresolved grief read After the Tears by Jane Middelton-Moz and Lorie Dwinell.)

Among self-injurers, at the root of dissociation and behind all of the symptoms of traumatic stress, from numbness to loss of control, is a range of painful childhood experiences, including emotional deprivation, physical neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and childhood loss. Because the combination of pain, shame, and grief from these early experiences often remains unresolved, feelings of dread and emptiness can build up and quickly grow to unbearable proportions.

One of the reasons I became a grief therapist was that my own grief work healed me. I had been an emotional cripple all of my life. I was afraid of being hurt and afraid of being close—all because of my unresolved loss. Thinking back on the losses was akin to putting my hand on a hot stove. I would recoil every single time. But when the pile got to be too big, I had to give in and work through it. I had to look at all of my losses, feel them, heal them, and then move on. Each time I did that, I became a more confident person, a more alive person. I started to heal and experience true happiness for the first time. I became a grief therapist to help others heal their broken places and experience the joy that is life once you heal your unresolved loss. Almost every client I have ever worked with resisted acknowledging his or her grief and working through the loss after a breakup. At first the process seems very difficult, because you have to face your true feelings head on. For a time it seems easier to ignore it, but when you ignore loss after loss, it takes an emotional toll that exacts a very high price.

When we are not allowed to remember, to express our feelings and to grieve or mourn our losses or traumas, whether real or threatened, through the free expression of our Child Within, we become ill. Thus we can consider viewing a spectrum of unresolved grieving as beginning with mild symptoms or signs of grief, to co-dependence, to PTSD.

Because if you know the ways of man, the various conditions of his inquisitous mind, you will not be stumped by fear, guilt, avarice, grief, or remorse, and therefore, when the time comes, you will not hesitate to plumb the depths of the abyss and send out a resounding alarm to the unthinking masses, those who are willfully blind, warning them of the advancing army of the unresolved past.

Closure isn't a point of arrival but a gentle letting go, a space where unspoken words find rest. Without closure, the heart can feel suspended, searching for the end of something that remains unfinished. Some losses carry a silence that only rituals can fill, offering a sense of closure that words alone cannot. Closure is less about endings and more about finding peace with the unresolved.

Unresolved grief is created when we don't allow ourselves to work through feelings as they arise. If we deny having painful feelings or put them on a shelf, they don't simply evaporate. Rather, unresolved feelings gnaw at our energy, prey on our emotions, and generally debilitate us.

Fantaseamos lo que no entendemos...Las situaciones que menos se comprenden excitan el inconsciente

Ladies and gentlemen.” His voice carried straight into the darkest corners of the hall and straight into Ellen’s heart. “There is a slight misprint on tonight’s program. We offer for our finale tonight my own debut effort, which is listed on the program as Little Summer Symphony. It should read, Little Weldon Summer Symphony, and the dedication was left out, as well, so I offer it to you now. “Ellen, I know you are with me tonight, seated with my parents and our friends, though I cannot see you. I can feel you, though, here.” He tapped the tip of the baton over his heart. “I can always feel you there, and hope I always will. Like its creator, this work is not perfect, but it is full of joy, gratitude, and love, because of you. Ladies and gentlemen, I dedicate this work to the woman who showed me what it means to be loved and love in return: Ellen, Baroness Roxbury, whom I hope soon to convince to be my lady wife. These modest tunes and all I have of value, Ellen, are dedicated to you.” He turned in the ensuing beats of silence, raised his baton, and let the music begin. Ellen was in tears before the first movement concluded. The piece began modestly, like an old-fashioned sonata di chiesa, the long slow introduction standing alone as its own movement. Two flutes began it, playing about each other like two butterflies on a sunbeam, but then broadening, the melody shifting from sweet to tender to sorrowful. She heard in it grief and such unbearable, unresolved longing, she wanted to grab Val’s arm to make the notes stop bombarding her aching heart. But the second movement marched up right behind that opening, full of lovely, laughing melodies, like flowers bobbing in a summer breeze. This movement was full of song and sunshine; it got the toes tapping and left all manner of pretty themes humming around in the memory. My gardens, Ellen thought. My beautiful sunny gardens, and Marmalade and birds singing and the Belmont brothers laughing and racing around. The third movement was tranquil, like the sunshine on the still surface of the pond, like the peace after lovemaking. The third movement was napping entwined in the hammock, and strolling home hand in hand in the moonlight. She loved the third movement the best so far, until it romped into a little drinking song, that soon got away from itself and became a fourth movement full of the ebullient joy of creation at its most abundant and beautiful. The joy of falling in love, Ellen thought, clutching her handkerchief hard. The joy of being in love and being loved the way you need to be. Ah, it was too much, and it was just perfect as the music came to a stunning, joyous conclusion.

If you or anyone you know is suffering from unresolved grief, please seek help—it can get better. My friend wants me to tell you that.

We are taught that grieving is feeling sorry for yourself, and that real strength is to not show any emotions at all. Because we do not know how to be sad, we want to get to the end-stage of grief; we want the benefits and the results of healing, but we do not want to take the time to move through the often long and painful process of grief. For too long we have been taught that shedding tears is a sign of weakness and that you must not wallow in your sorrow. . . . As a result of this approach to grief, we have a whole generation of people with unresolved issues, hurts, and pains in their past that have been shallowly dealt with at best, and at worst have been ignored and discounted completely. The result has been an increasingly shallow Christianity and a profound lack of understanding of the nature of God and how, as His people, we are to move and live in a fallen world.[117]

The more I worked with clients’ grief issues, the better they were getting. Additionally, trauma was not being talked about as a relational issue; it was talked about as if it happened just within a person. It was during this period that it also became clear to me that the trauma I was seeing in clients was the direct result of relationship pain, and that if it remained unresolved, it would continue to drive dysfunctional relationship patterns.

Where your anger resides, there you will discover buried wounds that need to be healed and unresolved grief that needs to be addressed.

I had once thought that I came from a line of Gods, and I had punished myself for failing to be Godlike. But we were not Gods, and I was not the avatar for our family’s unraveling. I was just another product of inherited trauma, unresolved grief, and reactive survival mechanisms, like everyone else who came before me. We were mortals who felt ashamed when we failed to appear omnipotent. Now I see that my job was to release my ancestors from this burden, to allow those who come next the freedom to be ordinary.

be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue... And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some day into the answer."6

The Army was looking for lads like me. What’s that you say, young man? Parents divorced? Mum’s dead? Unresolved grief or psychological trauma? Step this way!

When L.P. Hartley wrote ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there in the opening lines of his 1953 novel 'The Go-Between', he created one of the most memorable and famous opening lines in English Literature. The distant past is indeed a foreign country for any mature person considering their youth, and every one of us has an unchangeable past that looks very different now than it did then. As memories accumulate and tumble in upon each other, and unresolved, discordant issues jostle, protrude and disturb the mind’s peace, the past all too often becomes an uncomfortable, grief-littered and unwelcoming country. The past, however, might as well be set in stone as there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that we can do to shade it differently to what it actually is ... and actually was.

Unresolved trauma causes the stress response to be left in the “on” position,

Spiritual bypassing—the use of spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs—is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed. The spiritual ideals of any tradition, whether Christian commandments or Buddhist precepts, can provide easy justification for practitioners to duck uncomfortable feelings in favor of more seemingly enlightened activity. When

The tension that results from conflicting emotions, especially when family members unresolved grief is not acknowledged, becomes so overwhelming that they are frozen in their tracks. They cannot make decisions, cannot act, and cannot let go.

A primary goal of Feeling Release Therapy is to put patients in touch with painful feelings from the past: the anger, rage, anxiety, sadness or grief that they found too threatening to allow themselves fully to experience originally. In shutting off this pain at an early age, people disengage from their real selves as a center of feeling, perception, cognition, and behavior. They disown their genuine reactions by projecting them onto others, or they feel guilty and hate themselves for having “unacceptable” feelings and try to cover them up. They numb themselves against their pain or suppress it altogether after they repress or depersonalize their memories of the traumatic events that caused them distress. They build a false self that is almost completely cut off from the pain they are suppressing. These repressed feelings are locked into the muscles of the body and experienced as tension. Patients are generally unaware that they still have these unresolved, disconnected feelings or that they are actively engaged in suppressing them.

When a child dies, dreams go up in smoke. Long-held expectations are shattered. The future we planned on is gone. Part of us died with our child. We’re shocked, stunned. We get sad, and angry. In some cases, the anger in us festers and spreads. We grow bitter. Like anger, bitterness leaks. Similar to a slow but raging infection, it seeps into our souls and then pours out of our hearts and into our lives—and onto the lives of those around us. Losing a child is such a tragedy, such an unexpected shock that any of us can easily wind up here. Unexpressed, unresolved anger can give birth to a reservoir of bitterness, perhaps without us even realizing it. Bitterness is not unusual in cases of child loss, but it is not healthy or helpful. The loss of a child is hard enough without being complicated by this internal, cold, festering rage. Bitterness can dupe us into indulging deeper in its poisons, causing us to pile up regrets that confuse and complicate our grief.

We have a very simple belief that everyone involved in a divorce is a griever. That includes children, parents, siblings, and friends of the couple. This attitude makes it easy for us. We always know that the primary issue is unresolved grief.

Feeling lost in life often occurs when we feel stuck and unable to progress. Feeling lost is often a symptom of isolation, unresolved grief and a lack of presence-awareness. Uncertainty, confusion, shame and excessive guilt often drive a sense of feeling lost.

In his classic text 'Mourning and Melancholia', Freud linked depression and grief by hypothesising that in unresolved grief the image of the person lost to us becomes fused with our own 'self'. Melancholia, a severe form of depression, comes about when anger is internalised and directed inwards towards this new and changed 'self'. We can fail to grieve not only for the dead. A similar process occurs when we cannot come to terms with the loss of other things that are important to us: people, ideas, beliefs and hopes.