Let Yourself Grieve

I've been reading, "The Grieving Brain" again. It's by Mary-Frances O'Connor, PhD and I had already went through this book once and it provided me with understanding and comfort of what I was going through. 

Grieving is described as feeling like an amputation. And people grieve not just for the death of someone but also other things like being emotionally abandoned by a parent. Many times people don't truly realize fully that they are grieving or need time to grieve after being emotionally abandoned because things like this get dismissed under the stigma people have of "holding onto things and not letting the past go." It brings both an inward and external form of shame when people learn that we keep talking about our emotional pain. But what they don't know is that we are grieving deeply of a loss they don't understand and our brains haven't even fully processed everything. Did you know you first need to come to acceptance to what happened to you in order to even grieve properly? My grieving journey didn't even start until a few years after I left home when there was a night when I realized what had truly happened to me. In my late 20s is when God helped me to understand and accept that I wasn't just neglected but completely emotionally abandoned at the age of 3 and I needed to grieve and should be grieving. I was now given that time and space to do so. People did not understand where I was at. Long before this I was already told to let the past go. And here I was - grieving after continual realizations and after realizations of what I went through. It's so important to be patient and compassionate towards others because you don't know how they perceived and made sense of the trauma they went through and how deeply it impacted them and how their brain responded. People need different amounts of time to get back up and let their brains relearn a new reality that is completely different from the one they grew up in. To start new. And that's okay. The best thing you can do for yourself is to hold your inner emotions like a baby and let yourself grieve the loss of unconditional parental love that you deserved to have but was never given to you or was taken away. This is like an amputation. Take your time to grieve and let no one judge you for what you have the right to do. God gives you space to grieve with lots of love and compassion and He leads you to move forward differently than the ways most people have been judging you to "let it go." Forgive them and be gentle on yourself. You need to grieve and that's completely okay.