Post # 95: Secret Sorrow

There are things we carry inside that most of us almost never talk about.
Not with friends.
Not with family.
Often only—maybe—with a therapist.

These parts can feel too raw, too dark, too deep.
They aren’t the whole story of who we are, but they’re real.

You can love and hate at the same time.
You can feel hope for the future and dread of it—within seconds.

And often, it feels like no one really wants to hear the pain.
Truth be told, we ourselves often don’t want to share the pain.

So it “works out”:
No one wants to hear it, and you don’t want to share it…
and life goes on, with you quietly denying and avoiding the pain you carry.

Often, we bury it under:
“I’m fine.”

What else are we supposed to say?

You are fine on one level.
But on another level, there are often..

Lumps of Pain Or Sadness We Carry:

• When you have differences or difficulties no one quite understands.

• When your children struggle in ways that are misread or dismissed.

• When you have serious financial difficulties and feel ashamed or “irresponsible.”

• When you have adult children with mental illness or addiction.

• When you have health problems that are consuming their thoughts and time, and you sense that others are tired of hearing about it.

• When you feel irrelevant or invisible as you age, or after retirement, or after losing a role or status that once anchored you.

• When a spouse is aging or facing cognitive decline.

Mourning Things You Never Had

One woman once described it as “the loss of things that never happened.”

Psychologist Dr. Kenneth Doka (1989) called this disenfranchised grief—any grief a person experiences but cannot openly mourn, publicly acknowledge, or receive social support for, because the loss is not seen as “valid” or “significant” by others.

No one quite understands how you can mourn what you never had:

• The career you wanted.

• The education or recognition you longed for.

• The child, the partner, the adventure, the travel.

• The version of yourself you imagined but could never fully become—maybe because of anxiety, money, family obligations, identity, or struggles with focus and follow-through.

You may feel you’ve lost your footing and are afraid you’ll never find it again.

Of course, there are also,

Sorrows and Losses That Are So Big They Are Not Secret At All.
But even then, time passes.

At first, people are sympathetic.
After a few years, you may feel the unspoken message is:
“You’re still grieving this?”

These are all natural human feelings.
We all have some of them.

So What Are You Supposed To Do With Them?

When they are not expressed or even acknowledged to ourselves, they don’t disappear.
They fester.
They grow.

If you have a therapist, you can tell her.
You can write about it.

You can’t always share it with your partner, because often it involves family dynamics and can’t be received non-defensively.

So much of the work becomes inner work.

Sometimes there is a quiet but powerful practice that is available to all of us at any time, if we are willing to try it and become more comfortable with it.

Sometimes it is as simple (not easy) as this:

Psychologist Tara Brach, PhD, in her book Radical Acceptance, reminds us of the power of simply naming our experience.

She teaches a practice sometimes called “mental noting” or “naming”:
gently recognizing our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations with a simple, caring awareness.

This might look like pausing and silently saying to yourself:

• “Sadness is here.”

• “Grief.”

• “Fear.”

• “Shame.”

• “Loneliness.”

Not to judge it.
Not to fix it right away.
Just to recognize it and open your heart to it.

Secret Strength

Over time, these secret sorrows can become quiet strengths—
they can transform you, open new roads, new doors.

But this only really happens when you:

• Name what you’re experiencing, instead of trying to outrun it.

• Share it in some way: write it, draw it, speak it, or sit with it quietly and consciously.

Pausing, as Tara Brach suggests, allows you to look at your experience from a bit of distance—
not to push it away, but to see it clearly and hold it with gentleness.

Let the Reality Touch You.

The most destructive effect is not the sorrow itself, but the long-term cost of denying it—even to yourself.

Counterintuitively, these feelings do not grow bigger because you let them in.
Instead, when you soften and open your heart to them, their grip often loosens.

This is courage—from the Latin cor, meaning “heart.”
Courage is not the absence of fear or pain; it is opening your heart in the presence of them.

Radical acceptance, to me, means facing the reality of whatever your life brings.
It does not mean resignation.
In fact, it is the first step in problem-solving, because:

• You see the situation more clearly.

• You free up the psychic energy that was spent on denial, so you can take action if and where you need to.

Healing, at its root, means to restore to wholeness—to see the whole picture of who you are, including both the sorrow and the strength.

When you let yourself do this, your sorrows may not completely go away—but they often lose some of their destructive power.

Instead of abandoning ourselves, when we stop denying the truth of our experience, we reconnect bravely to our hearts.

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This subject will be the focus on our next Reflection group on September 2.

I hope you will consider upgrading to join this part of our community where we explores these topics together on zoom.