Grief, anger, and emotional loneliness

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad at Me? If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we deep-dive into this book together. You can also listen on Spotify & Apple Music. These episodes are meant to help translate theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change.

We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time - our next live meeting has moved to Sunday, August 2nd at 11 am EDT so that we have a few more chapters under our belt before we meet (a recording will be available if you can’t attend live!). If you’d like to learn more about getting unstuck and making lasting change in your life, join my upcoming class: 5 Steps to Change on Sunday, July 26th.

This book takes us deep into fawning, one of the survival strategies so many of us developed in childhood to stay connected and safe. It helps explain why we learned to manage other people’s emotions instead of feeling our own, and how patterns like people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and perfectionism make so much sense when we understand where they came from, and how they can change.

If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads, such as Unlocking the Emotional Brain, No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m grateful you’re here and reading along with me.

This week, we’re reading a chapter on grief, anger, and emotional loneliness, and exploring the difference between feeling these emotions in the present and the old feelings embedded in our brain from childhood, why we can’t jump straight to acceptance and compassion, and how we can use everything that comes up as clues to the deeper learnings that are ready to be met.

As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:

Is there something that you’re grieving? Notice if any resistance comes up as you acknowledge it.

2. Is there something you feel angry about?

3. As you reflect on your past, are conflicting emotions coming up for you?

(0:00 - 3:50)

Hi and welcome back to our book club where we are diving into the book Are You Mad At Me?, all about fawning and our survival strategies from childhood. This week we’re going to be reading a chapter that addresses grief, anger, and emotional loneliness. These are feelings that will be very familiar to those of us who grew up in environments with developmental ruptures and attachment failures.

Maybe we had emotionally immature caregivers or other forms of early developmental trauma. If you’re familiar with my work, you’ve likely heard me talk about the big three of the emotions, and that is anger, sadness, and fear. These are normal expected emotions that all humans will feel, and there are many emotions that kind of branch off from there.

Of course, hurt and grief and rage and annoyance, frustration, disappointment. There are many ways we might experience emotions within that spectrum, but those emotions are also very present when we have experienced these attachment ruptures in our lives. And there’s a difference between feeling those feelings in the present and feeling those feelings as a child and being all alone in them.

And so this chapter is going to be curious about how we as adults can start to feel things like grief, like anger, to identify our feelings of loneliness that can often create feelings of being very afraid because it’s terrifying for a child to feel that they are disconnected, and how those things impacted us as a child versus how we can be with them as an adult. You know by now if you listen to some of the other books, like Unlocking the Emotional Brain, that many of our parts, our schemas, our patterns, what we might think of as core beliefs, are actually emotional learnings. So many of these things that say, if I want other people to love me, that I need to be good, that I need to be meeting all their needs all the time, I can’t be myself.

These are unconscious learnings stored in our brain, and they are rife with emotion. So when we are a child and we have this experience of when I’m my playful, silly, messy, emotional self, it upsets my parents, or they seem to fall away from me, or they seem more stressed, or they fight more. We might feel in that moment very scared because we rely on our caregivers to keep us safe.

Some part of us might also feel sad, even if we don’t consciously know it, that we can’t be ourselves when that’s all we know how to do as children. We might also unconsciously feel angry. Why can’t I be myself? Why can’t my parents take care of me and manage themselves? All of these things might be happening unconsciously, but they get stored in our brain.

So then in the present, when we might feel an emotion that we consider as messy or not good, like anger, for example, that old learning gets activated in our brain and makes our mind and body feel like it’s a bad thing to do, like it’s scary, like we’re going to upset others. So that learning gets kicked off in the present. We know in the present, it’s not unsafe to feel feelings like anger or grief or sadness, but it still feels that way because of those deeply embedded pathways in our brain.

And it’s not just about whether we felt sad that we couldn’t feel our feelings as a child. It’s about whether anyone could be with us in those emotions and what it would have meant to feel those emotions. It would have felt incredibly dangerous as a child to feel like our parents could not take care of us in the way we needed them to.

As Meg says in this chapter, there’s a deep grief to be felt in realizing that your parents aren’t capable of being the parents you needed them to be. That’s in our adult place. But it’s in our childhood experience, too, that we will have this feeling of, my parents can’t be there for me, and that actually feels deeply unsafe.

(3:51 - 6:03)

So we don’t feel grief as children. Instead, we just learn to shut it down because it feels really scary. So what you might experience as you go through your own healing process is that there are feelings to be felt in the present, but there are also old feelings that still exist in these pathways in your brain.

And it’s different than feeling your feelings in the present. Grieving in the present for the childhood we had or what we didn’t get isn’t the same as the deep aloneness, sorrow, longing, and heartbreak that we might have felt consciously or unconsciously as a child. Feeling our anger in the present is what allows us to have boundaries, agency, connect to our life force.

And it’s very different than the rage and the helplessness and the disorganization that we might feel as a child when we feel that our parents can’t take care of us. Feeling the fear or anxiety, the unsure feelings that might come up in the present around being around parents or caregivers who might still act out in this way is very different than feeling the terror, the feeling of there being no way out, the survival energy, and the fear of the loss of attachment that we feel as children. So I want you to keep in mind as we read this book and we’re talking about what it feels like to feel anger and grief as an adult, to know getting to these feelings as an adult is a process.

Because when we try to move toward feeling those feelings, for example, grieving what we didn’t have, all of those old learnings can come up that say, no, it was you, you just weren’t a good child, or why are you judging your parents when they took care of you? I want you to remember those are actually just clues to deeper learnings within our brain, other parts of us, if you’d like to think about it that way, or survival strategies from IFS and NARM that need to be met by us, that need to be sort of brought to the surface and metabolized. So if you’re reading this book and you’re identifying with the grief and anger and you’re feeling that, wonderful. If you’re reading this book and you’re noticing it feels like too much to get to those feelings right now, or other stronger feelings are coming up, or you’re starting to criticize yourself or pressure yourself to just let things go and move on.

(6:03 - 7:05)

These are just clues that we can be curious about. That’s why we’re always emphasizing the observing thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, and impulses with anything. Trying to force ourselves to feel the grief or anger when other parts of us don’t feel safe with those emotions or need to process other learnings from the past will not move us forward.

Then it just becomes another counteractive technique, meaning another way that we’re just trying to manage ourselves. So as we go through this chapter, let’s do it with curiosity. If grief is there, we’ll meet it.

If other emotions or thoughts or even behaviors, maybe you find yourself wanting to put this book away and not listen to this, or maybe you find yourself saying, I need to get more books on this concept so that I can really feel my grief. We’re just noticing we’re gathering data on what learnings, what parts of you might be arising. And something I want you to remember from this chapter is Meg says, no child can be good enough to earn a functional childhood when their parents are in so much pain of their own and stuck in their own unprocessed trauma.

(7:05 - 8:31)

The causes and conditions that have led us here aren’t our fault, but our healing is our responsibility. So what we’re being curious about is building up safety to connect to ourselves and access our own agency. And we can do that by holding a dual experience of grieving and being angry about what happened to us while holding that our parents were having their own unique experience too.

So at the end of the last chapter, we were talking a little bit about how we might unconsciously be drawn to relationships or situations that remind us of experiences with our parents, our caregivers, whoever it might have been that caused us pain or where we didn’t feel good enough. So we can try to reenact it so that this time we can do it right. We can win, but we know getting drawn into those reenactments doesn’t actually solve it because the pain that we’re feeling is from the past.

It’s not in the present. No matter how hard we try to fix another person as an adult, we’re never going to be able to heal the parts of us that hold all of these emotions from our childhood experiences until we can turn and meet those parts of us, right? So she says you win by grieving what you didn’t get and moving forward to find what you truly deserve. So that’s what we’re really being curious about, this idea of feeling grief or sadness or loss about what we didn’t have, of wanting to be nurtured and not being able to be nurtured in a way that felt good to us.

(8:32 - 10:33)

And it might also mean, little by little, letting go, letting go of the parts of us that are hoping and wishing that that person could finally change and be what we need them to be, letting go of the parts of us that so hoped for and wished for a childhood or a family or a parent or a sibling relationship where we could have felt seen and loved and cared for. This is such an important step in the healing process, is accepting and feeling the feelings around what we didn’t have, but we can’t jump straight to acceptance and compassion. We want to, many times we want to, and we might even think that we feel compassion towards ourselves or that we’ve accepted what happened, but that is often an intellectual experience.

And I say that because it’s a little bit of an overriding experience for some of us to say, I know I didn’t get what I need for my childhood and I feel compassionate about that. And yet we continue to intellectualize, to fawn, to overfunction, to be pushed into perfectionism. That lets us know that the compassion is still valuable, but it might just be a cognitive experience right now.

There’s some deeper thing happening in our brain where we’re not actually letting ourselves feel all of the grief, the anger, the fear, and feel compassionate toward those parts of us. It can sound kind of confusing, but feeling compassion towards ourselves is very different than saying we’re compassionate towards ourselves. And we know how twisted it can become where, in fact, in our brain, we might have a learning that says it’s not safe or right or good to feel truly compassionate towards myself because that means I’ll let down.

I’ll be myself or I’ll have needs or I won’t be perfect and then I won’t be loved. And so that’s why we often stay with compassion only as a thought, as a cognitive intellectual experience. We don’t actually fully feel it because our brain is predicting if we fully feel it, we’ll do all of these other dangerous things that will make us lose our relationships or will make the situation worse, will make other people around us upset.

(10:35 - 11:54)

So if you have this sense that I think I do feel compassionate towards myself, what you can do is kind of wait in it a little bit, right? So you can name like I do feel compassionate about that I went through these experiences that were really hard and wait and see how does it feel. Does it feel mourn? Does it feel good? Do you feel a softening? Do you feel a curiosity about what might come from this experience? Or as you sit with it a little bit longer, do you start to feel tight or tense or anxious? Do you start to try to defend your parents or caregivers? Like, well, they went through a lot of things too. Like we might actually just be in an intellectual cognitive experience and when we let our brain sit with it, that’s when the other feelings will start to come up of fear, of grief, of anger.

So we don’t have to jump toward compassion. We can stay in this really neutral curious state, which I think is what Meg is really inviting here when we’re being curious about this grief. When we’re children, we know it’s natural to put our caregivers on a pedestal.

We fiercely, fiercely protect that fantasy version of them and we have to because we want to feel that our parents are safe, that they’re taking care of us and that they love us in the way we need to. It would feel so incredibly dangerous to step out of that fantasy as a child and accept, wow, my parents are hurting me. Wow, this doesn’t feel good to me.

(11:54 - 16:53)

But as we are in our adulthood and we start to observe, we can allow them to come off of that pedestal and feel all of the grief and fear and anger that comes up as a result. The resistance we might feel to feeling those feelings, to taking our parents off the pedestal, that’s part of those deeper learnings, right? Meg says this is because we still want to protect the vision of our parents that we hold so dear in our minds, but our healing isn’t a betrayal of our parents. That’s right, but it feels like a betrayal to some part of us.

It felt like in our childhood if we would have felt those feelings where we were betraying our parents or it would have been so shattering to us that it wasn’t safe. So because our brain as children predicted these dangerous outcomes, if we took our parents off the pedestal, if we didn’t stay in the fantasy, then we have all of these survival strategies that keep us from going toward those emotions. Remember, our brain will generate context in the present just like what happened in the past to try to keep us from doing that thing that it predicts will cause harm.

So trying to take our parents off the pedestal to feel our true grief and emotion, our brain is still going to generate that old learning from 1996, 1986, whatever it was that says, no, if you feel that way, you’re going to shatter your whole world. So why don’t you intellectualize this? Why don’t you walk away? Why don’t you distract yourself? Why don’t you zone out? That’s normal. Instead of trying to resist that, we use it as a great clue that there’s a deeper emotion wanting to be met and deeper learning, a deeper schema that says it’s not safe to feel this way.

This will lead to a bad outcome. So it’s actually a gift when that happens, when we say, I’m going to let myself grieve about this and another thing comes up. Why? Because it gives us clues to these learnings that still need to be met, right? We observe through metacognition, thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, and impulses.

And that’s when we gather those deeper learnings that say, oh, if I let myself feel that my parents weren’t perfect, it would feel so shattering that I would just collapse. That is a learning we can work with, right? That you can’t tolerate feeling these feelings. That’s what it felt like as a child, but we know that’s not what’s true in the present.

That’s when we can use that process of memory reconsolidation, like we’ve learned in Unlocking the Emotional Brain, to get deeper, to target some of these deeper learnings. So while we’re reading here about this grieving process, remember we’re also using it as an experiment to observe what comes up. And I think there’s a perfect example in this section about grief that helps us understand some of these deeper learnings.

So she’s talking about a client who learned that she was stupid, directly and indirectly. So she had this really big insecurity as an adult, this fear of being seen as incompetent, someone who couldn’t figure it out on her own, you know, this imposter syndrome. And as she was working on this, she learned that she had this experience, that she was stupid, because there was a younger part of her that still wanted her dad to be right.

So she’s holding on to this idea that she’s stupid, she’s an imposter. She wants her dad to be right, because if he was right, then maybe he would be right about other things, and he could be someone she could rely on, something we so yearn for, to have this parent who is good, and we can rely on, and we can trust. So if she worked on this idea that she was capable, it would have meant accepting her dad wasn’t the person she needed him to be, and that he never would be.

So grieving this hope that she could be the parental figure that she was protecting in her mind. A little nuance I want to share here is Meg often uses this term that this was a limiting belief, that she had this belief, that her capability meant accepting her dad couldn’t be the person she needed him to be. It’s a slightly nuanced take, but if you listen to Unlocking the Emotional Brain, you know that we don’t view these things as beliefs, rather they are learnings.

They are acquired through experiences in our lives. It might seem like splitting hairs, but I think it’s really valuable to see them as learnings, because it’s not just random things in our brain. They came from experiences.