Healing Journey: Can Someone Feel Low When They Are Grieving Unmet Childhood Needs?

When someone is on a healing journey and is thus working through their emotional wounds, there are going to be moments when they will be in a lot of pain. The reason for this is that they will be facing up to the fact that certain needs won’t be met.

These will be needs that go back to when they were a child, a toddler and even an infant. Once they have become aware of an unmet need, it will give them the chance to face the pain that they were unable to face all those years ago.

A Time of Surrender

This will be a time when they will be in their feminine element, as they will be letting go and allowing themselves to cry out the pain that is inside them. Their masculine element, on the other hand, that will give them the need to change, fix and repair and something that will have given them the strength to face themselves, won’t be needed at this point.

To be able to do this and not resist what is going on will take a certain amount of presence. If they find it hard to be present and to hold the space for themselves, they will probably need to reach out for external support.

The Outcome

By reaching out for support, they will be able to develop or embrace more of their presence. It is then not that they will need external support in this form forever; it is just until they are ready to generally hold the space for themselves.
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Once they have this ability, they will be able to work through just about whatever comes up. At this point in time, this might be hard for them to accept but they are likely to see the results for themselves.

Invisible

When they are working through one or a few unmet childhood needs, there are going to be other unmet needs that they are not aware of. As a result of this, they are going to be engaging in transference.

This is something that will take place unconsciously and it is where they will see certain people as their caregivers and those from their early years. Thanks to this, they will be able to engage in repetition compulsion.

Repeating The Past

So, by unconsciously seeing certain people as their caregiver/s, they will do what they can to finally receive what they missed out on as a child and before. Ultimately, certain parts of their being will be looking for love, acceptance and to be seen as enough, for instance.

To achieve this, they can work hard, try to be seen as special, do what they can to be ‘successful’, bend over backwards for others and/or spend a lot of time volunteering, among other things.

The Fuel

What is clear then is that these unmet childhood needs will provide them with a lot of motivation and fuel to do things. However, this motivation and fuel will be coming from their need to avoid facing how they really feel.

After working through one or a number of unmet childhood needs, they are likely to soon end up coming into contact with another unmet need. And, while working through this need or these needs will stop them from looking for what can’t be provided by another human being, it can also end up wiping them out.

Deflated

What they have been unconsciously looking for, for so long, won’t be able to be provided and this will cause them to get in touch with how they felt originally. When this need was not met, many, many years ago, they would have experienced a lot of pain that would have soon been repressed by their brain.

This is likely to be a time when they will feel helpless and hopeless, and they may even want their life to end due to how much pain they will be in. Their desire to do the same thing is likely to have been taken away, which will also take away a lot of their motivation and fuel.

Weighed Down

Consequently, whilst they are working through these wounds, they can spend a fair amount of time feeling low and even depressed. But, by understanding what is going on, they won’t need to see this as a ‘bad’ thing and as a sign that they are in a bad way.

They will be able to see this is part of what they are going through and if anything, it is actually a ‘good’ thing. As even if they felt a lot better before, they would have been trying to receive something that couldn’t be provided; so they would have only felt better because they were unknowingly living in denial.

False Hope

By facing and working through their unmet childhood needs and those needs that were not met before this stage, their need to replay scenarios that leave them feeling angry, frustrated, helpless, hopeless, worthless and not enough will decrease. It is then a case of consciously suffering for a short time, or unconsciously suffering forever whilst having moments where, thanks to transference, one feels on top of the world as they will unconsciously believe that they are finally receiving what they missed out on as a child or before, only to come crashing back down to earth before long.

The trouble is that if they live in a society that largely sees feeling low or being depressed as a ‘bad’ thing and as something to be changed or fixed, as opposed to something to be explored, they are unlikely to receive much support if they look towards the system or from a number of the people in their life. Fortunately, by having a good understanding of themselves and what is going on, this won’t trouble them.
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Awareness

If someone can relate to this and they are ready to change their life, they may need to reach out for external support. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.

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Oliver JR Cooper
http://www.oliverjrcooper.co.uk