As the title would suggest, chronic - persists for a long time, and sorrow is self explanatory.
Chronic Sorrow is a response to grief, loss or bereavement. This includes situations where no one actually died.
Our sorrow might be for a situation. For example, our loved and wanted child is not the child we expected they would be. They have learning, behavioural or medical complexity. Maybe they have all of those things with bells on. We do not love our child less. But maybe we love ourselves less. Maybe we feel that we failed somehow. That if we just tried harder, if we were just better people, if we could just control things that are out of our control we could fix it. We could fix them.
Maybe, we never got to be biological parents. Maybe we are mourning this loss. The loss of the type of family we thought we would have. Maybe we thought that by fostering or adopting a vulnerable human being we would achieve our dream, that we would have our need to nurture, to love and to be loved back fulfilled. Maybe our dream got smashed into a gazzillion pieces when we invited a vulnerable human being who has ptsd into our home and our heart. It's okay. You're allowed to feel sad. It is sad.
What Therapeutic Support can achieve:
Therapeutic Support can enable and empower us to achieve understanding and acceptance of ourselves for who we are, how we are and why we are how we are. This is the foundation for healing from experiences that have hurt us or caused us pain. The pain and hurt we experience is not our fault. We do not choose pain.
Ah, but what if we do 'choose' pain? What if we invite pain into our lives through self sabotaging behaviours. We will look at 'self sabotage' in a separate blog but for now, trust me on this, we do not 'choose' self sabotage.
What Therapeutic Support cannot achieve:
Therapeutic Support cannot erase pain. Neither can it erase hurt, damaging experiences nor can it change neurology.
Therapeutic Support cannot change the past. It provides us with the tools to make sense of the past, to accept ourselves in the present and to consider the future as a neutral passing of time absent of fear.
Therapeutic Support cannot be imposed against our will. We must be an active traveller in our healing journey. We cannot be a passive passenger.
We heal when we are ready to and in our own space and time. To accept ourselves we must accept all the things that make us 'us'. This includes the painful stuff that we like to keep locked away. A healing journey is not for the faint hearted. If you're not ready yet it's okay. It's okay to accept your own boundaries.
Let's be kind to ourselves. We're all doing the best we can with the resources available to us in any given moment. xx