The Grief That Lives Inside Healing

My father loved sharing a good allegorical tale. He once told me about circus elephants. Trainers tie baby elephants to stakes with a thin rope. The young elephant pulls and pulls until it learns: you cannot break free. Years later, that elephant weighs several tons, strong enough to uproot trees, yet stands docile beside the same stake. The rope barely holds. The real tether lives in the elephant's mind.

We are all, in our own ways, that elephant. But remember, it takes immense courage and strength to break free from the invisible ropes that bind us.

Your invisible rope might be the voice insisting you're too much or not enough. The belief that love must be earned through perfection, through silence, through making yourself small. The terror of disappointing others, of being alone, of being truly seen beneath the performance.

These tethers were forged early, usually by people who loved you but couldn't give you what you needed, or by circumstances that taught you the world wasn't safe. Here's what's both true and heartbreaking: those defenses worked. The tragedy isn't that you developed these defenses. The tragedy is that you're no longer in that original danger, but part of you still stands beside the stake, as if the rope still holds.

The Paradox of Liberation

One of therapy's most counterintuitive truths: sometimes liberation requires mourning.

As you begin to speak truths you've swallowed for decades, to feel what you've kept buried, something unexpected rises. You find yourself grieving the very patterns that imprisoned you.

Why? Because even when that old self was suffering, it was yours. You knew how to inhabit that person. Others learned how to relate to them. Your family had a place for them. There was strange comfort in familiar pain, in predictable patterns, in the role everyone expected you to play.

Your anxiety wasn't just a symptom to eliminate. It was how you stayed vigilant, how you anticipated rejection before it arrived. Your guardedness was how you protected the tender parts that no one was allowed to see. These weren't just problems; they were solutions, strategies, a language of survival.

When you start to change, you lose all that certainty. The old story crumbles, and suddenly you're standing in rubble without a map. This disorientation is grief.

What We Lose as We Heal

We lose the illusion of control. Those old patterns may have limited you, but they were predictable. Depression meant staying small and staying safe. Anxiety meant staying vigilant and prepared. Now you're learning to improvise, to trust something other than fear, and the uncertainty feels unbearable.

We lose familiar relationships. When you stop playing your old role, some people won't know what to do with you. The friend who needed you to be the helper. The parent who needed you to be the good child. The partner who needed you to need them. Some relationships will transform into something more authentic. Others will fall away. Both outcomes carry grief, for what was lost, and for what was never really there to begin with.

We lose the fantasy of rescue. Perhaps the deepest grief lives here: mourning the childhood you needed but didn't have. Part of healing is letting go of the fantasy that if you just tried hard enough, were good enough, stayed small enough, you could somehow go back in time and receive what you needed. That if you were perfect, they'd finally understand. That if you explained it right, they'd finally apologize. That if you waited long enough, the love would arrive in the form you longed for.

We lose the protective numbness. You've spent years building walls, creating distance, staying busy. Therapy invites you into the depths you've been avoiding. You begin to feel the anger you were taught was dangerous, the sadness you learned was weakness, and the need you experienced was shameful.

You've been living as a carefully contained pond; controlled, predictable, safe. Therapy invites you to become the ocean. But oceans have storms and depths and a vastness that doesn't fit inside tidy borders.

The Sacred Work of Witnessing

This is why genuine transformation takes time. If we don't explore what's being lost, if we don't honor what's being left behind, the old patterns creep back. They have to, because the unconscious needs the patterns that served it but were never touched.

Real change requires meeting the parts of yourself you've exiled: the angry child who was told to be quiet, the terrified teenager who learned the world wasn't safe, the heartbroken adult who never got to grieve because they had to keep functioning fully.

In therapy, we create space to sit with these parts. To listen to what they needed and never received. To witness what they survived and what it cost them.

And then you grieve. Not indulgently. Not endlessly. But as a sacred act of witnessing what was lost, you can finally stop trying to fix it retroactively.

What Emerges Through the Mourning

This is the paradox at the heart of healing: you cannot become whole without mourning the fragments you've been. You cannot become free without grieving the chains that gave you an identity, a place to stand, a story about who you are.

The grief doesn't disappear entirely. There will still be moments when you miss the old ways, when you reach for the armor you've set down, when you wonder if healing was worth what it cost.

But something else emerges, not a perfect self with no problems, but a more authentic self with room to breathe. Room to be complicated. Room to be human.

The anxiety or depression that brought you here may not vanish, but it no longer runs your entire life. You discover you can feel your feelings without being destroyed by them. You can be alone without drowning. You can connect by choice rather than desperation. You can disappoint people and survive it.

You learn you can touch the depths of your sadness without drowning. You can feel your anger without becoming the monster they said you'd be. You can acknowledge your need without becoming pathetic. You can take up space without being too much.

Liberation isn't about becoming someone new. It's about shedding everything that isn't you until what remains is the self that was always there, waiting beneath the protective layers you built to survive. And then you receive something no quick fix can provide: a freedom that isn't fragile. A self that isn't performed. A life that's yours because you've claimed it consciously, not by default or defense, but by deliberate, hard-won choice.

Not the self that was built merely to survive, but the self that's finally ready to live. 

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If you would like to work through grief and mourning with one of our therapists, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.

Photo credit: Jonatán Becerra