Thursday's Therapy Unpackaging the Princes' Top 10 TRUTHS of Child-Loss Grief #7e) Child-Loss Grief is Pervasive throughout... our Spirit

Missing...

Thursday's Therapy

Unpackaging the Princes'

Top 10 TRUTHS of Child-Loss Grief

#7e) Child-Loss Grief is Pervasive throughout... our Spirit

#7) Child-Loss Grief is pervasive and invasive throughout your system. It is multi-dimensional, affecting your body, soul, mind, heart, and spirit. Your old beliefs about God, and about How the world works will be challenged.

Child-Loss Grief is Pervasive throughout... Our Spirit.

Spirit: the non-physical part of a person that is the seat of emotions and character.

Spirit can also be defined as personal identity.

Tommy:

For the longest, my spirit felt crushed to where, relatively feeling, there wasn't much "life" left in me. As an example, due to trauma and/or my crushed spirit, the songs that I always had in my head went silent, were absent.

In regard to personal identity, we do not know who we are now. Many things that were once characteristic of our personalities are not characteristic of us now, for example, our otherwise

• Out-going nature,
• Comfort being in crowds,
• Looking forward to going to church (Church as we once knew it is "kaput" (definition of kaput: broken and useless, no longer working or effective - for example, often what they're interested in teaching or talking about, I am no longer interested in.) All of these otherwise normal traits

are the antithesis of what they once were.

Angie:

An example of the changes in our personal identities were played out in me simply in our going out to eat with our precious sons and daughter-in-law last night:

Yes I was happy, even jovial. Yet

• I was insecure,
• I was unsure of myself as to who I am compared to how I see my former "more confident" self.
• I cannot compete with the positive, secure, outgoing, overly generous person I felt I once was.
• I don't know who I am, what I can do, or what I can give.

Tommy:

My spirit is very much grieved once we "all" get together, even to the point of ~ last night's family outing was probably the best it's ever been in these last almost-five-years, but my subconscious betrayed me. In my nightmare afterwards, I was going to another funeral for Merry Katherine, this one in Georgia (Angie's home state), and

I was so ripped up, I was weeping in my sleep.

So just our little family getting together rips me up??? What kind of bad joke is that?!

Once Merry Katherine was killed, my relationship with God changed, feeling betrayed, abandoned, like,

"Did You not hear me???!!!"

It's taken me five years for that relationship to begin to recover, and then there's still some things I can't deal with... for example, the "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for you" statements, prosperity theology, etc.

Child-Loss affects one's spirit at a very deep level, sometimes at levels so deep, we are not even consciously aware of it:

Tommy:

There is an invisible dynamic ever at play within us. Externally, I was having a delightful, playful time with my family last night. Internally, my spirit was very grieved without me even knowing it or being consciously aware of it.

Angie:

Evidently, always struggling within our spirits is a cry,

"WHERE IS EVERYBODY? SOMEONE VERY VITAL TO OUR FAMILY IS MISSING, AND WE WILL NEVER BE OKAY WITH THAT!"

Picture - Thanks to Grieving Mothers