When there is an open wound in our life, a constant underlying pain accompanies us. Solving it means letting go of the loved person, situation or object that will never come back, starting to build new possible bonds and moving forward.
Last update: January 15, 2020
Overcoming mourning is neither obvious nor easy. Sure, time helps, but without a personal narrative of what happened, we are likely to feel the effects of a wound that does not heal for a long time. We may even stop feeling pain, at least consciously, but it will continue to gravitate into our lives in unexpected ways.
Separating from the one you love, whether it is following an abandonment, a breakup, a death, is always painful. It is an experience that can happen at any age and in different life circumstances. Sometimes a loss can leave an incurable wound and pain becomes a way of life.
Mourning means restructuring our psychic world; it is a work we do on ourselves, which leads us to accept the event and to transform our way of being and living. Only when this metamorphosis occurs will we feel the intensity of the pain decrease and the wound close.
"Those who have never had a wound laugh at the scars of love."
-William Shakespeare-
The mourning
Mourning has two faces: the first is grief, suffering for having lost the object of our love. The second is struggle. On the one hand, sadness and the desire to return something that is not there and will not be there anymore. On the other, our inner struggle. In pain there is necessarily a tension between the past and the future, which coagulates in the present.
Mourning is not only felt towards people; we also experience it when we are forced to abandon a situation that makes us happy or when we lose an object. This object can be the youth that has left us forever, the money gone up in smoke or, simply, something we never got to live.
Each person he experiences suffering in his way. This depends on the psychic structure of each of us and the circumstances in which the loss occurred. Usually, however, there is a tendency to deny to the bitter end. Over time, some come to accept, in others there is a certain resistance.
Grieving, taking care of a wound
Unresolved grief is a wound that does not heal. It is a pain that remains alive and does not resolve itself over time. It may remain covered or we can ignore it, but it is still present, as a background in our life. No bereavement story is simple, and this is a problem in an age that rejects all that is difficult. It is often slow to heal, a tragedy in our instant culture.
For a different period of time, depending on the type of loss and the intensity of the pain, we are no longer able to live "normally". Sadness and disinterest prevail over other emotions. Your work or study will likely suffer and it will be difficult to be comfortable in the company of others. Suffering will mostly be all we have.
Loss is the first moment of grief. Of course this is a circumstance that is beyond our control, otherwise it would not cause pain. Mourning, on the other hand, means losing what we love for the second time; now, however, voluntarily, as an effect of the restructuring work on thoughts and feelings. Sometimes, we refuse to go through this process.
Symptoms of a wound that does not heal
The average length of bereavement is said to be between six months and two years. Certainly one of the most difficult to overcome is the loss of a child. So hard, yet strangely enough, there is no word for this type of loss. There are the orphan and the widower, but we don't have a term for a father or mother who has lost a child.
A wound that does not heal tells us about a work on bereavement that has not been completed. First, there is the resistance to accepting what happened. Sometimes this resistance takes the form of cynicism or evasion. In these cases one becomes hypersensitive to nonsense and one loses genuine contact with oneself. We live mechanically.
In other cases, repressing pain leads to sickness, an emotional or physical disorder. It is also possible that you will become harsh, self-destructive or irresponsible. Any loss that does not lead to a positive transformation is suspicious and needs to be addressed.
