Our culture thrives off of denial.

We are taught to deny, negate, or ignore our wounding and focus on having “positive” thoughts instead, but that is not where our conditioning comes from.

The beliefs we develop about ourselves and life around us arise from our earliest childhood experiences.

Unprocessed pain, unmet and unfelt grief crystallizes into “negative” belief patterns and shame. It contributes to and is easily and steadily fed by our emotionally dysfunctional culture. A culture that is incredibly illiterate in one of the most potent, healing, powerful, and important aspects of the human experience.

Grief.

Grief is potent healing energy.

Without it, the unmet, unfelt wounding within us reaches out into the world to find soothing, to find “mother” in order to experience some kind of inner resolution that will lead to peace, safety, and goodness, to feel connected to the feminine face of God.

Love.

Unprocessed, denied wounding is running the world. It’s what has us picking the same relationships over and over again, running from one addiction to another, looking for the “one” or hiding ourselves.

What we see as codependence, seeking our wholeness in the external world, is at the root, a symptom of spiritual and emotional disconnection from love itself, also known as trauma.

It is the mother wound playing itself out so that we can finally come to know ourselves.

Trying to change our beliefs is like putting our wounded inner one in a corner for a time out and expecting them to only emerge when they are ready to behave properly.

Our separation from the Mother, from nature herself, has us living in our minds, minds trained to be oppressive parents hell-bent on painting anything into a radiant, positive thing, including childhood hell.

We live in a time that diminishes our feeling capacity, which is our direct connection to the feminine aspect of the divine.

We are here to feel.

We are here to fine-tune ourselves through energy that moves through the body as feelings. Old wounds are stuck energy that lock up our life force, and they become the energy the mind responds to that keeps us in a spiral of negative mother or death mother energy. It keeps us in a constant conflict with life and ourselves, and I don’t think that being human is truly meant to be this hard. Yet, the world as it is constructed is making it hard for the soul to feel safe, for us to feel good about what makes us human.

Healing codependency is looking to the spaces where unmet, unheld grief has a story to tell. Where love wants to crack open the heart and release the grip of the past so that the psyche is free, clear, and able to know its own love and discern what love is meant for him/her.

Grief is love.

We do not grieve things we do not love. It is a profound act of love to turn back, to look down the path of the inner one who experienced separation at such a young age, and to acknowledge all that was survived. To acknowledge the truth to the one inside who longs to be seen, heard, known, and held. To honor the truth of the past. To offer love to the one who is seeking it everywhere. To turn the mind toward the heart and offer a space not of fixing and attacking, but one of empathy, compassion, love, understanding, and space to grieve.

Grief, like all things, is impermanent.

We fear it will last forever, but it does not. It comes and goes as life comes and goes. The pain that gets lodged because of our fear of opening to grief does become permanent—and that, that is the root that needs to be tended to.

To tend to the roots is to let the love flow again, to let the love for yourself open your heart back to yourself. To be the one who says the buck stops here with the pain running the show and continuing the pattern of looking for someone to be the one we need to be for ourselves.

It’s a learning curve for sure.

But, grief is not as scary as we think. We don’t need to put a positive spin on it. It is beautiful as it is. As you are. Holy in its burning and tears, the broken openness that softens our hearts to ourselves and life, gives us another opportunity to appreciate what we have and allows the channel of our own aliveness to set us free.

We are taught to fear the very things that will set us free.

Codependence is our collective unconscious search for the divine union.

We are the only ones who can turn to that one seeking and find that is us whom we have been seeking all along.