Lesson 13: Healing Emptiness and the Wound of the Neglected Heart
Forgive Yourself and Start Fresh
by Mary Hayes Grieco
Lesson 13: Healing Emptiness and the Wound of the Neglected Heart
from Unconditional Forgiveness
by Mary Hayes Grieco
I want to take some time here to discuss a ‘self’ problem for which many of us take the blame, even though it arises from circumstances that are not our fault. It is the wound of the neglected heart, which causes a feeling of emptiness inside. Sometimes, even when we are surrounded by people who care about us, we don’t feel seen, understood, or loved. We lack the capacity for true happiness and fear that this is a self-inflicted negative attitude or some other character defect. Our fear worsens with our feelings of helplessness. This low-grade chronic loneliness usually has roots in a childhood where we seldom received generous, open attention from our parents.
Some of us grew up in an era when busy parents were glad if they managed to raise us with enough to eat and get us through school with a few practical skills and some decent values. If your parents gave you only what you needed to survive but not what you needed for your heart and spirit to thrive, then the ability to thrive may elude you as an adult. This is especially true in large families with a number of children; your parents may have missed the fact that you also needed individual time with them to be held, helped to solve a problem, or just spoken to with more awareness and kindness. Like a houseplant that thrives if it is given the proper light and watering, a child needs affection for, and reflection about, who she is from those who are raising her, if she is to blossom. If you didn’t get encouragement at a time when you were trying to ‘sprout’ a new part of yourself and reach for the sun, that part of your individuality may have withered away, leaving behind it a baffling sense of loss that you can’t consciously name.
If you recognize yourself here, consider doing some self-healing work that culminates in forgiving your well-meaning parents for not providing you with nurturing attention. It wasn’t their fault, either—most parents weren’t expected to nurture the self-esteem of their kids and may not have received it from their own parents—but this ‘failure’ on their part hurt you. There is a lost child inside you, frozen in a lonely and needy state since a certain developmental stage in your growing up years. You wanted to experience more intimacy and affection with your parents. You craved a caring touch and loving praise for who you were as an individual. If this was missing from your childhood, even though your parents never once lifted a hand to harm you, you carry the long-held and silent wound of emotional neglect. You wear a grey cloak of mild depression around you that mutes your happiness, even in good times, because you are unconsciously grieving a loss. This loss was the chance to feel ‘special’ to your parents and to yourself as you grew up. Your heart aches for the nourishing glow of simple self-love.
Forgiveness work can help heal this kind of depression. If you take some time now to forgive the lack of attention that you received as a child, a part of you will grow up happy at last.
Use The Eight Steps to Forgive Another>>
to address the key points in your childhood where you needed more nurturing and attention, and that gap will become filled in now, in the present, by energy from your soul and the Universe. With the help of a Higher Power—which can be seen as Mother or Father, if you wish—you can gracefully fill in some of the needed love and learning of previous developmental stages. You will walk taller, with the ordinary nobility of a healthy person. You will have a new ability to receive all the love that is already around you in the present. As you thoroughly address this wound of emotional neglect, your precious heart—cool and empty for so long—will become warm and contented at last.
“We will know peace.”
– Adult Children of Alcoholics/Dysfunction Big Book
www.aca.org
LOVE YOUR INNER CHILD!
BECOME YOUR OWN LOVING PARENT
PICK ONE OR MORE OF THESE EXERCISES TO DO TODAY
Exercise I:
Find a photo of yourself as a child. What positive soul quality can you see in that little face? You were the same good soul then as you are now. Appreciate yourself, both little and grown, for the soul that you are. Keep that photo around in a special place for a while and send love to your inner child.
Exercise II:
Relax yourself, and call to mind a picture of yourself as a child at an age when you needed some help and encouragement. Your intuition will provide it. Ask the child what they need, and then visualize giving it to them. Tell them the good wisdom you have to share now from your life experience.
Exercise III:
Do your daily harmony exercise>>
and consciously hold the Inner Child safely in your heart.
If you have a rocking chair, rock yourself gently for a while.
Stay with this, breathing, and visualizing the following, until you feel a sense of inner security.