The Grief of the Selves You Built to Survive
Definition
Healing asks you to honor the adaptive selves, and then to let them rest. This requires grief. The actual grief of the identities you created in order to endure what hurt you. Sitting with the loss of the hypervigilant one, who was so good at their job and who exhausted themselves in the doing of it. Acknowledging the accommodating one, who gave and managed and smoothed and adjusted and who never once got to simply be. Feeling the specific sadness of the one who stayed quiet to stay loved, who swallowed so many true things that they eventually stopped knowing what the true things were. These versions served you. They kept you safe. They are not failures. The grief is the honoring of what they carried.
Origins & Context
Grief as a necessary component of trauma recovery has been articulated by several theorists working in different but converging traditions. Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery, identifies mourning as one of the three central tasks of trauma recovery: the survivor must grieve not only what was lost externally but what was lost internally, the parts of the self that could not develop, the experiences that could not be had, the life that was not lived because survival took its place. Francis Weller's work on the nature of grief broadens this further, arguing that we must grieve not only deaths and endings but the unlived life, the potential that was foreclosed by circumstance. Pete Walker's work on CPTSD recovery emphasizes the importance of grieving what he calls the lost childhood, the developmental experiences of safety, attunement, and unconditional belonging that were absent. Donald Winnicott's developmental theory provides a complementary frame: the false self, built to protect the true self from impingement, must eventually be mourned as the person moves toward greater authenticity, because the false self, for all its costs, was also a kind of companion, a reliable structure in an unreliable world.
They were not failures. They kept you safe. The grief is the honoring of what they carried.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
The grief of adaptive selves shows up as the unexpected sadness that arrives when an old defense drops. You finally let go of the hypervigilance, and instead of feeling only relief, you also feel loss, because the hypervigilance kept you company for twenty years and its absence is a kind of silence. It shows up as the compassion, if you can find it, for the child or adolescent or young adult who built these strategies under genuine duress. For the one who learned to scan the room because the room was sometimes dangerous. For the one who learned to accommodate because accommodation was the price of belonging. For the one who learned to stay small because small was safe. It shows up as resistance to healing that is not laziness but loyalty: part of you does not want to release the adaptive self because releasing it feels like a betrayal of the version of you who needed it. The grief honors that loyalty. It says: you were right to build what you built. And the building is finished now.
Nikita's Note
The piece of healing I did not expect was how much I would miss the adaptive selves when they started to loosen their hold. The hypervigilant one in particular. She was exhausting and she was mine. She had been on the job since I was very young and she was very good at it. When I began to work on relaxing the vigilance, there was relief, and then there was grief, the specific grief of someone who is retiring a long-serving, deeply loyal part of themselves. I did not expect to need to mourn these versions. I thought healing meant being glad to be rid of them. What I found instead was that they needed honoring. They had done hard work in difficult conditions. They deserved acknowledgment, not just the door.
From the work
They were not failures. They kept you safe. The grief is the honoring of what they carried.From When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Inner Lexicon
See all in The Inner Lexicon →I wrote about this in When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself — available on Amazon.