How Do I Actively Grieve My Past?
Grieving an adverse childhood can sound abstract until you understand the practices inside it: naming the loss, allowing the feelings it brings, and making sense of how the past lives in the present. This essay offers a compassionate framework for active grieving, including why intangible losses count and how truth, feeling, and integration work together.
Why Abstract Loss Deserves Grief
“But Annie, what does it mean to grieve my past? I mean, what does it mean practically?”
In emails and blog comments, I’ve been receiving some iteration of this question more and more frequently.
And I completely understand why this question is coming up!
Very often in my articles, I talk about the need to grieve the childhood you didn’t and won’t have.
I talk about how this grieving stage is necessary and a fundamental step for anyone on a healing journey from a relational trauma history.
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But what does it mean , actually mean , to actively grieve your past?
How do we make this abstract concept tangible and practical so that we can better engage in this process?
Grief is, I believe, the innate emotional process we as humans have to help us heal from the inherent losses that come along with being human.
It’s the pathway through our suffering (which is inevitable in this human condition).
It’s the body and brain’s natural and intuitive way of shepherding ourselves through heartbreak and anguish that, at times, seems like it might destroy us.
Why is it important to actively grieve our past?
Abstract grief is mourning for an intangible loss, such as safety, a childhood, capacity, an imagined future, or a relationship that was never what it needed to be.
In plain terms: A loss does not have to be visible or socially recognized for your body and heart to need space to mourn it.
“But pain’s like water. It finds a way to push through any seal. There’s no way to stop it. Sometimes you have to let yourself sink inside of it before you can learn how to swim to the surface.”
Katie Kacvinsky, author
What Active Grieving Involves
Because that’s the pathway through the pain into a future that might feel better.
Because if we don’t, we run the risk of staying in our suffering, in our anguish longer.
“Honey, you’re a survivor. No shame in that. Your daddy hurt you something fierce. Life hurt you. Lies are one of the easiest places for survivors to run. They give you a sense of safety, a place where you have to depend only on yourself. But it’s a dark place, isn’t it?” , William P. Young
Often in my work, I’ll witness people rejecting the idea that they get to grieve their past and dismissing the idea that they get to mourn their childhood.
“It’s not like my best friend died. My childhood was bad, sure, but it doesn’t mean I get to be sad about it. It’s pathetic to feel sad about something I can’t change that happened so long ago.”
I firmly and strongly believe that abstract and intangible losses , like a childhood we never got to have, or the end of freedoms we enjoyed before becoming parents, or the passing of time and life paths you didn’t take , count as much as any concrete losses we might experience (such as the death of a loved one).
Loss is loss.
No one gets to define what kind of loss is more important and “counts” more than another.
And personally, as a trauma therapist and parent, I truly think that it’s every child’s innate right to have a safe, stable, loving, and emotionally nurturing childhood.
And when this doesn’t happen, when a child is robbed of their childhood, it is a profound loss.
And that loss must be grieved by the individual who experienced it.
Sense-making is the process of understanding how an experience fits into your story and how it has shaped your beliefs, choices, and responses.
In plain terms: It is not excusing what happened; it is seeing it clearly enough to make different choices where you can now.
Making Meaning of What Happened
“I felt my throat tighten and constrict. My hearts ached with a pain I could not describe. I wondered if I were dying. I felt not sadness. I felt pity. For myself. For us all. We were children no longer. And we never would be again.” ― K. A. Applegate
Actively grieving your past is, in my professional opinion, at its heart, processing, and sense-making.
It means admitting to ourselves that we experienced a loss, allowing ourselves to feel the full extent of our feelings about this loss for as long as it takes, and then integrating our reality into our life story.
But again, what do each of these abstract concepts actually mean?
Admitting to ourselves that we experienced a loss: This means being willing to confront (meaning facing and turning towards versus turning away from) our past experiences. Looking backward into the shadows of time, the half-remembered moments and, yes, especially the painful parts of our past experiences that we would otherwise prefer to avoid. And in doing so, in turning backward, we look at our experiences with sobriety, with more knowledge about what is normal, functional, and healthy behavior and what is not normal, functional, and healthy behavior so that we can see our pasts with more truth and reality.
Feeling the full extent of our loss: This, to me, mandates that we reduce and stop any of the myriad ways we psychologically defend ourselves from feeling our feelings (intellectualizing, dismissing and diminishing your past, using substances and behaviors compulsively to numb ourselves, etc.) and then, with more access to our feelings, with more capacity to be embodied, allowing ourselves to feel whatever comes up about our past and then to safely and appropriately express those feelings no matter what they are , despair, sadness, rage, anguish, and more. And then we keep doing that for as long as it takes whenever and however our body and heart communicate to us that we still have feelings about what happened to us.
Integrating our past experiences into our present reality: This is the sense-making part. It means seeing our pasts plainly and understanding how our past may have impacted us in myriad biopsychosocial ways. Being curious about how we formed in response to our past, how those responses are evident in our present, assessing if those responses are working well for us, and, if not, making movement towards changing maladaptive thoughts and behaviors. All the while understanding (with self-compassion) that we formed in response to our pasts but that we have different choices and chances now.
Each of these steps and their attendant nuances is, in my opinion, how we actively grieve our pasts.
How we grieve our lost childhoods.
What does actively grieving your past mean and look like to you? What’s one practice, tool, or behavior you use to help yourself actively grieve?
“She could never go back and make some of the details pretty. All she could do was move forward and make the whole beautiful.” ― Terri St. Cloud
Here’s to making the whole beautiful with you.
Q: What does actively grieving my past mean?
A: The essay describes it as admitting the loss, allowing the full range of feeling for as long as needed, and integrating the reality into your life story.
Q: Does a difficult childhood count as a real loss?
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A: Yes. Abstract and intangible losses, including a childhood that was not safe or nurturing, are real losses worthy of grief.
Q: Why can I not just move on?
A: Grief is presented as a natural process through suffering; refusing or numbing it can keep anguish present longer.
Q: How can I begin without becoming overwhelmed?
A: Turning toward the past can be gradual and can include reducing avoidance, safely expressing feelings, and seeking support as needed.
Q: What does integration look like?
A: It means seeing the past plainly, noticing how it shaped you, assessing what still serves you, and moving toward different choices with self-compassion.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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