"There is no Healing Without Feeling" BRB p. 52

For so many of us, we learned to feel helpless and even hopeless, like giving up was the only intelligent way to endure our childhoods. This hopelessness is part of what feeds the depression we experience as adults. It may seem paradoxical, but in ACA we learn that we need to experience our grief in order to alleviate our depression. It may only be through first-hand experience that we can understand how this works.

There is a difference between the stagnant quality of hopelessness and the flowing quality of grief work. The former seems like a permanent state. It drags us down and makes us feel like there's no way out. The latter seems more like a temporary phase on the way to acceptance, integration, and peace. One never seems to say goodbye, while the other is about the courage to say goodbye to the losses we've sustained and all the things we cannot change.

The thought of doing grief work, of feeling the pain of our past, may seem daunting, but in ACA we come to know that this is the balm that heals our ruptured souls.

On this day I have the courage to grieve my past in order to say hello to the present and the future.