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Grieving: Process

Overview

Grieving is one of the most powerful tools for moving through emotional flashbacks and healing the losses of a traumatic childhood. Walker identifies four interlocking processes — angering, crying, verbal ventilation, and feeling — that together release the fear, shame, and depression at the core of most flashbacks. Learning to grieve is also how the inner critic loses its fuel and emotional intelligence is rebuilt.

Quick Reference

  • Four processes: angering, crying, verbal ventilation, feeling — use all four for full release

  • Grieving defuels the critic: healthy anger and tears short-circuit the critic's fear-driven programs before they spiral

  • If crying or angering makes things worse, shrink the critic first before leaning into grief work

  • Verbal ventilation (speaking or writing feelings uncensored) reconnects left- and right-brain, building emotional intelligence

  • Feeling (passive body awareness) complements active emoting — surrender to sensation without resisting or judging it

  • Start with low-intensity verbal ventilation in early recovery; intensity can increase as the critic shrinks

The Four Processes of Grieving

Effective grieving draws on four practices that work together. No single process does the whole job — the most complete relief comes from being able to move fluidly between all four.

1. Angering: Diminishes Fear and Shame

Angering means actively and aggressively complaining — sometimes raging — about past and present losses, injustices, and childhood betrayals. It is the yang, outward-moving process of grieving.

  • Why it works: Children are wired to release fear through crying and anger. When that capacity is shut down by punishing parents, trapped anger turns inward and becomes the inner critic's ammunition. Redirecting that anger outward restores the instinct of self-protection.

  • Saying "No!" to the critic: Angrily refusing the critic's attacks is a form of angering — it externalizes anger instead of turning it against the self.

  • Redirects blame: Angering moves blame back to its rightful source — the people who actually caused the harm — and dissolves toxic shame in the process.

  • Counters powerlessness: Feeling righteous anger is a reminder that you now live in an adult body capable of self-defense, not the helpless body of the child you were.

  • Can be done alone or with a witness: A safe friend, therapist, or even a private car can serve as a container. Over time, most angering moves inward as a silent, thought-stopping self-protective practice.

  • Helps break repetition compulsion: Recovering healthy anger at past mistreatment helps stop the pattern of allowing others to reenact those same violations.

2. Crying: The Penultimate Soothing

Crying is the yin complement to angering. Where anger moves outward, tears move downward — releasing sadness, fear, and shame through the body's own natural discharge process.

  • Cuts off the critic's fuel: Tears can interrupt fear before it transforms into the critic's catastrophizing thought loops. A good cry can silence the critic entirely.

  • Activates the parasympathetic nervous system: Unguarded crying triggers the relaxation response, directly counteracting the hyperarousal of a flashback.

  • Awakens self-compassion: When met with self-acceptance rather than shame, tears activate the developmentally arrested instinct of self-compassion — which then becomes the foundation of genuine self-esteem.

  • Enables compassion for others: The capacity to be fully present with others in pain grows from the same root as the capacity to be present with your own pain.

  • Crying and angering together: Both are needed for complete emotional release. Culturally, men are often shamed out of tears and women out of anger, leaving each with only half the grieving toolkit. Recovering both is essential. Grief that uses only one half can devolve into whining — a leak that never fully releases.

  • When crying is blocked: Deep, slow abdominal breathing can bring feelings into awareness. Holotropic rebirthing and Reichian therapy offer more intensive techniques for survivors whose emotions remain inaccessible.

3. Verbal Ventilation: The Golden Path to Intimacy

Verbal ventilation is speaking or writing in a way that is driven by and colored by emotion — the opposite of analyzing, reporting, or intellectualizing. It is the primary bridge between right-brain emotional experience and left-brain language and understanding.

  • Neurological rationale: During a flashback, the emotionally oriented right brain becomes hyperactivated while the thinking left brain goes offline. Verbal ventilation re-engages the left brain without abandoning the right, building new neural pathways so that thinking and feeling can happen simultaneously — a core component of emotional intelligence (Goleman).

  • Not the same as dissociation: Verbal ventilation must be distinguished from dissociative escape routes:

  • Right-brain dissociation: fantasy, fogginess, sleep, zoning out — numbing away from pain

  • Left-brain dissociation: obsessive worrying, catastrophizing, intellectualizing, trivialization — thinking around pain without feeling it

  • Uncensored talking or writing: The most useful form is free-associating aloud or on paper about whatever arises while staying connected to bodily sensations and emotional experience.

  • Effective only outside the critic's control: In early recovery, verbal ventilation can easily slide into verbal self-attack. If that happens, it intensifies rather than relieves flashbacks. A therapist or safe intimate can help identify and interrupt these shifts.

  • Alone or with a witness: Private verbal ventilation — speaking aloud in a car or empty room — is a legitimate and powerful tool. Physical aids (one client used a rubber hose on a phone book) can help release stuck anger during solo sessions.

  • Verbal ventilation and intimacy: Reciprocal sharing of emotional truth — mutual commiseration — is among the deepest forms of human intimacy. It directly repairs the childhood wound of being punished or ignored for authentic self-expression.

4. Feeling: Passively Working Through Grief

Feeling is a quieter, more receptive process than the active discharge of the first three practices. It means turning attention toward internal experience — body sensations, energetic states, affects — and staying present with them without trying to push them out or away.

  • Emoting vs. feeling: Emoting releases emotional energy outward (crying, yelling, speaking). Feeling stays with the inner experience, allowing awareness itself to dissolve and metabolize the sensation. It is the difference between expressing pain and inhabiting it without resistance.

  • Physical dimension: Suppressed emotions accumulate as muscular tension and armoring, particularly along the digestive tract. Digestive symptoms (diarrhea, nausea, constipation) can sometimes be understood as the body's long-term response to unexpressed emotion. Relaxing into feeling can gradually release this physical holding.

  • How to begin: Focus awareness on sensations of tightness in the face, throat, chest, or belly. Breathe into those areas. In early practice, feelings may surface strongly enough that they will need to be emoted out — that is fine and expected.

  • Advanced practice: In later recovery, it becomes possible to simply feel through fear, shame, depression, and anxiety without needing to actively discharge them. Awareness functions as a solvent that metabolizes pain.

  • Balancing feeling and emoting: The most complete grieving moves fluidly between feeling (passive) and emoting (active). Sometimes only presence is needed; other times, the feelings that arise through feeling need to be released through angering, crying, or verbal ventilation.

Grieving Ameliorates Flashbacks

Grieving directly targets the abandonment mélange — the interwoven cluster of fear, shame, and depression that forms the emotional core of most flashbacks.

  • Fear can be understood as grief for lost safety; crying and angering can move a person out of fear-states

  • Shame can be understood as grief for lost self-worth; angering redirects blame away from the self and dissolves shame

  • Depression can be understood as grief for lost aliveness; the full grieving process gradually restores access to vitality

Sufficient grieving eventually produces what Walker calls fierce, unshakeable self-allegiance — the settled conviction that you were innocent and loveable as a child and deserve care now.

Defueling the Inner Critic Through Grieving

Fear powers the toxic inner critic. The critic feeds off trapped fear, replaying the contemptuous and rejecting voices of early caregivers as though they were still present. Healthy angering and crying interrupt this loop before it can escalate into the critic's catastrophizing programs.

  • Trapped anger that cannot be directed outward turns against the self as self-hate, self-disgust, and self-attack — "the most grievous reenactment of parental abandonment"

  • Reclaiming anger from the critic and directing it at the critic ("Shut up!" / "No!") is one of the most direct forms of critic-shrinking available

  • As grieving proficiency increases, the critic's volume and intensity gradually ebb; without effective grieving, progress in critic-shrinking has a ceiling

When the critic blocks grieving: If tears or anger immediately trigger toxic shame or escalate flashbacks, the primary work of early recovery may need to focus on shrinking the critic before grief work can safely proceed. Starting with low-intensity verbal ventilation is often the most accessible entry point.

Techniques to Invite and Enhance Grieving

These techniques are particularly useful when crying or angering feel inaccessible. Different combinations work for different people at different times.

  • Find a safe, private space where you will not be heard or interrupted

  • Recall a moment of compassion — toward someone else, from a book, film, or news story — to prime the emotional pump

  • Invoke self-compassion: bring to mind someone who was genuinely kind to you, or imagine someone who would be

  • Journal or speak aloud uncensored — verbal ventilation about what is bothering you, without editing

  • Visualize being comforted by a higher power, a kind figure, or an imagined compassionate presence

  • Remember a time grieving brought relief — either your own experience or watching someone else cry or express anger in a healthy way

  • Inner child visualization: imagine holding your younger self, telling them it is okay and normal to feel sad or mad, and that you will protect them from the critic

  • Breathe deeply, slowly, and fully — abdominal breathing naturally brings awareness into the body's feeling zone

  • Use evocative music or film — poignant music, films that portray healthy anger release or genuine sorrow, can soften the critic's grip enough to let emotion move

Inner child reparenting exercise: Visualize traveling back to a moment of deep abandonment. See your adult self holding your younger self and offering unhurried, unconditional comfort: acknowledging what was unfair, affirming that none of it was the child's fault, and communicating that there is no rush to feel better. Even if it feels awkward at first, repeated practice gradually produces a genuine experience of self-compassion.

Grieving and Emotional Intelligence

When verbal ventilation is practiced consistently, it heals a specific developmental arrest: the inability to think and feel at the same time. This is the neurological consequence of early trauma — right-brain (emotional) and left-brain (cognitive) functioning become split.

As new neural pathways form through repeated verbal ventilation, the two hemispheres begin to work in coordination. The survivor can eventually access left-brain perspective (including the knowledge that a flashback is a flashback, not present danger) while remaining fully present to emotional experience. This is what Goleman describes as a core trait of emotional intelligence — the ability to think about feeling states in ways that generate healthy, appropriate, and relationally respectful responses.

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