Loss of what could have been

 I was talking with my therapist this week about my weight loss journey. I've been working on the emotions behind the over eating and just didn't feel like I had figured it out yet. We narrowed it down to something that happens in my relationships. My first marriage, as well as my second. So my therapist asked my about my first husband...how we met, etc. I gave him the run down of events and then began to tell him about my first miscarriage. I was five months pregnant and, I was clear to indicate that I did not feel any motherly bond, or that I thought my baby had died. I've only told the complete story to a few people, not letting on how traumatic the experience was. For the first time, I teared up when telling my therapist. I realize that I brushed off any feelings about not only the miscarriage, but that whole relationship and the abuse and terrible ending. I did not allow myself to grieve or validate any emotions at all because I had made a series of bad choices that led to the marriage and I had no idea how to be married. In other words, I had made my bed and I had to lie in it. When we split up, no one said anything to me except my stepmother. She said, "we didn't like him anyway". As I left my therapists office, a melancholy settled over me and for days I have felt so emotional about everything. I have never allowed myself to grieve over anything other than my mother's death. Growing up I was taught that my feelings would never be validated because Scientology taught that if you validate feelings, then it would teach people to use those feelings for manipulative purposes. For example, if I fell down and got hurt, or got sick, I was given no empathy, or even acknowledgment because I would then get hurt or sick more often just to get the attention. Expression of feelings were never accepted and I was expected to toughen up. If I wasn't happy, I needed to fix my own life and figure it out. My brother's called my cry baby if I cried about anything. Or they would tell me to stop being a girl. 

Now, don't get me wrong, I have a good life and fantastic relationships with my family now but it wasn't always so. I'm so thankful that we all 'grew up'. But, I have a life time of grief that I've never allowed myself to feel because most of the world had it worse than I did and it's my fault if my life is crappy, so I just needed to suck it up and fix it. 

My plan is to start going over all the events and things in my life that I need to grieve over. With the baby I lost, I didn't feel like there was a death of a baby that I bonded with, but the whole situation was terrible - I was treated terribly by the hospital, no one had any empathy for me, and I lost what I wanted. I lost the future child that I was excited about. It was also the beginning of the end of my marriage, even though it was a bad marriage anyway. So many things that I had hoped and dreamed of, ended. That's worth grieving over.