There is another entrance to grief, a second gateway, different from the gate connected to losing someone or something that we love. This grief occurs in the places often untouched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our life...
These neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair. What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but *we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth*....
We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our inacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion....
Grief is a powerful solvent, capable of softening the hardest of places in our hearts. When we can truly weep for ourselves and those places of shame, we have invited the first waters of healing to wash through our souls.
— Francis Weller
Excerpted from The Wild Edge of Sorrow
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