I was 6 when my Mom passed from cancer and no one ever gave me the chance to grieve or even explain to a 6 year old why the grieving process is vital, no one sat me down for a one to one or even asked me was how I felt about it.
The emotional pain would surface but only in public when other kids would come up to me to say sorry about your Mom like at the funeral, then it welled up inside me and felt like I was going to break down crying, was I going to have an emotional out burst in public?, no so I had to push it back down as far as I could to avoid that embarrassment, it never came out when I was by myself and I wish it had back then or if there was someone else I could have opened up to.
I completely buried it deep down inside and just went on with life, there were times where if I was ever upset in certain situation's it would trigger the suppressed grieve to come out and it was always in public so I had to push it back down again, example been in class and not being able to to a math's sum triggered it to come out in front of all my class mates so again I had to push it back down.
By the time I was 15 my life was going great and I was always very proud of how well I was doing without having a mom in my life, I was highly charismatic, other then academics there was no area or part of my self I didn't excel in, I had the world at my feet and was set to do big thing's when I got older and that's when unresolved grieve hit me.
I didn't know what it was when it started, I knew something was wrong just didn't know what and from that point on my life took a drastic downward spiral, it's like you just stop being happy but without any specific cause, your not yourself anymore and you don't know why and I didn't have anyone close in my life for me to turn to for advise or guidance, I have memory's of this turning point the first one being hating all emotion inside myself, basic emotion such as smiling, displaying happiness and making a conscience choice to suppress everything and to get as far away as possible from it, at home I made the conscience choice to no longer take pleasure out of anything in life, television, food, music, thing's that I loved, I think the term for having an emotional attachment to object's and activity's that we enjoy and love doing is called cathexis?, so I broke off everything that I loved to do and things that gave me pleasure in life, I was changing inside, turning to the dark side if you will, I aspired to be an angry hateful person, something that I never was in the first place and peoples reactions were not good, I was always used to being at the top of the social hierarchy and loved to be around other people, fed off it, it fired up my charisma, but from here on in every interaction I had with people was negative, people reacted almost in disgust and turned there backs on me, the rock solid self confidence that I had always enjoyed was being shattered on a daily basis, a year later from all these changes I found my self completely alone in the world crying my eyes out every day trying to figure out how I could have fallen so far and ended up so alone.
From there I fell into a deep dark depression accompanied with so much anger that grew over the years and fed of itself, I'm not going to bother going into detail over the past 15 years because it was hell, from the age of 29 on wards I started getting better, last spring I finally grieved as if the person had just died and since then the depression and anger have gradually all but subsided, the tension Iv been carrying in my body these past 15 years is starting to leave and I'm experiencing something of an emotional re-awakening again, just wish it had happened a lot sooner, I have lost over half of my life to unresolved grief.
I'll leave it at that, I'm a male and about to turn 31 next month.
