Cycle Breakers and Traumatic Grief
You can’t talk about cycle breaking without talking about grief.
Cycle breakers experience deep grief on their journeys to learning how to heal and support themselves. It’s often complicated grief that involves recognizing the depth of what has been lost. This includes what was lost in the past, what isn’t accessible in the present, and what the future has lost. This kind of grief isn’t necessarily about losing someone who has died. It’s about losing relationships, losing your childhood, losing certain hopes for the future, and reckoning with the reality of what is true.
Cycle breakers come from families that are really unhealthy. They often had to grow up way too soon and act like parents themselves while they were still children. When my clients first come to me, sometimes they already know this to be true, and sometimes it takes a while for them to realize that they were a parentified child. Sometimes they define their childhoods as traumatic, and sometimes they use minimization to cope and say it was just rough or had its difficult moments. Families are by far the most influential and greatest source of support for children. When the trauma you’ve experienced in your life came from your family of origin, you are left without the support you need to healthfully cope with trauma and you are reliant on those who hurt you. When children grow up in this kind of environment, their brains and attachment systems wire around it. It's common for them to minimize events and develop negative beliefs about themselves. Self-blame and believing that they did something wrong or are inherently bad is emotionally safer for a child than realizing that their caregivers aren’t emotionally safe.
We carry a lot of this patterning with us into adulthood. It takes a lot of intention and challenging emotional work to dismantle this wiring and rebuild your beliefs about yourself. One of the biggest challenges is experiencing traumatic grief when you realize the painful truths and realities about your family.
Here are some examples of traumatic grief that cycle breakers may experience:
Feeling completely separate and different from your family—a feeling of not belonging anymore and of being othered because you are the only one who is working on yourself and trying to break the cycle.
Realizing that you never got the chance to just be a kid. Joy, ease, and being care-free were things you missed out on.
Realizing that you were unprotected by those who were supposed to protect, nourish, and support you. What should have been a source of security and support was a source of fear, insecurity, or emptiness.
Realizing that you may never have the kind of relationships with your family that you want and need.
Realizing that your family members do not have the capacity to fully see you or heal the relationship. This is a type of loss that can extend into the future as you realize that the relationship may never change like you had hoped.
Witnessing and creating healthy relationships with children and realizing how much you needed an adult like you growing up. The loss here is profound, particularly if you have children of your own. Seeing children get what you did not can be a mix of gratitude, grief, pain, and envy.
Watching children in your family grow up with family members who are not able to break the intergenerational cycles of trauma. It gets passed down and witnessing this while also not being able to do much about it is extremely painful and disheartening.
A feeling of being alone in the world. Realizing and reckoning with the realities of being a cycle breaker is painful and lonely. Experiencing disconnection from the family you grew up with while also not having a community of other cycle breakers around you who relate can be a very lonely experience.
Being a cycle breaker is hard work. There’s no denying it. It’s often a lonely path full of obstacles and confusion. It can be hard to know what the right thing to do is when you are trying to learn healthy boundaries and communication. You are simultaneously unlearning what was modeled to you in your family and educating yourself on how to be the healthiest and happiest version of yourself. Not everyone around you will get it or be able to support you in the way you need. I specialize in working with cycle breakers and I can help you.
The first step to working together is to schedule a free 20 minute phone consultation. Investing your time, money, and emotional energy into therapy or coaching is a big deal. It’s an investment in yourself and your wellbeing. It’s important that you make this investment with trust and confidence that working together is a good fit. This is why I offer a 20 minute phone consultation. During this time we can identify your needs and answer any questions that you have about working together.
Hanna Woody is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor in Asheville, North Carolina. She has over 12 years of professional counseling experience and specializes in breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma, childhood trauma, and the Enneagram. Certified in the Embodiment Tradition, she has over 150 hours of training and teaching experience. Hanna is in private practice and provides online mental health therapy, Enneagram coaching, and Enneagram training.