My wife and I went

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

My wife and I went to see A Beautiful Mind tonight. It was a good movie, but a difficult one for me to watch. Anything that reminds me of the complete emptiness that losing time created in my soul is tough for me to swallow. Watching John come to grips with his delusions, and the sense of loss that he must feel when he realizes what they are was a stark reminder. The reactions of his coworkers to him after his hospital stay was eerily familiar to me as well. The uncomfortable laughter when you make a joke about your own mental illness, the worried looks, the neverending doubts, etc. all are there for the rest of your life when you have a breakdown that public. They are for me, as well. Even now, 5 years after the last hospital stay, more than 4 years since I’ve been off meds, there are still moments of uncomfortable laughter with my family and friends, and doubts in my own head. Like John’s delusions, they never really go away, you just learn to ignore them and go about your life.

She has a more “theater critic” type review of the movie on her blog , if you’re interested in seeing the movie.

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Something else interests me about grief though and that is the grief that child abuse survivors have because it’s complicated. We aren’t grieving a person we’ve lost, we’re grieving something we never had. A safe, happy childhood or a loving parental relationship that didn’t exist. The lack of any kind of family bonds as an adult, or the inability to trust anyone. Those are things we can, and should, grieve. Often we aren’t given the chance to do that. Other people expect us to “put it behind us” because it was a long time ago. We may even convince ourselves that the best option is to suck it up and forget it, no reason to think about any of that. But, I think there’s a reason to grieve the things we didn’t have as children. They are very real losses. They have very real impacts on our brains and our emotional well-being. We can’t change it now, but we can allow ourselves the freedom to feel grief over it. It’s part of the process. 

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