Lionheart Grief Coaching

If you go looking for definitions on Google, prepared to be disappointed, but deferred grief is unprocessed/unfelt grief which can manifest itself in mental illness, substance abuse, anger, and/or violence.

Deferred Grief is often passed down generationally until it is processed and felt. Think of it as the cause of generational trauma.

A good example of this can be found in Disney’s Encanto. The matriarch suffered the incredibly traumatic loss of her husband. Rather than work through the pain of her grief, she pushes it down to make a safe place for her children and other people in her community displaced by war. In not confronting her loss, her expectations of herself and her family rise to a level that is unattainable, impacting her children and her grandchildren. So bent on perfection, the family and, symbolically, their home begins to fall apart.

It’s not just true in the movies. When the people we love don’t process their pain, it doesn’t just go away. It has to be felt or it morphs into unhealthy coping behaviors such as substance abuse, rage, violence. It can turn into severe depression, anxiety, and present in other disorders such as OCD. These difficulties don’t just impact the original griever- more often than not the people they love the most inherit the debt of grief through generational trauma.

And, sadly, it often keeps getting passed down until a descendant somewhere down the line does the emotional work to pay off the grief debt by acknowledging their own pain and tending to the grief it has created within them.

In Encanto, it is only through the work of one grandchild, Mirabel, that the cycle of generational trauma is broken.

Encanto is Mirabel’s story of breaking free of generational trauma by naming the source of the pain and working within herself and her family to heal the grief through self-love and forgiveness.

In your own grief journey, it can be helpful to be aware of the potential of passing down your grief if you don’t process it. Feeling the pain of loss and tending to your grief is difficult, but unless we want to pass our heartache to others, we must confront it with all the courage we have.