The Grey Tree
Dealing with grief and anger after losing a parent
She was nine years old. And she had lost a parent.
Not a mystery case this time. The grief, the anger, the helplessness are all completely understandable. None of it can be argued away or fixed with the right words.
What I can do in those situations is give a child somewhere for it to go.
Eyes closed, she looked into her inner world. What she found was a lone grey tree.
She reached out her hand and touched it. And immediately felt the full weight of what she was carrying. Grief, sadness, and anger, all at once. On a scale of zero to ten, she said it was a nine.
Some of the anger was directed at the parent who had left her.
That anger is common in these cases. And it makes sense. A child who loses a parent doesn’t just feel loss. They feel abandoned.
Also, the parent who left never got to explain. Or to say sorry. The conversation that needed to happen never happened.
So we went and had it.
Eyes still closed, we floated up together to heaven (or wherever a child believes her parent has gone). We found the huge gates and went through them.
There she talked to her parent.
The details of the conversation belong to her. What I can say is that the parent explained. Apologized. Made clear, in the way that only this child’s own inner world could make clear, that leaving had never been a choice made lightly.
That the leaving was not her fault and not a rejection of her.
That she was loved.
After all these important things had been said, forgiveness could take place.
On the way back from heaven, we stopped at a rainbow. She filled a gigantic cup with rainbow water to fill the emptiness inside. It tingled as she imagined drinking it.
To end the session and reinforce the change, we returned to her inner world and the grey tree. She watered it with her rainbow water, and it immediately started to glow.
She drew what she experienced. The tree now glowing. The enormous cup with the rainbow water.
The most beautiful part came entirely from her. I did not ask her to do that:
The sun and the clouds in her drawing tell you everything: up in the sky, where her parent now rests, peace has moved in.
Some things cannot be fixed. A parent who is gone is gone. That truth can’t be changed. But this child carrying grief and anger could be given the conversation that reality stole from her. And that conversation changed how she carries the weight.
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