Intrapsychic Loss

Excerpt from “Grief is Holy: A Practical Guide to Grieving with God”:

I feel at different intersections of every loss, intrapsychic loss happens as well. This is where our plans for ourselves and the life we live or planned to live with others, gets crushed. Whether the death of a loved one, divorce, functional, systemic, or role loss, the life we imagined gets altered, often without our permission. The dreams die or get broken apart, and pieces of who we are go the way those dreams did. The job we have, the person we married (and may have lost), the parent that died, the law that got passed, the accident we were in - it wasn’t the plan. This part looks differently than we thought it would. And there’s a backpack of grief we can carry because of it.

Intrapsychic loss is the death of a dream. It’s the death of the picture of what we thought would be. Oftentimes, trying to reconcile what we thought would be with what is currently our reality can hand us a backpack of grief and open the door to grieving and having to let go of the picture we had. Ready or not, when dreams get ripped away, the confusion and disorienting feeling of trying to figure out what is next can be heavy.

What has been your experience with losing a dream?