A mother’s cry

No change comes from outside

We try to shape a soul with everything we have. Tears, pleading, bargaining, bitter words, tenderness, threats. All of it lands somewhere outside the place where change actually happens. A spirit turns from the inside, in its own time, and no amount of love applied from without can do that work on its behalf.

What does move someone is recognition: the moment they see the need for themselves, and see a path, and feel the urgency of it. With open eyes and a willing heart the transformation begins, and it is theirs. Which means the most loving thing available to us is often to stop pulling at the strings, and to find peace while we wait.

For in the depths, each must explore their own truths. And I love you, my child, either way.

What loss is

Loss, for a mother, is not one feeling. It reaches into everything, because her identity has been braided together with her child for so long that losing them removes part of herself. It arrives as a long ache rather than an event: dreams that will not now happen, moments that will never be shared, an ordinary Tuesday that suddenly has a hole in it.

It tests her strength, and at the same time it shows the size of what she carried. There is isolation in it, and longing, and a void that nothing quite fills. And there is also, held in the same place, the memory of a love that does not obey time.

What we do in a session

I guide you into a deeply relaxed state where the feelings can be looked at safely, at your pace, and where what has been held can begin to move. We work to ease the pain, settle the anxiety around it, and strengthen your ability to carry what remains.

You will be able to revisit the good memories too, and feel the love you still hold, which is often where the relief comes from. The aim is calm, inner strength and self-compassion: not forgetting, and not being asked to be finished, but being able to go forward with more peace than you arrived with.

There is no schedule for grief, and no need to arrive tidy. Reach out when you are ready and we will start with a conversation.

Angela Pereira is a certified hypnotherapist and Parts Therapy facilitator in Mulbarton, Johannesburg South, working in person and online. She came to this work through her own hypnotherapy, for a driving phobia that had quietly organised her life.