Unless I missed something in her essay "Suffering the Death of a Loved One," Anderson does not explicitly mention the possibility of our mourning bereavement in the present as perhaps hooking in abandonment feelings from past experiences of losses, but not necessarily losses due to the death of loved ones. However, in my own recent experience of mourning bereavement, I have also been experiencing mourning abandonment feelings from the past. (But I have not had the impression that I am also mourning other bereavements from the past, although I suppose that that could also happen.) In other words, I have been experiencing more or less concurrently but not exactly simultaneously both kinds of mourning processes that she writes about. To be sure, mourning the death of a loved one started first and proceeded for a time before I had the impression that I was also beginning to mourn abandonment feelings from earlier losses in my life that I evidently had not mourned adequately and completely at the time. As a result, I have found Anderson's two accounts of the two respective mourning processes helpful in trying to sort out and understand my own experiences of mourning.
Because Anderson's new book is Taming Your Outer Child, I should point out that our outer child acts out our inner child. Perhaps our inner child will always endure within us. However, when we mourn abandonment feelings, we are mourning abandonment feelings of our inner child. As a result, as we mourn abandonment feelings, our tendencies to act out our inner child's abandonment feelings should be reduced bit by bit.
Our outer child tends often to act out of anger. As I suggested above, Achilles' anger at being dishonored by Agamemnon can be understood as the kind of anger that involves abandonment feelings. In her book The Journey from Abandonment to Healing, Anderson writes about mourning abandonment feelings. Through most of the Iliad, Achilles is mourning abandonment feelings. As I suggested above, in her book Taming Your Outer Child, Anderson writes about how our inner child is suffering abandonment feelings which in turn are acted out by the outer child. Up to and including Achilles' refusal to accept Agamemnon's gifts of restitution, Achilles' wounded inner child is acting out his inner wounds. As a result, Achilles' outer child dominates his refusal to accept Agamemnon's gifts of restitution.
After Hector kills Patroclus in battle, Achilles can set aside his anger at Agamemnon because his (Achilles') anger at Hector is overpowering. It would probably be fair to say that Achilles was blind-sided by the death of Patroclus. Achilles probably did not expect that to happen. Under the best of circumstances, Achilles would have recognized that he himself was in part to blame for Patroclus' death, because he allowed Patroclus to re-enter the battle when he could have kept him out of the battle. He is also obviously mourning the death of Patroclus, and Anderson reminds us that mourning bereavement usually does include anger over the death of the deceased.
But let us examine Achilles' anger in light of Aristotle's challenging standard. Agamemnon and Agamemnon alone is the sole target of Achilles' anger at being dishonored by Agamemnon. Achilles does not take his anger out on anybody else. In this way, Achilles demonstrates enormous self-control, the carefully cultivated self-control of a trained warrior.
After Achilles re-enters the war, he is an overpowering killing-machine on the battlefield. Nevertheless, he does not kill non-combatants, as Americans, for example, have by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Achilles finally kills Hector, he ties Hector's corpse to his chariot and drags his corpse around to desecrate his body. By desecrating Hector's corpse, Achilles carries his anger too far.
I belabor these details to say that Aristotle and everybody in his audience knew the story of Achilles' anger. Against the back-drop of Achilles' anger, Aristotle formulated his challenging standard regarding the expression of anger that Bradshaw invokes in the subtitle of his book and in three different places in his book. Aristotle did not just dream up his challenging standard for the expression of anger out of the blue as it were. But most of the behaviors that Anderson writes about in her book Taming Your Outer Child involve expressing anger in ways that fall short of Aristotle's challenging standard. In light of the various ways in which our outer child acts out our inner child's abandonment feelings, it may be the case for many of us that there is no end in sight of our mourning abandonment feelings. Mourning our abandonment feelings is necessary until our mourning work spontaneously lifts.
When our mourning work spontaneously lifts, we will feel stronger. As a result of mourning our abandonment feelings, we will thereby open the way to new inner strength, as Bradshaw in the title Reclaiming Virtue. Virtue is the result of inner strength. The various particular virtues that Aristotle discusses in his Nicomachean Ethics are distinct forms of inner strengths.
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