HSP Retreat: Sacred Grief | Lorna’s Story
Healing Early Childhood Grief,
Earning Secure Attachment, Basking in Spiritual Grace
For many HSP women, the deepest emotional wounds are rooted in early childhood losses that traditional talk therapy often cannot fully reach. When we carry an insecure attachment style into adulthood, we often feel vulnerable to rejection, criticism, and emotional abandonment. True healing requires a nurturing environment like an HSP Retreat to bypass the analytical mind, honor our need to grieve, and safely move toward a secure attachment style. Lorna’s journey demonstrates how somatic breathwork can heal life-long grief, manage family conflict, and restore inner peace.
What You Will Discover in This Story
- Heal Early Childhood Grief: Discover how a single session of somatic breathwork washes away layers of buried childhood maternal grief on a deep cellular level.
- Earn a Secure Attachment Style: Learn how body-based spiritual healing breaks lifelong patterns of relationship insecurity and feelings of rejection.
- Navigate Conflict Calmly: Experience how resetting your physical nervous system gives you the capacity to handle difficult family conversations without getting emotionally activated.
Here’s Lorna’s (a pseudonym) story, in her words.
Trusting the Soul’s Guidance Over Medication
Before seeing Benita Esposito, one psychotherapist suggested that I do a year of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and start on an anti-depressant. It seems conventional practitioners often recommend medication when they run out of tools. I knew deep in my soul that what I needed was healing on an emotional level, not drugs.
I have worked with Benita Esposito for ten months. We have done both personal counseling as well as incredible couples counseling with my husband. I’ve had a life-long insecure attachment style that was impacting all my relationships, including my marriage of seventeen years.
I’m so grateful that I accepted her invitation to attend a HSP Breathwork Retreat that included a spiritual healing method. I’m a highly sensitive person and I was apprehensive. It seemed a little unnerving to not know what would come up during breathwork, but I enrolled anyway because I trusted Benita.
Lorna’s Childhood History:
Weathering Early Loss and Abuse
My birth mother died when I was two, and my father remarried just four and a half months later.
My mother was very sick after I was born, and she also had another baby. It’s easy to imagine that getting individual loving attention from her might have been challenging. I was often cared for by aunts and grandparents before my mother passed away. I had been the third of four in my family, and when my father remarried, I had three older step-siblings, so I became number six of seven.
My stepmother was not a nurturing woman. In fact, she vacillated between mild and extreme abuse throughout my life. Emotional and physical aggression was a normal way of life for me. The verbal abuse lasted until I was forty when I finally began to stand up for myself. Needless to say, I wasn’t close to my stepmother. While I still call her weekly and do my best to care for her, it is out of love for my deceased father and my commitment to being a Disciple of Christ, not out of a loving attachment.
I have grieved for years about not having a deep mother-daughter relationship.
Childhood Abuse Impacts Adult Relationships
During my 17-year marriage, I’ve tried to develop a healthy loving bond with my three stepchildren. They rejected me from the very beginning. Even though we’ve had lots of counseling with other therapists, I continued to feel vulnerable and emotionally unsafe with my husband and his children. I’ve been sensitive to criticism like many highly sensitive people, and I’ve felt emotionally abandoned. My husband’s family told me that I am too sensitive, too picky, and defensive.
The optimist in me kept thinking, “If I can’t have a loving attachment with my stepmother, maybe I can have one with my stepdaughters.” Fortunately, God does compensate, and I have one daughter-in-law whom I’m very close to, as well as other young women who are open to the love that I have to share.
Lake Chatuge in the GA & NC Blue Ridge Mountains—the serene mountain home of our HSP Retreats.
The Courage to Leap During Breathwork
Day One of the HSP Retreat
- Parental Loss: Processing and healing the lingering grief surrounding my mother’s death.
- Childhood Wounds: Addressing and releasing the deep hurts of childhood neglect and abuse.
- Sudden Grief: Releasing the sudden, painful shock of my father’s unexpected passing when I was 35 years old.
I was surprised at how quickly I began to cry, but this was not an ordinary cry. The crying turned into vigorous sobbing that was loud at times. I am still amazed at how much grief came out of my body. I cried for almost an hour!
At one point, I was grieving that I could not remember ever having a loving embrace from my mother. Oh, how I wanted to feel that! Just then … without any words between us … Benita knelt beside me, and reached down and hugged me, heart to heart while I sobbed in her loving embrace. I think she must have held me for ten minutes until I could finally take a deep breath. Then she released, and so did I.
Near the end of the breathwork, the music shifted to the sound of soothing ocean waves gently crashing against the shore while seagulls called in the background. My body unwound, and I sank into a sweet relaxation. As Benita asked us to imagine walking along the beach with Jesus, I sensed Him giving me a heart, which I tucked into my pocket for safekeeping.
When we finished our breathwork session, I was filled with extraordinary love and peace. I felt so known and loved by my Heavenly Father, my Savior.
God directed Benita to embrace me exactly when I needed it.
This was a life-changing embrace, and I am forever changed! Forever grateful!
Day Two of the HSP Retreat
On Sunday, round two of breathwork started. I quickly found that there was nothing to clear. It was all gone! The image of a fire truck came to my mind. I know that may seem strange, but it was as if it required a huge fire hose (not a small garden hose, or even a pressure washer) to aggressively wash away all the grief on a deep cellular level.
The message I heard from the Holy Spirit was, “You are whole and complete.”
After the HSP Retreat
A few days after the retreat, I was talking with one of my stepdaughters to clear up some things that had happened months before. I’m so grateful that I could start the conversation by sharing with her that I had completed my grieving, and that I now had a greater capacity for loving her.
During the conversation, I allowed her to share anything that was upsetting her so I could apologize. The best part was that I did not get emotionally activated at all! I could see her point and commit to creating a deeper partnership with her. In the past, I did not have the capacity to do that because there was way too much hurt inside of me.
I am so grateful for Benita’s exquisite expertise, her powerful intuition, and her caring Christian heart that facilitated such profound healing. In addition to Benita, I found the other participants to be loving as well. It was a powerful, safe, beautiful environment to heal.
Postscript nine years later:
At the end of the breathwork, Benita asked us to draw a picture of what we had experienced. I drew hearts falling from heaven—hearts from my mother, June, who passed away when I was only two years old. Today, nine years later, I still have a beautiful Viennese crystal heart hanging from my rearview mirror. I love it so much. It constantly reminds me of my mother’s love and God’s love for me, both of which were so beautifully revealed during that HSP Retreat.
Bypassing the Mind to Heal the Heart
Lorna arrived at the retreat carrying the heavy weight of early childhood loss. She wanted to heal the grief of her mother dying when she was two years old, and the trauma caused by her abusive stepmother. Lorna knew she needed to transform her insecure attachment style and process decades of rejection by several family members.
By leaning into her painful emotions, she experienced a profound somatic and spiritual rebirth. Through the power of the breath and intimate spiritual connection, she washed away layers of cellular grief. Wrapped in the comforting embrace of God’s love, she walked away with a complete sense of inner peace and resilience.
Ordinary talk therapy can’t help you heal the grief of early childhood loss like this, but breathwork can. It bridges the gap between psychological healing and spiritual connection, allowing you to settle into an sustainable state of safety and peace.
This kind of amazing transformation is available to you, too. If you are a highly sensitive introvert ready to clear emotional wounding and reclaim your Radiant Authentic Self, I am here to guide you.
Note to HSP Men
Lorna’s profound transformation shows how somatic breathwork can gently heal deep-seated grief and restore the heart. While my in-person mountain HSP Retreats are designed exclusively for women, your emotional healing matters to me. I offer private sessions tailored to help sensitive men safely process profound loss and navigate life transitions. Depending on the interest, I host a Virtual Resilience Intensive for men to help you shift out of emotional survival mode and reclaim your inner peace. If you are ready to address your unique HSP challenges, contact me to explore private online sessions with me.
👉🏼 If you resonate with this journey and are ready to move beyond your wounds, I invite you to explore my upcoming HSP Retreats.
About Benita A. Esposito
Healing, Growth & Mastery
“Chief Trail Guide” for Highly Sensitive Introverts on the Hero’s Journey to the Authentic Self.
Drawing on my rich background as a licensed psychotherapist in Georgia and North Carolina, I operate globally as an ordained minister, spiritual counselor, and life coach. I am also the author of the Amazon bestseller, The Gifted Highly Sensitive Introvert: Wisdom for Emotional Healing and Expressing Your Radiant Authentic Self. I design emotionally intimate retreats and nurturing learning spaces to guide you toward deep emotional healing. Together, we move beyond the wounds to unlock your full creative potential, using the same transformative tools that changed my own life. By combining body-based healing like Brainspotting and Breathwork with a grace-filled Christian perspective, I help you quickly pinpoint limiting patterns so you can experience lasting inner peace without wasting precious time.
When I’m not working with clients online or leading retreats at my home overlooking a lake in the Blue Ridge Mountains, you can find me tending to my flower garden, rowing, or capturing the beauty of nature through my camera lens.
👉 Ready for your breakthrough? Schedule a Discovery Call to see if our upcoming HSP Retreats are the right fit for your journey.
Disclaimer: Benita A. Esposito, M.A., is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in Georgia, a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LCMHC) in North Carolina, and an ordained minister and spiritual counselor through the Association for the Integration of the Whole Person (AIWP). While retreat participants enter into a formal client relationship for life coaching and spiritual counseling, the workshops, virtual intensives, and retreats offered through this website are strictly educational, coaching, and spiritual in nature. These services do not constitute psychological diagnosis, clinical treatment, or traditional psychotherapy, and do not establish a psychotherapeutic therapist-client relationship. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or require clinical mental health treatment, please consult a licensed professional in your local area.
Photo credit:
- Benita’s photo: KBoyerPhotography
- Lake Chatuge Landscapes: Benita A. Esposito
“Your Authentic Life. Anything Else is a Compromise.”
Life Coaching and Spiritual Counseling for Sensitive Introverts
on the Hero’s Journey to the Authentic Self
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