Trauma & Loss

Trauma is often linked to an experience of loss. Loss is often the invisible thread in trauma. Maybe loss of something you should have received, but didn’t (such as affection or love). Maybe it was a loss of something or someone you had, that got suddenly removed or slowly, and painfully removed. A job, your health, a loved one.

Loss is often like a terminal illness, nothing we can truly do except perhaps put it off for awhile. 

We tend to quantify and compare loss with statistics, numbers, length of time, severity, and difficulty. How many years did they suffer? Who had it worse?

But loss is loss, and no two losses are the same. Each loss (or trauma) inflicts a unique kind of pain. It is impossible to quantify and compare losses.

When we quantify and compare, we deprive an individual of the validation they need to move through the experience. Or we deprive ourselves.
We suddenly feel like the boy who scratched his finger but cried too hard to receive much sympathy. It is suddenly dismissed and unworthy of attention. 

So what can we do?

The goal is not to compare “how bad is it?”, it’s to gain meaning from the suffering so that we can grow through it.  

Processing or healing grief isn’t about getting over it either. It’s about learning to live through it. It’s to absorb it and allow it to become part of who we are, and who we choose to be from that experience. 

We cannot “recover” what loss we’ve experienced, but we can learn to grow in our loss by understanding the power of response. 

*recover defined as expecting to resume the way we lived prior to the loss.

*response defined as the choices we makes the grace we receive, and the transformation we experience during the loss .

A response, is the find meaning in what you have lost. Not right away, but by feeling it, processing it, and sitting in the pain. By allowing that pain to penetrate so deeply that it creates something new in you, something wonderful you didn’t think was possible.

Reference: A Grace Disguised by Jerry Sittser

-With deep sorrow comes deep joy- with the power of response.