The shock and the pain blew me out of my world. All of the necessary activity of those days kept me connected with others, those who knew and cared. Then, all of the rituals of death were over.
Everyone went home. Their lives returned to normal.
Normal no longer existed for me. The regular world felt surreal. Everyone was behaving like they did before, and I was no longer a part of that world.
Surreal – real but not felt as real any more. In most cultures, people are assumed to be in deep grief for the first year after a death, and then they emerge from that state, and slowly re-integrate into their community. Space is given for grief. Grief is honored and respected.
In this Western culture, grief gets immediate attention and then it’s somehow supposed to be something to move past. People do not move past their past traumas. They grow larger emotionally to be able to know, feel, and remember their traumas while also becoming more capable of being present in their current lives. This is called Post-traumatic Growth. When people are allowed the space they need to grieve, when their grief is not curtailed, they will learn to hold both the painful reality of loss along with the love they still feel for the person who died. From there, their lives expand to hold both past, present, and future. Their emotional world deepens, compassion and wisdom grow.
I am a psychologist specializing in working with people who have been severely traumatized. What I already knew about trauma helped me enormously when my son died. I let myself grieve deeply. I didn’t try to ‘move on’. I knew our culture’s response to death was inadequate, superficial, and, at times, harmful to the grieving person. I keened, wailed, sobbed, and cried, the intensity coming down over time, naturally. Meanwhile, I knew I needed to integrate this loss into my life and future, so that my son’s legacy in my life would be a good one, in honor of him. Deep grief makes those around us very uncomfortable. They want to fix it, make it better, and that actually makes it harder because it tells the grieving person that they’re ‘too much’. So, the grieving person has a choice – grieve alone, or stifle the grief and maintain contact with others. This is a horrible dilemma, because when people are traumatized, they need the presence of others. They need good, warm, comforting contact with people who know and care about them. Human contact helps people heal. When there is no one around, the grieving person suffers in isolation, or becomes numb to their own pain in order to stay in connection. Sadness slides into depression. Friendships become distant. Some people may feel the world isn’t real any more, or the world is real and they’re not. Those are dissociative mechanisms – derealization and depersonalization. They are like circuit breakers in the nervous system, lowering the ‘charge’ by disconnecting the emotions.
Many people experiencing deep grief are also very familiar with the symptoms of PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – intrusive thoughts, avoidance, numbing out, nightmares, problems with sleep. It would be helpful to take the “Disorder” off of that diagnosis. It’s Post Traumatic Stress. It’s a human response to trauma. It would be inhuman to not have a response to this kind of huge trauma. The responses are normal. The problem is finding ways to help calm the nervous system and integrate the all-too-intolerant emotions of loss, anguish, and try to build a life without someone who is now gone.
One of the common traps for people who have lost others is the “I should have” trap. “I should have known.” “I should have been able to stop this.” This is a normal first level thought process. It happens commonly right after the death. For a short time, it may be helpful, backtracking in the mind to find clues that may have been missed, or possible solutions that weren’t tried, etc. That’s a way the mind tries to learn what can be learned to prevent this from happening again. It normally goes away with time. However, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it gets stuck. When that happens, it’s usually a wish in disguise. “I wish I had known.” “I wish I had been able to stop this.” The wish is real, and if it is experienced as a wish, it doesn’t tend to cause distress. It expresses a truth – a wish that this loss could have been prevented. It can be harmful, however, if it’s felt as a ‘should’. “I should have known,” and “I should have been able to stop this” turn into an assumption of omnipotence. None of us has that kind of all-knowing and all-powerful control. We are all simply human, doing our best with what we do know and actually can do, and that’s limited. We do have influence over others, sometimes a lot. However, none of us has control over others. We just don’t. So, we use our influence as best we can, and our knowledge and whatever power is available, and sometimes that’s enough. And, sometimes it’s not.
The feeling of everything being surreal that comes after the funeral, when everyone returns to their normal life, and we no longer have a normal life, marks the start of a new way of living in this world. We are part of it, and often feel apart from it. The challenge is to expand – to honor our grief, deepen our compassion for ourselves along with everyone else, and notice how we grow. Post traumatic growth is what we can do for ourselves, in honor of those we lost, so that their legacy in our lives is a good one.
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