LOSS AND TRAUMA
The tragedy is not that a man dies,
the tragedy of life is what dies
inside a man while he lives.
— Albert Schweitzer
The Wound That Can't Be Seen:
Healing the Wounded Heart Any creature that bonds grieves when it experiences separation—whether it be an elephant kicked out of the herd, a duck that has lost its mate or a mother who sends her child off to college. As humans, we are biologically designed to form kinship bonds through which we learn the lessons of love, caring and intimacy. When those bonds are broken, a piece of us breaks or is traumatized by that loss. Then we go through life hungry for what is missing. When we avoid the experience of grief, we lock ourselves up in the loss; we carry around an unhealed wound.
Humans are physical beings, existing in time and space. Scientists tell us today that our emotional bodies are just as physical as our corporeal bodies—only harder to see and measure. Healing is biologically driven: We cut ourselves, we clean and suture the wound. Then we rely on nature to complete our healing process. We cannot reknit our flesh, but nature can. So it is with emotional wounds. Wounds to the heart need to be cleaned in order to naturally heal. A wound to the psycho-spiritual body can be just as crippling to the whole person as a wound to the physical body.
Life is full of losses. Passing wholly through the stages of mourning—whether it be for a loved one, a job, a divorce, a child who has left home or a stage of life—not only strengthens the ego and the inner self, but increases our trust in life's ability to repair and renew itself. It deepens our inner relationship with the self.
Grieving serves a number of important functions. It releases the pain surrounding an event or situation so that it will not be held within the emotional and physical self. Grieving allows the wound to heal. If we do not grieve, we build walls around the ungrieved wound in order to protect it, even though these very walls can keep healing experiences out as well.
I have asked myself a thousand times what is the difference between a person who can live a healthy balanced life and one who cannot seem to get life together in a productive manner. We all face problems. But some people move through them and some remain stuck. I have observed that clients who succeed in therapy exhibit or acquire certain qualities:
They are able to self-reflect—that is, they look at their own thinking, feeling and behavior and have enough emotional distance from their self-identification so that they see themselves realistically.
They take their own good advice and live by it rather than spending valuable time and energy digging trenches, then sitting in and defending them. They identify what they are feeling and articulate it to themselves and others, which gives them the ability to face the pain of loss.
They identify their issues and live with a realistic rather than an idealized view of themselves, and when life hurts they are able to own their issues and work with them.
They cope with loss by calling it by its correct name, and move through the emotional turmoil of a grieving process.
They separate the past from the present, which allows them to live in today without sabotaging it with unresolved, unfinished business from the past.
They find meaning and purpose in their struggle, which is how spiritual transformation and growth take place.
They use life struggles not only to get through but to grow, thus deepening and strengthening their relationship with life and self and others.
I find it very exciting and hopeful to see this process at work. Over and over again I have seen lives that were in shambles turn around and become happy and productive. I have witnessed people who were caught in chronic despair awaken to their own pain, process it and get better. These are not overnight miracles. They are not the result of thinking the right thought, going to the cutting-edge seminar or seeing the perfect therapist. They are the result of surrendering to the grief process, having the courage and willingness to walk through it and the commitment to stay with it for as long as it takes. Healing is a series of quiet awakenings, born of the willingness to struggle to have a true and honest encounter with the self.
We have, in attempting to explain the complexities of the human mind and our relationship with self, created the field of psychology. But in our quest to contain and describe pathology, we have forgotten the philosophical roots of the field. The philosophers of ancient times took on no less of a goal than to better understand the whole of the human spirit, body, mind and soul. The ancient Greeks and yogis did not research representative control groups, but spent their lives in lifelong contemplation and observation, first of self and then of others. They looked at humans and attempted to order the functions of both mind and spirit. When psychology ignores the spirit, it goes its way without a conscience, without that very energy that first gave it life. Without a spiritual philosophy, life is reduced to only what we see. Scientific observation has expanded too much for life to be reduced to this narrow and superficial vision.
The field of psychology expanded very quickly after World War II in order to address the traumas of war, and perhaps this partially explains why its focus has remained so pathologically oriented. Perhaps this happened because psychology made its alliance with the Newtonian model of science, and broke off from philosophy and art. But the human spirit has always sought to express itself at the deepest level through art, writing, music and ritual. These are the voices of the soul, the vehicles through which inner turmoil and grief are worked through and brought from silence into song, through shadow into light. Throughout time we have expressed our humanness through the vehicles of body, mind, heart and soul. Possibly a society less inhibited in this personal expression would have less need for violence and less buried hurt flowing into the underground river of emotional isolation and psychological illness.
We can suffer loss in many ways. A person can be lost not only to death but to divorce, addiction, separation or alienation. The stages of mourning and bereavement following the death of a loved one are similar to what I observe people go through in the process of therapy, whether or not they have lost a loved one to death. Often the people I see in the field of addictions have lost a loved one to addiction, divorce or mental illness. In the case of children of divorce, the children lose the warmth and reliability of both parents in the home. They often feel left behind and deeply confused. "If Daddy can't get along with Mommy, then how can I? Should I move away too? What happened to our family?" Similarly, the children of alcoholics may still have the parent in the home, but they have lost access to their loved one. Their loved one is there, but emotionally the experience of those children is that their mother or father is lost to them, a prisoner of their addiction and unavailable to the children who need them. Often children of parents with psychiatric disorders such as clinical depression or psychosis feel that they can neither emotionally or psychologically find their parents, nor can they rely on them to help them with their own developmental needs on a consistent basis. Children who are physically, emotionally or sexually abused may feel the loss of innocence or childhood.
Clients that I serve seem to need to go through a process of active grieving of early childhood losses in order to be able to move into adult roles. If they do not go through this, and if they remain locked in the pain associated with early loss, they unconsciously have such a strong yearning for the original lost object (person or experience) that they spend much of their time hoping, wishing and trying to make their present-day adult situations into relationships and careers that will give them what they lost—which is, of course, not possible. Consequently, they move through cycles of excitement and disappointment, disillusionment and abandonment of their endeavor that closely mirror their earlier experience and serve to retraumatize them. Their access to adult roles is blocked because they are stuck in the unfinished business associated with their child roles. These are wounds that can go unattended in our need to "get on with life." Oftentimes, these ungrieved wounds lead to emotional problems and depression later in life.
Where do the grief and sadness and fear go when we, as a society, no longer honor the depth of loss and support someone through it? We seem to see feelings of grief as a sign of weakness rather than strength. In fact, true grieving both requires a strong ego and builds a strong ego because it asks us to stand beside our own pain and allow ourselves to have it. It asks us to be strong and compassionate and wise enough to hold our own woundedness in our hearts without abandoning ourselves at this very crucial moment. There is nothing weak about this. It is a sign of love and contact with what is real and alive in this world, and it requires the wisdom to give ourselves the right to be human.
The aforementioned are dramatic types of losses, but as we live our lives, we experience various ranges of loss on many levels. The loss of youth, the loss of our physical strength and prowess as we get older, the loss of hair, the loss of beauty, the loss of career, the empty nest syndrome—the list goes on. How we learn to cope with loss greatly influences how deeply we allow ourselves to experience life, and how successfully we are able to modify old roles and adopt new ones.
Giving Voice to the Wound There are tw...
