Grief is a normal response to loss and change. It comes with sadness, sorrow and an inner ache that can be felt with our whole being. Crying is normal and common behavior when grieving, and it can also look very different. While grief is not a comfortable feeling to have, it shows us that we realize a loss of something important in our life. We are missing something that we should have (or should have had) and there is an area of pain inside that is caused by this lack in our life. There is an empty space where something good should be. Society has a tendency to pressure people to move on but that has proven to be ineffective at moving people through the process of grief.
Grief as part of integration
I don’t know if there is grief that is not directly related to a form of integration, but integrative processes always come with grief, even if it is just a short moment before we move on. It is the emotional response to realization in its various forms and usually happens after an anger response if anger is part of the personal process.
Grief after integrating memories
When trauma processing is successful, it will result in grief. We will realize how much the traumatic event has taken from us. Maybe we get a sense for what we missed out on because we were busy surviving. We might realize all the things other kids had that we never even imagined. Even just basic safety or care become something we envy others for. However things play out for us, there should be a greater sense that the past is over and that we are living with the effects of it today. What has been a mostly sensory experience (flashback) should become a narrative one (our story). In a healthy integration process we will feel grief about all the effects the events had on our life. The realizations of the impact it had will come in waves as we discover new layers or areas of life that were influenced. It can take a while for these waves to find a place of peace.
I consider grief one of the hallmarks of successful trauma integration. If it doesn’t happen, something went wrong. We didn’t realize all there is to realize. Even small losses create grief when we are aware of them. If we don’t feel grief after trauma processing, something did not reach our awareness. Even when events are long in the past and we have created a good life for ourselves, a sense of grief should wash over us, however briefly. I would always return to the memory to double check it if no grief sets in at all. I believe that it means that something about it is still dissociated. That doesn’t mean that the therapy intervention failed. The process might just not be complete yet. Realizations need integrative capacity and they can very well still be too big to handle and come at a later time.
I intentionally don’t use the word ‘trauma confrontation’ here. While they are tested and tried tools to process trauma that usually result in grief and integration, there are other ways to approach our personal history and work our way through integrative actions. It doesn’t matter if it is Reframing, Rescripting or something that mainly works with radical grounding. If there is an integrative effect there will also be grief. People who reflect about the past and present a lot might get to this experience without formal confrontation. In an unexpected way, that makes approaches like psychoanalysis, that are not usually recommended for trauma, weirdly useful again (though probably still not very efficient). Trauma disrupts how we make meaning of life events. Grief is part of the process that repairs meaning.
Grief about life changes
It is not rare for people with a chronic trauma history to have very difficult lives. Poverty, continued violence and retraumatization, stigmatization and dehumanization. On top of our childhood trauma we have years and years of hardship that leave a mark. If we are lucky, our recovery journey includes a path for our whole life to recover, in all areas, and circumstances will eventually change. We might find stability and safety. Changes like these need to be integrated as well. If we don’t, we might walk through our new life while our mind and body are stuck in the old one. Or we might start a new life and dissociate where we came from. There can be a tendency to create new everyday parts that are adapted to the new circumstances when older parts don’t manage to get through the transition. Too big, too fast, whatever it is, we might leave ourselves behind and start fresh. But these splits always come at a cost. It is worth the effort to move the whole system through the transition into a better life with great care to make sure we all realize that it is happening. And that transition needs grief as a main catalyst.
To avoid leaving ourselves behind in the past to embrace the new, we need to create a continued line between our old experiences, the times where transition happened and then into the new experience. It was one big story arch that led us here. The past was true and now reality also looks different. As we remember where we came from we can notice the moments of change and how meaningful they were. Our past self was miserable and stuck and it deserves to be honored and remembered for making it through. This is a good time to develop deeper compassion for ourselves. Everything belongs, even the things we would prefer to forget about. This story arch made us who we are today. There are important moments hidden in our past that will help guide us in the future. We might develop bitter-sweet feelings for our own story when grief mixes with our compassion for ourselves. To manage big life changes without dissociating where we came from, we need to grieve the hardships and tragedy of it all. Without realizing the whole story we might end up reenacting the past and thereby risking our future.
Sometimes life changes happen early in recovery when we first find safety. Others might be late changes that are made possible because we integrated more memories and it changed how our cPTSD affects us. Things like learning who we are without constant stress responses might need just this kind of grieving process to fully embrace them. Grief doesn’t just feel sad, it lowers defensive mechanisms and allows for more depth. An old mentor of mine used to say that you mourn every loss, big or small. And sometimes we mourn the loss of a drastically worse life because it means change and change isn’t easy. Becoming someone new without rejecting who we used to be is hard. Being able to hold our story arch in mind will also give us a greater sense of fullness and wholeness.
Grief that comes with fusion
[CN: This paragraph might feel overwhelming for people who are not ready to think about integration, usually that concerns people who are not processing memories yet.]
My system has not experienced full fusion but we have some partial fusion. It feels different than people think. For us, it was like some elements that defined a part were moved to the past and got integrated into the memory of what happened and who we were during TraumaTime. This happened through trauma processing and realizing that some of what this part carried belonged to the past. Other elements of who they are were integrated with the part who fronts the most. They are distinctly present and can be accessed while they also don’t feel like ‘not-me’ anymore. We can clearly sense the characteristics of that part without it feeling like something that is separated. When we try to talk to the part herself, there is no response anymore. For a system that has been communicating for many years, this is a strange new experience. While the core elements of the part are not missing at all and can be accessed, there is no distinct voice or personal response anymore. Just a knowing of how they would have responded. Nothing is lost but there is a sense of loss nevertheless.
I can only imagine how this would feel on a grander scale when all parts are fused. The silence inside must feel deafening at first. I think I have an idea how lonely it can feel for a while when there is nobody to talk to inside. There will be a shift from having a rich inner life to having a rich outside life with other people to talk to and new experiences to share with them. But there is an obvious loss there when communication can’t happen with others inside anymore and we are somewhat alone with our thoughts until we learn how to share things with other people more effectively. The grief about that might open up new ways of relating with others who can support us with comfort. There can be unexpected healing in our concept of relationships when grief is shared.
Change towards an integrated sense of self will bring new realizations about ourselves and our life. We might feel it in our bones, that we were never many people and that all of it happened to us as a person and parts helped to survive that. Our life story becomes more personal and real. The natural response to these big realizations is grief. There is a sea of grief when we finally get the big picture. The option of having something different, realizing that things don’t have to be this way forever, opens up a new world and it comes with pain because of all the things that have not been or might never be.
The structural integration of a system usually doesn’t happen in one event. It is made up of many small events where things find their place today and trauma is moved into the past in the form of memories. Every step into a new life is accompanied with grief. We do well when we befriend it. It will be a steady companion on our way.
How I personally approach grief
I treat grief as a sign that a wound is scabbed over and healing. There is no need to meddle with it, even when there are sensations that don’t feel nice. I expect grief to come whenever there is change and I use comfort to meet it halfway. It is not an enemy. Maybe it is not a friend either but it can be familiar and doesn’t have to feel threatening. Getting stuck in grief might be a sign we are stuck with integrating aspects of our experience. It happens. Then it might be better to focus on further integration than to get stuck with the feeling of grief itself. I gain strength and reassurance from grief because I know that it is the last phase of the healing process for the piece of life experience that I have been integrating. Passing feelings of grief are a sign of success. Treating it that way has always made it easier for me to sit with it and allow it to be there.