How Embracing Grief is Helping Me Overcome Trauma
I didn’t know there was an upside to grief until I came out on the other side.
I’ve always found comfort and freedom between the covers of a good book. Growing up in a home where there was always a strong feeling of scarcity, the local library was a glittering sanctuary for me— a place brimming with adventure, knowledge, and warmth — and my little self hungered for those trips. They fed the creative spirit inside me, helping it grow by showing me what was possible in the world and who I could be.
My ten-year-old self would spend all of my library time trying to find books of plays, which we could do with just two people. When we got home, I would lead the charge as my little sister, and I deconstructed the script, pulled together costumes, and advertised with brightly colored signs and concessions, often all in the same day. We would beg our grudging parents to come to the couch and performed our patched-together play with gusto.
I wish I could say that our enthusiasm won them over. As in many homes with scarcity, I strained to find the praise in their restrained applause and grim smiles and left with a sense of yearning in my love-starved little heart. I tried a few more plays, and between them, did magic shows, filled my sketchbook with pencil drawings, and taught myself how to play the keyboard — reading music, playing by ear, and composing songs that I’d perform for my parents. Always feeling full and engaged in the process of creating and seeking approval that never quite came.
Later on, when we bought our first personal computer — a massive Gateway with a single-speed CD ROM — I wrote stories with protagonists that would travel, read minds, form tight friendships, and be bold in ways that I wish I could be, instead of feeling trapped and alone.
“Here, let me just help you get out of your own way.”
Through battling my own health issues (and after a decade of working in IT), I’ve become acutely aware of how interconnected and interdependent systems can be. I’ve come to understand that the things you see on the surface — behaviors, physical maladies, thought patterns, food sensitivities, relationships with ourselves and others— are quite often symptoms of something deeper, positive or negative, and it’s not until you dig deep enough that you find the root of the issue.
I could (and have) filled my own library with books that I needed to take me further into healing. I have a chronic illness called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, which is not very well understood and often mistakenly treated as an endocrine disorder. After several disastrous attempts at treating hypothyroidism (my original diagnosis), I found a doctor who finally confirmed that I had an autoimmune disease, not a thyroid disorder. Another doctor and a few books later confirmed that the Hashimoto’s was caused by adrenal fatigue and leaky gut (both also not well understood and often not recognized as real conditions).
Finally, I thought — we’ve gotten to the root of it. All I needed to do was stop eating the rapidly growing list of foods I was sensitive to, take some supplements, get some rest, and walk more.
Yeah…not exactly.
It took a year and a half before I plateaued, broke down, and finally found myself a therapist. I started for the stress relief, thinking that my doctor said this chronic stress had caused my adrenal fatigue was probably a simple case of job dissatisfaction. At that point, I had also been trying for years to write, and every time I sat down, I froze, unable to push through the fear and shame I felt in front of the blank page. It was telling that right from the get-go, I searched for a therapist that specialized in trauma…as if my subconscious was circumventing my dumb rationalizations with a “Here, let me just help you get out of your own way.”
When I started therapy, I was also researching stress responses and discovered that given my symptoms, it was likely that I had higher levels of adrenaline than normal and longer recovery periods, which was burning out my adrenals and wreaking havoc on my body.
It took another year and a half for me to finally find my actual root cause — the ugly pit at the core of everything.
I was always running through the feeling, right into the doing, instead of just being.
In the end, it was grief that finally saved me.
I was going around in therapy circles, thick with the feeling that what I was searching for was just out of my reach, unhappy with my job, and still unable to write. I know now that trauma, especially from childhood abuse and neglect, can be buried under layers of defenses and stitched together with busyness, people-pleasing, anger, and apathy. It can be hard to fully see its impact because trauma's effects present themselves with so many varying symptoms that they seem like temperaments and personality quirks. Tellingly, I identified as an INFJ long before I ever figured out I had Complex PTSD because it was easier to have a certain kind of personality than it was to have a mental condition.
It’s grief that often makes long-buried trauma rise to the surface, no longer willing to be ignored.
During a very intense period of enormous loss, it was grief that finally allowed me to lance the emotional throbbing wound open and let it drain. It helped me see the connection between the autoimmune disease I’m battling now and the CPTSD that put so much strain on my body and ultimately caused it. It forced me to stop and sit and feel the guilt, the sadness, the anger, and the shame — feelings that I had numbed for decades years.
It also made me realize that I had never done this before, sat in my grief, and felt my emotions. I was always running through the feeling, right into the doing, instead of just being.
It was the act of sitting in the grief, feeling it fully, and letting it wash over me that allowed me to release it and come back to the center. I wish I would have known back then how powerful and moving this act could be, feeling these feelings that I was so afraid would hurt me. And it did hurt — it hurt a lot. But it was also pivotal in starting to shift and resolve this stagnant energy inside me.
What I hadn’t realized as well was how much space these feelings had taken up. After finally being able to grieve them fully, I found that I now had room to start asking myself questions that I should have been asking all along, but had never thought to. Questions like…
- Does my life fulfill me?
- Am I doing something meaningful?
- What are my values, and is there anything in my life not in alignment with them?
- How can I manifest the life that I want to live?
- How can I use what I know and have learned to help other people?
These seem like crazy questions to me sometimes when I slip back into the survival mindset, and I need to remind myself that I am not just surviving anymore. I am a thriving adult who has surrounded myself with responsible and loving people who have a support system and have cultivated a set of tools to heal and grow, who can keep my family and me as safe as possible in an unsafe world.
Healing, I’ve found, is a process and not an event. It requires incremental change that comes to you when you are open and ready to receive it.
It is through healing that I’m able to permit myself to create again. I am writing (slowly) and sketching (poorly) and took up watercolor painting because it is absolutely impossible to be a perfectionist while at the whims of water. I’m giving up the idea that it has to be perfect or fast or even good — it just has to be true, and that makes it enough.
I understand now that healing from trauma is not possible without experiencing grief. It is uncomfortable, it is painful, and it is messy. But being uncomfortable gives us the greatest chance to experience the profound healing and growth needed to work through these emotional wounds. We must feel our feelings fully and grieve the losses that we’ve felt so that we can release them and make some space inside ourselves for other things to grow.
