You don’t get trauma without grief.

One of the aspects of trauma that many mental health professionals don’t know or don’t talk about is that trauma and PTSD recovery require grief processing.

This is the main reason why I got education and certification in both trauma and grief recovery, so that I could offer practices that cover both.

Why Grief AND Trauma?

The easiest way that I can illustrate this idea is with an example from my own life.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by my father. This predatory behavior does not happen in a vacuum; instead there’s a whole toxic family system that supports it. In my toxic family, there was alcoholism, disordered eating, narcissistic behavior, enabling, emotional abuse, and more.

I officially entered trauma recovery in 2006, when I was diagnosed with PTSD. As the years have passed, I’ve been able to see my sexual abuse experiences in context of this toxic family system. A lot of these realizations happened when my children were young, and I worked really hard to give them a childhood completely different from my own.

In this process of parenting my children and re-parenting myself, I grieved.

I grieved the family that I DID have, and I grieved the family that I DIDN’T have.

Releasing Trauma & Grief

One of the reasons why The Body Keeps the Score is so popular is that it validates what we’ve always known on an intuitive level. Our bodies bear our burdens, physically and emotionally.

These burdens can be released. What is stored in the body can be released by the body.

This article arrived in my email inbox this morning, and it is fantastic – Physical Symptoms Of Grief: How To Deal With Grief Pain. I believe that this applies to grief AND trauma because the ways that our bodies store trauma is similar to how they store grief.

Here’s what’s covered in the article:

• Physical symptoms of grief (and trauma)
• Where we hold grief (and trauma) in the body
• Why grief hurts so much
• How long grief lasts
• How to deal with grief
• Releasing grief in physical ways, including somatic exercises

Hopefully this is a helpful resource for you to use now and in the future!

More Helpful Resources

I LOVE helpful resources. Why? Healing happens in community, and recovery opportunities need to be accessible.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the Resources page has changed in a good way! Now there are TWO different pages of free and low-cost trauma recovery resources:

• Go here for Trauma & Grief Recovery Resources
• Go here for PTSD Resources

As always, if you find something awesome out in the world that can benefit this community, please send it my way and I’ll add it.

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