A critical step in the process of grieving …

If there was something I wish I had a magical power over, it would grief.

Grieving the loss of someone we love is one of life’s most painful experiences. While in times of grief, it feels like our hearts will burst and that we cannot endure such a seemingly overwhelming plight to our minds and hearts; we often feel like we cannot survive the impact.

The hard fact is that there isn’t a magical power that can remove the difficulty of grief, it’s something we must make our way through to get to the other side of it. Some try to avoid the pain by trying to dodge grief altogether, but that isn’t possible, as pastor Bill Hybels illustrates:

Fifty years ago industrialists thought they could just bury toxic waste and it would go away. We have since learned it doesn’t just go away. It makes trouble. It leaks into the water table, contaminates crops, and kills animals. Buried grief does the same thing. Raw time doesn’t heal a thing. Buried pain leaks into our emotional system and wreaks havoc there. It distorts our perceptions of life, and it taints our relationships. That contamination happens subconsciously.

Grieving is a natural, healthy response to the loss of someone we love. But key to entering into a healthy process of grief is making a critical transition from trauma to grieving.

I often explain trauma as that experience of when the seemingly unthinkable suddenly becomes our reality.

There are many possibilities in living life that we do not, or will not, allow to enter into the realm of possibility in our minds. For example, entering onto a freeway at 55 to 70 miles an hour is actually a very dangerous thing to do, but we do it day after day without thinking about how perilous to our lives such activity could possibly be. In our minds, we keep outside of the realm of possibility how something could go wrong from such activity, otherwise we could become paralyzed with fear and unable to function as we need to.

But, when we get a call that a loved one was in an accident — the unthinkable has punctured its way into becoming our reality — it is a trauma that strikes our being.

Trauma isn’t limited to just those sudden experiences. We may have loved ones who experience long battles with illness; even though we may have a protracted period of time to process into our thinking that their loss is eminent, it can still be a traumatic experience when their loss finally occurs.

When someone is traumatized by either the memory or manner in which someone died, it is critical for them to de-traumatize from those memories or thoughts so they can feel free to grieve properly. Psychotherapist Mark Tyrrell likens being traumatized by loss as focusing on the last punctuation mark in a story:

I often reassure people through analogy, by talking about how the final punctuation mark at the end of the story isn’t the book itself – it’s just the way it ends, and how you have all those different chapters full of events, adventures, and maybe illustrations. They are the real book, not that last punctuation mark. And when we think of a book, we take it as a whole, not just its final bit.

Moving beyond the initial blow of trauma into grieving doesn’t make life easy, you’re just beginning the grieving process. But you cannot really begin a healthy grieving process until you transition from the experience of the initial trauma to grieving the life of the lost loved one. Moving beyond the initial trauma finally frees us to grieve — and celebrate! — the whole story that comprised the life of the one who is gone. Henry Simon tells a story of how we miss out on celebrating the life of our lost loved one when we remain stuck in our trauma:

The home of Paul Laurence Dunbar, noted poet, is open to the public in Dayton, Ohio. When Dunbar died, his mother left his room exactly as it was on the day of his death. At the desk of this brilliant man was his final poem, handwritten on a pad. After his mother died, her friends discovered that Paul Laurence Dunbar’s last poem had been lost forever. Because his mother had made his room into a shrine and not moved anything, the sun had bleached the ink in which the poem was written until it was invisible. The poem was gone.

If we stay in our trauma, we lose so much of the life that can be remembered with appreciation and celebration.

Let me urge you that, if you’re struggling with being able to make that transition from trauma to grieving, to get the help of a skilled, competent Christian counselor.

Scotty