Turning Trauma Into Transformation
BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT
There is little in human experience that is unique. The healing of any trauma, whether random, malicious, well-intentioned or self-induced, requires an understanding that this too shall pass, that it is one of the ills the flesh is heir to, and whatever we experience can just connect us more tightly with our fellow humans. It is not nearly as important to understand why it happened and who is to blame as to figure out what we ourselves can do to face it, to prevent it, and to handle it better next time.
— Frank Pittman, MD, The Family Therapy Networker, 1995
The dry cleaner doesn't have our dress ready for a wedding. So we wear something else, even though it doesn't look quite as snazzy. Our new car is scratched by a thoughtless driver who banged his car door into the side. It's irritating, but not a terribly big deal. Our appendix flares up right before an important meeting and we miss giving a presentation we've planned for months. Once more, most of us don't think it's the end of the world.
Other events, however, push us closer to the edge. These are the major traumas that come into everyone's life at one time or another. A significant loved one dies. A spouse asks for a divorce. The house burns down. The economy takes away our job. A child is born with a birth defect. We are told we have a life-challenging illness. We are the victim of a serious crime.
All these events, from relatively minor ups and downs of daily life to catastrophes, involve loss. And the reason loss is hard to deal with is that loss forces us to change our identity. Our whole sense of who we are in the world and how closely we are connected with others is tied to our identity. We carry this identity with us everywhere we go. When you awaken in the morning you unconsciously draw comfort from the feeling that "who you are" didn't change during the night. Without needing to say it, you may think, "Who I am is someone who lives in a modest house with a dog, two children, a comfortable salary, supportive friends, loving parents, and a healthy body. I am also a person who believes in a particular religion and a particular philosophy of life." These are things you "own" in the sense that they belong to the space you claim in the world.
We all do this. We all define ourselves by what we have or don't have — by our possessions, relationships, job, sense of security, beliefs, values, personality. The trials and tribulations of life, to say nothing of the normal developmental stages through which we all pass (see Growth at the Margins), require us to shift our identity from time to time. How easily we shift that identity in the face of loss depends in part on how attached we had become to the "object" or concept we lost.
For example, if we define ourselves primarily by what we do, the loss of a job can be experienced as a major trauma because suddenly "who we are" does not include an ingredient we believed was essential to our very being. If we arrive home to discover our house was burglarized, we lose any sense we've had that our home was safe from the crime we assume happens to others.
Fortunately, all trauma and loss can eventually be transformational. We can turn any event into new patterns of behavior, renewed connection with others, forgiveness. We can believe once more in our own worth and value. We can change patterns of behavior in which we got stuck in the past. And we can develop an increased awareness of the joy of life. Yes, as hard as it may appear when trauma first hits, by the time we've been dragged, often kicking, screaming, and gnashing our teeth, into new circumstances without the object we lost — be it spouse, house, job, dream, or belief in a fact that proves untrue — we discover we are different people. Eventually. As the old saying goes, "time heals all wounds."
However, you may note that I said loss "can" be transformational. In the first place, not all loss requires us to make a major change in our lives. The old tree in the front yard which we climbed as little children and in which we later pushed our own children in a swing blows down in a major windstorm. This loss may make us cry for awhile, but such a loss doesn't mean we have to change how we relate to the world. But this article isn't about those kinds of loses. Rather, this is about the losses that really shake us up and make us wonder if we'll ever feel normal again.
While such major loss can be transformational, there are those who refuse to change or are not yet ready to change. Somehow they manage to pull themselves together and move through their tragedy without gaining any insight into whether, and how, they might have contributed toward their loss. In all likelihood they will remain stuck in the same situations that gave rise to their loss in the first place.
PLEASE NOTE : If you have lost your partner from accident or disease, I don't suggest you were responsible for your loss. If you lost a leg because a drunk driver ran a red light, that loss wasn't your fault. However, there are many kinds of losses in which a person does play a role, such as the break-up of a relationship or getting fired from a job. No matter what the cause of your loss, you will find information in this article that can help you understand your situation better. In some cases that understanding will help you prevent similar losses in the future. In other cases you can use the information to more easily heal your life and gently move on.
The following are some things I know about this topic both from my own experience and from working with clients for many years. (I've also relied in part on notes I made during a seminar at The Academy for Guided Imagery many years ago and other unidentified notes from various workshops.)
The Journey From Loss to Recovery
Understanding the relationship between loss and significant change begins with recognizing that time doesn't heal a wound simply because time passes. Time heals because WE change as we pass through time. We make subtle, and not so subtle, adjustments in the way we think and act.
We make these adjustments by progressing through several stages similar to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of grief. (She called her's denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.) If you've experienced a recent loss, you should know that these stages don't follow a fixed, sequential pattern. Some people may seem to skip one stage only to return there later. However, the importance of knowing about these stages is the realization that you may not feel quite so crazy if you realize others have gone through what you're going through — and that they've come out the other end.
The growth process of loss, change, and transition or transformation go something like this:
Shock
At first time stands still. There is a numbness, a denial that this can be happening to you. "Oh, he'll come back. He just needs to do some thinking by himself for awhile." When you first realize the rug has been pulled out from under you and you've lost (or are just about to lose) something important, you may be in a total fog and dissociate. In other words, you can't seem to do the ordinary things you're very capable of doing. You not only misplace your car keys, you misplace the car. You can also turn to alcohol and drugs for solace, become compulsively over-active, or slip quietly into depression.
Protest
Once the shock is over, there is a longer period filled with anger, guilt, resistance and resentments. "How could he leave me after all I've done for him!" "Men are just plain rotten!" Self-pity comes calling and you say, over and over again, "Why me?," "What if . . .?," and "If only . . ." You're preoccupied with what has been lost, grieving for the "good old days." Certain you can't go on and refusing to let go, you hang on to what has been familiar, no matter how painful.
There is a transition between protest and the next stage that is difficult for some people. It is the willingness to experience and express the emotions that accompany loss, even if you feel awful. This can be especially hard if you've been taught to suppress your emotions, fearing you'll be seen as vulnerable or weak, if not also foolish or crazy. To complicate matters further, family, friends, and fellow workers may seem to "tolerate" your sadness and will commiserate with you at the beginning. However, later they will encourage you to pull yourself together and "move on." Even though their concern most frequently masks their own fear of loss, this can make it hard for you to be honest about your feelings.
Disorientation
This stage is marked by existential pain, despair, grieving, and confusion. You know you're here when a black cloud of helplessness, hopelessness, and worthlessness seems to descend on you. The realization that your identity is changing may cause you to ask, "Who am I? What am I going to do?" If the shock of the first stage did not lead to depression, here is where you will sometimes be overcome with apathy and a feeling there is no meaning or purpose to life. Alienated from yourself and from others, there's a feeling of unreality, not certain who or what is or isn't real. "Who cares?" "I'm no good."
A little different than depression, at this time there can arise a feeling of restlessness and aimlessness, as though one is wandering alone in the wilderness, searching for a replacement of the loss. Often in this stage people say their pain makes their lives unbearable. But the reality is that their lives make their pain unbearable. If you believe your life has meaning and worth, when loss comes you are less likely to feel the fates have singled you out for punishment.
Transition to the next stage can be very gradual or may come in a moment of truth when a light goes on and the person realizes they are breaking through to a new stage, a new way of being, a new identity. While moments of euphoria may cycle with despair, a light rainbow appears on the horizon and you begin to recognize the freedom of unfolding possibilities.
Reorganization
Healing finally arrives as you begin to develop new patterns of behavior, renew relationships, and begin to trust that life can be enjoyable. Feeling more courageous than before and more oriented toward the reality of your situation, you are free to once again be the best you can be and develop new interests and new skills. Here you let go of resistance you had before and acknowledge, and accept, your loss. Believing in your own value and worth, you can now say with conviction that "I CAN go on. I CAN change." Often in this stage there is a cleansing of blocks that previously kept you from living fully and stuck in old patterns. With letting go and surrender can also come a spiritual awakening, deepening faith, hope, and love.
Recovery and Transformation
Finally, you come to the last stage. You may possibly experience this as a feeling you've "recovered" who you were before. Although your identity has shifted somewhat (you now acknowledge that which you lost is not in your life anymore), you don't feel as though you're a "different" person.
On the other hand, if your identity has shifted significantly, it may be that you feel truly transformed, as though you've entered the doorway to a whole new life, even though you may continue to have some flashbacks of loss and the echo of earlier grief.
Facilitating the Transformational Process
What can you do to gain the most from your experience of loss? Here are several ideas.
Change from the attitude that you are a victim.
Years ago I attended an "est" seminar. While I wouldn't recommend the program to anyone if it were still around today, there were a few lessons I found valuable. One of them came from a talk about being either the cause of your life or operating as though you have no choice other than being the effect of what others do to you. Without expanding that idea into a New Age "you-create-everything-in-life and you're-responsible-for-all-your-pain" philosophy, you do hold the power to make a choice of how you respond to the situation in which you find yourself.
Guilt-free helplessness does not empower people when it puts them into the victim position. Healthy guilt, with awareness of the power you hold in a relationship and the effect you have on other people, is a formidible source of strength. With such an attitude, almost ANY kind of movement will get you out from under the burden of concentrating on your loss.
One of the ways you can faciliate that change in attitude is through telling your story. Increasingly people use the technique of a narrative to reshape the way they view their situation. Writing their story, an excellent technique, and telling it into a tape recorder can take some of the "charge" off the event as you write and listen over and over again. And when you are talking with others about what has happened, notice if you focus only on how you have been injured and not on what role you may have played in setting up the situation. (However, as I indicated earlier, there sometimes are real victims, such as the survivors of a bomb blast. Nevertheless, even they will benefit from telling their story.)
Recognize that what may appear to be tragedy from one perspective is an opportunity from another.
It is only in retrospect that you can know what opportunity for growth you have been given. However, simply realizing pain is transformational can open your heart to listen for the lesson you've been given. Even in the midst of trauma you can ask yourself several important questions:
 How this can help me reorder my priorities?
What is something positive that can come out of this experience?
Am I better off or worse than others have been in a similar situation?
Could things be worse?
What about this is fortunate?
Change habitual thinking.
Even if you decide that now you will live differently and be a better person without that which you have lost, your old habits, cravings, and behaviors can't just be wished away. They can, however, be changed by replacing an old habit with a new one and then reinforcing the new one.
Make the most of what comes and the least of what goes.
The amount of attention we give to old ideas determines how solid they become. However, if you make the most of what you've got, you may be surprised at what you will get.
Play.
If you are struggling with a serious loss in your life and want an anti-depressive, even though my license doesn't allow me to dispense drugs, I will gladly write you a prescription. It would simply say: "Take four hugs a day and play." And I'm sure if we could measure serum fun levels, you would see that yours would rise AND that they would affect your transformation process, to say nothing of preventing you from getting sick, which is a frequent side-effect from the stress of loss. Unfortunately, when people are struggling with loss, they often feel guilty about playing. "How can I possibly play when I'm in such pain?" they ask.
Frank Pittman, MD, wrote in an article for therapists called "Turning Tragedy Into Comedy" in the Nov./Dec. edition of The Family Therapy Networker:
"Until your patients can laugh at their tragedies, they have not completely processed the experience. Until they can cry at other people's tragedies, they have not joined the human race. Any fool can laugh at the funny stuff happening to other people or cry over his or her own pain, but in every experience there is more to be felt."
". . . T. S. Eliot has told us that 'human kind cannot bear very much reality.' But we can bear far more in comedy than in tragedy, because in comedy we don't have to be perfect, we are not alone in our suffering and we get to change in time to not die from our hopeless emotional position. If we are fully embedded in our comic perspective then we can bear all the reality life has to offer."
So if you already feel a bit crazy from dealing with your loss, why not go "crazy" creatively? Imagine all the things that you would ordinarily consider a little bit crazy, a little bit madcap and frivolous. Everyone has their own idea of what that might be. You could read a positive horoscope for a astrological sign that isn't yours and see whether you can make those predictions come true. Or how about playing tourist in your town, with or without a friend, and do all the touristy things you can think of? Then there are coloring books to color, puddles to splash in, swings to swing on, and cookies to bake with a funny frosting face.
Choose Friends Who Don't Water the Weeds.
Recently scientists proved what many have long suspected: The very presence of a solicitous spouse can be a pain. A study in Germany involving twenty couples in which one partner suffered from severe chronic back pain, involved deliberately giving the patient painful electric shocks to their aching backs and studying the brain's responses. What they found was that a husband or wife who was most solicitous, who clucked most lovingly over the spouse's discomfort, seemed to trigger the pain. The more the husbands or wives dwelled on their partner's pain, the worse it felt.
However, those spouses who responded to complaints by changing the subject, by suggesting helpful but distracting activity or by not dwelling too long on the pain did not elevate the neural responses. This doesn't mean that people should ignore their partners', or friends', suffering. Rather, it seems to indicate that having people around who focus on the pain of your loss can exacerbate your distress. They are like those who would go around and water the weeds, ignoring all the other flowers in a garden that need attending.
Having truly supportive friends is great. Keep them around. But if you have friends who appear to feed on your grief and encourage you to pour out all the messy details long after the time when talking about your loss helps, tell them you'll get back to them after things are better.
Develop a Deeper Relationship With Yourself
In the end, what you will eventually discover is that in all change, even in the painful loss of a relationship, the only permanent relationship you have is with yourself.
I know, of course, that the loss of a spouse or significant friend to divorce or death can feel as though a part of you is missing. And in a way it is. When you were in a relationship with that person, you allowed a part of yourself to be expressed. It may have been positive, cheerful, and creative. With a relationship that wasn't so great, the part of you that got expressed was probably not something of which you are proud, or something you want to repeat with another relationship. So don't forget that the good parts of you are still good and you can always turn the less-than-sterling characteristics into something much better. So be kind to yourself.
In reflecting on the relationship of loss and transformation, don't forget the power of love, which is the acceptance of all things. It is not the absence of feeling a loss, but the acceptance of that loss. After all, if that which you lost wasn't important enough in the first place for you to give it any attention, its absence now couldn't cause you any pain — and you wouldn't gain much from the experience.
Finally, take a moment right now and recall a loss you've suffered in the past and notice what personal growth grew out of that experience. Recognizing that your life was "eventually" (there's that word we talked about in the beginning of the article) enriched from that loss can give you faith that once again you can transform loss into a better way of being in the world.
©1993, Revised 2002, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT |
