19. Chapter 5
Diversion: How Unresolved Grief and Trauma Take Us Away from Ourselves
*This book was set the be published by the publisher of my first book, but after years of struggle and many other reasons, I decided to release it on Substack instead. Each week, the 52,000 word book which was tentatively titled “Be A Force” will be dropped here online. The sections will start with number 1 and then progress over the 52 weeks of the next year. The Chapter title will be placed in the post description for clarity.
Let’s Talk About Trauma
I recently received an email from someone who had been in one of my audiences at a virtual event where I was a speaker, she had read my first book:
I’m 68. Wish I had had your book years and years ago. In my late 20s, my alcoholic parents wrote me a letter saying they disowned me. I, frankly, was always weird (highly introspective, oldest) who my one sister bullied mercilessly, and my mother never intervened. So, when the letter came, I merely wrote back and said: No, I disown you. Had NO contact with any of the three sisters or parents since.
About ten years later I suffered a near emotional collapse after I married a man simply so that he could be on my health insurance. It was the only way I thought I could get him to hold a job and move out of my home. Talk about picking up street urchins for rescue. After that, I threw myself into other toxic relationships and did get some degree of therapy. When that delivered more pain, I remained celibate, and except for work, relatively isolated. I retired just around the time of the pandemic and suddenly felt lonely. Picked a man, who I since figured out, was a total narcissist.
I have been up and down emotionally, trying to blame him for being deceptive with me, and then I attended a meetup where you spoke and realized: Damn, it’s not about him. It is about me. There are so many trauma wounds I haven’t dealt with. I have, for the last six months, been going to Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings, but realize, at my age, I need to speed up the process with a professional therapist.
This time, I’m not fighting it. I am actually looking forward to getting healthy and hoping with the concrete suggestions in your book, that I, the supreme introvert, will figure out how to get beyond my deep and dark loneliness. Thank you.
PS. I got your book on Audible and hearing your voice tell the story is more powerful than I think it would have been just reading from the pages. I am, however going to buy the book(s) to give as gifts for members of my ACA fellowship who have described loneliness as their greatest dilemma as well.
This email blew me away, both in its candour and in its revelation that trauma and grief undealt with from as early on as childhood could derail our decision-making, perception of interactions and indeed the relationships we choose to be in, well into the autumn of our lives. Natalia Rachel, author of Why Am I Like This? Posits that when we have unresolved trauma, we are usually holding onto experiences of the trauma triangle of powerlessness, grief and anger. In her opinion, all of these three experiences, that go unprocessed inside us, alter the way we’re experiencing grief as a transformative emotion.
