My Essay
Trauma and Grief Can't Be Denied
I understand. I truly do. I know the pain that cuts you so sharply that all you want to do is drop to your knees and wail and continue wailing until the world simply stops spinning.
My own experience happened when a sibling of mine was murdered. What I remember so vividly about that time was that there was nobody to help me or my family. I remember looking around and thinking, "Where do we turn? How do we do this? How can we survive this?!!!" I will always remember one nurse at the hospital where my sibling died, putting her arms around my mother and rocking her, and I thought, "That is what I want to do. I want to rock the hurting until they remember how to breathe."
Recovery from a tragedy, trauma, and grief takes a very long time. There are a lot of things that impact the trajectory of the survivors' lives including faith, family, education, and mental health support. In my case, the healing was stifled because the murderer was still on the loose. And then 32 years after the killing, a. man walking into the police department and confessed.
During those 32 years each family member sought to find their way out of the darkness and some had more success than others. The path for me seemed to demand understanding why somebody would do this, and so I got a masters in criminology and a masters in mental health therapy.
And now I help those who need to be held and rocked and, most of all...heard. The grieving, the traumatized, and those in all types of emotional pain need to have somebody to listen—to lean in to the client and say, "Tell me. I am here to witness this thing we call 'life,'"
