Grief makes us even more vulnerable to conflict, betrayal, abuse

I’ve seen this happen so many times.  In the season of loss, a person, a couple, a family, a community, is so much more susceptible to what we could call secondary trauma.

The only problem with calling conflict and abuse, “secondary trauma” is just how often—because of how terrible an assault they are—these take precedence.  When the grieving person or people deploy energy for dealing with the conflict or abuse, in making the secondary issue primary, they fail to attend to their grief.

What they end up with is a complicated grief.

Complicated grief is an unresolved grief, and much grief that goes on and on and on is unresolved.  Like the relationship status, “It’s complicated,” such a grief is exactly like that.

One thing that people who do not understand grief do not understand is just how vulnerable grieving people are to these secondary traumas.  Grief leaves us exposed.

How can we possibly be expected to respond in our best self when our best self is at the time unattainable?  Grief is survival mode, and usually it’s ugly and messy.

So, when circumstances conspire against us, or when people who should know better provoke us when we could do with their empathy, we react rather than respond.

Perhaps we’re reeling from the fact that they don’t seem to care.  That they don’t care at such a time as this—Christians very often I mean—evokes incredulity in us, and given we’re already weakened, such a provocation is all it takes for us to react angrily out of astonishment for being exasperated.

Maybe we detect that they’re being opportunistic.  What an affront to kick a person when they’re down! And yet that’s the nature of what so often occurs in loss.

Very few seasons of loss for any of us are clear-cut and pure in one form.  There are always layers, and we’re perennially susceptible to betrayal, rejection and abandonment.

What I want to say is that, in your grief you’re being braver than ever, because you would deny it and run from it if you could.  But you can’t.  

Then to add insult to injury, there is another factor that draws you away from the primacy of your grief.  It is tantamount to spiritual treason for a person or group to conspire against the living God when they attack someone already so compromised.  And yet it happens!  And you’d be astounded as to the calibre and kind of person who does this.

As you show up in your grief, readier than ever to face the full fury of a pain that seems destined to floor you, these traumas—conflict, abuse, trauma, betrayal, rejection, etc—will blindside you.

And if the double-whammy doesn’t take us out, watch out for the third and fourth wave!  So many of us have personally experienced this.

One thing we might all experience before we’re done is the eye-opening reality of how frequently those who are down are abused.  Statistically, it’s those who are suffering most who are also most vulnerable to further iterations of suffering.

Wouldn’t it be great if we were all aware of this concept: do we comprehend the fuller extent of the complicated nature of a person’s grief?  Chances are they cannot be transparent with all of what they’re dealing with.  Isn’t that a travesty?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash