Life is all about relationships, and it’s through relationships our lives are made meaningful. Even if that relationship is with self or God alone, to the exclusion of all others, it’s still relational.
I heard the story of a mother who gave birth to a crying infant, who immediately settled when he was placed on her naked chest. Skin for skin, every human being needs human connection and when that’s not possible in the preferred of ways, that humanity seeks recompense.
That baby did what that mother needed him to do — crave her and be met by her.
Trauma is created when the normal design of the relational life is interrupted — when a human is failed and betrayed by another human, or when a human does something detestable to another human, or when a human sees or hears or experiences what is relationally overwhelming.
The recompense for loss that is unrequited is the trauma of grief.
What can’t be redeemed must be grieved. Yet in grief what is sought is the redemption of loss. The relationship we lost must be compensated by other relationships.
This explains why we rebound; why we ‘land’ in another relationship so soon after one ends without warning or ends more abruptly than we expected. What we crave we cannot live without — but rebound whether for death or divorce or other reason so often ends in misery. Little wonder, we’re so vulnerable. Yet occasionally soulmates are made through tragedies of loss.
In loss, our reliance on those close to us increases significantly. It’s only when there’s a scarcity of support or we don’t reach out for it that we really struggle to ultimately recover. And if our ‘support’ is corrosive or we reach for a substance or addictive practice, our trauma is redoubled because the recompense our soul seeks continues to elude us.
The task of recovery from loss involves grieving our grief, and this is the way we heal. The recompense is finding another way to achieve the connection we crave — principally, that is human soul meeting human soul, and it is also possible through the divine.
I think of a family who lost their husband and father far earlier than they should have. It was a slow burn of ambiguous loss that both complicated their grief but also prepared them for what lay ahead. Yet, of three persons, each grieves significantly differently, and that too must be respected.
Every significant change in our lives involves loss that demands a grieving.
When we talk “resilience” this is actually what we’re talking about. We become resilient through bearing the long season of loss in the hope we’ll recover — and we do if we don’t give up along the way. The journey to recovery demands faith, fuelled by a hope we’ll arrive.
Grief demands a recompense and if only we can view loss as a cosmic lack of connection, we’ll reach out to connect with others and ourselves and the divine in ways we find redemptive. Often this involves a search, and often it requires acceptance, for the recompense we seek is a long bridge to cross, for who can compensate for the one we’ve lost?
Grief is what we might explain is the gap between what we had and what we lost.
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