Understanding Trauma: How It’s Always Connected to Loss

By Mark Shelvock and Jordi Gorham

Trauma and loss are inseparable. Every experience of trauma carries with it a profound sense of loss. Loss occurs when a significant change alters our circumstances, relationships, or ideas about life.¹ While often associated with death, loss also follows other difficult experiences and life transitions.

Trauma can be accompanied by psychological or intangible losses, such as the loss of trust, safety, self-esteem, identity, or a deep sense of deprivation from one’s psycho-spiritual life. Domestic violence, religious, childhood, intergenerational, sexual, or family-related trauma frequently brings relational losses alongside more tangible losses. The loss of health, finances, and time spent preoccupied with recovery often compound the pain.

Source: Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Traumatic and unexpected deaths, such as those caused by homicide, suicide, homelessness, the loss of a child, or displacement due to war, can profoundly disrupt our sense of existence. The sudden loss of connection and the life we once shared with a loved one often leaves us grappling with shock, intense anxiety, overwhelming pain, or a sense of paralysis. In an instant, future plans, dreams, and hopes can vanish, leaving a void filled with uncertainty. This type of loss can strip away our sense of meaning, making it difficult to make sense of anything in its wake.

Traumatic bereavement penetrates us to our core, and leaves a lasting imprint on the human spirit. The layers of loss and overwhelm that accompany trauma become encoded in our bodies, often leaving us with a sense of restriction, stress, dizziness, muscle weakness, upset stomach, and chronic fatigue. At the same time, feelings like fear, anger, and unrelenting sorrow intertwine with daily life, while yearning, hypervigilance, and numbness or dissociation create a persistent sense of restlessness.

Traumatic loss can feel like an unbearable descent into darkness.² While grief is the natural response to loss, trauma intensifies the pain, creating an overwhelming, immobilizing, and all-consuming vortex. This vortex extinguishes our sense of aliveness, drains our vitality, fragments our psyche, and leaves us feeling stuck in an impossible situation.

The Gift of Co-Regulation and Presence

The impact of a significant traumatic loss can fracture our understanding of life, beliefs, and assumptions. In the wake of such a loss, many tangible and intangible losses occur simultaneously. Surrounding ourselves with people who are psychologically available, dependable, empathetic, and non-judgmental can provide us with emotional comfort and help re-foster a renewed sense of security. When our loss, along with our feelings and thoughts surrounding it, is seen, heard, and shared with someone we trust, our hearts, minds, and souls can begin to re-integrate the experience.³

If those wishing to support traumatic loss can also let go of the need to "solve" everything, and instead bravely sit with the pain of others, healing can begin through connection.

Building Grief Literate Communities

Supporting individuals who have experienced traumatic loss requires a holistic approach, recognizing that everyone has a different role to play. Most people benefit from informal supports, such as friends, family, colleagues, or teachers who can provide comfort and understanding during difficult times. While these informal networks are essential, fostering grief literacy in our communities enhances their ability to offer meaningful support.

Grief literacy is the understanding that discussions about grief and traumatic loss should not be confined only to clinical and institutional settings.⁴ By normalizing conversations around dying, death, trauma, and grief, we can develop the language and behaviors necessary to support those living with loss, thereby creating compassionate communities. This collective awareness helps bridge the gap between informal and formal supports, ensuring that individuals receive the care they need. With more traumatic or complicated experiences, specialized psychological care from grief and trauma therapists is often necessary to address the unique challenges of traumatic loss.

Grief is often described as a universal experience, yet it is deeply personal, shaped by our unique social, cultural, and financial contexts. When individuals from diverse backgrounds feel safe expressing their needs and trust these needs will be met with care, both individual and collective well-being can thrive.

Trauma Essential Reads

When Childhood Trauma Cannot Be Shared

Relational Trauma: Beyond Adverse Caregiver Experiences

Traumatic Loss Responds Well to Care, Not Cure

Nurturing personal wellness, whether for ourselves or others, requires great courage. It takes bravery to challenge emotionally phobic societal norms, lean into psychological discomfort, and be fully present with pain in a compassionate way. Grief and trauma are not experiences that can be "fixed" or resolved in a linear fashion, but rather are ongoing experiences that require intentional space and time for post-traumatic growth.

All pain is valid, and it’s essential to recognize how systemic and societal barriers can significantly impact a person's healing process. Trust and safety are cultivated when pain is acknowledged, needs are heard, and barriers are identified and addressed. Tending to traumatic loss is a complicated journey that defies rigid timelines, short-term solutions, or attempts to rush healing.

Lean Into Grief

Grief has no one-size-fits-all approach, and there are no specific maps for navigating trauma vortexes; each of us must find our own path through these experiences, although no one should embark on this path alone. While listening and talking are important ways to support loss, exploring deeper emotional, physical, and psycho-spiritual experiences can help us integrate both loss and love.

Traumatic loss benefits from being approached holistically, particularly as grief is always held in the body. To experience healing, we must learn to gently tend to trauma symptoms and survival responses, such as hypervigilance or dissociation, and re-orient ourselves to the sensations of grief within our physiology. Often, reflecting on the images we hold internally can be helpful. Listening to music that moves us and allowing all emotions to arise to the surface also supports healing. Our emotional experience and inner psychological life can guide us in making new meanings and narratives after traumatic loss.

Source: Jodi Gorham / Used with permission

Opening our hearts fully to grief is one of the most courageous acts a person can undertake, as grief is so painful and disorienting. Yet, grief is also medicinal, guiding us to relearn the world after a traumatic loss. Without grief, we would have no way to reshape our lives or understanding of the world after a traumatic loss.

This article was co-authored with Mark Shelvock and Jodi Gorham, CYC, BSW, MSW, RSW, Founder & Managing Director, J.A.G. Village. Jodi and Mark are faculty members in the Grief Education Program at OISE, University of Toronto. They both provide grief and trauma-responsive psychotherapy in Ontario, Canada.