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“Be careful seeking support online,” I tell my clients. “There’s so much value in finding a community of people living your struggle, other humans who relate to your pain. But remember: Nobody posts when they’re doing well. They just ... disappear.”
When we’re traumatised, we tend to seek witnesses. We’re lonely echoes in the dark, ghosts pacing the same ground over and over. We need people to notice us, and listen to us, and help us step back into the world of the living.
Support groups, online communities, and (I can’t believe I’m saying this) even places like Reddit can be lifesavers.
There are, occasionally, very special everyday people that can provide loving support when you’re in the depths of grieving a traumatic loss. They understand the timescales involved, can bear the level of horror you’re walking around carrying, and don’t take your enduring sadness, self-destructiveness, rage, or repetitiveness personally. They don’t make unhelpful word-shaped sounds at you because they’re uncomfortable (“I mean … don’t you think you should be over this by now?”). But such people are rare, and because healing stems from connection—this is a large part of why you need a therapist you can trust—nearly everyone I’ve spoken to who has lost a sibling to suicide has sought support online at some point. As it turns out, many more survivors than I could have imagined found it here, in my posts.
I’m also very aware, these past few years, that I’ve done exactly what I warn my clients about: I stopped logging in to post.
From haunted to ghosting
When my brother ended his life, it became the defining event of mine for many years. It was the gravity well I orbited, the place my thoughts always returned, like a speck of dust circling the drain. Trauma drove my choices, my behaviour, and my capacity to trust in the enduring goodness of anything in the world, others, or myself. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, points out that often it isn’t the thing that happens to us, but what that thing reveals about ourselves and our humanity that breaks us. There's a reason he's sold so many books: The man knows what he’s talking about.
I didn’t make a sudden choice to stop writing articles or working on my bereavement book. It happened gradually, by degrees. The way you slowly grow out of something, like a familiar piece of clothing, until one day you realise you haven't worn it in years. Researching death, loss, and trauma started to feel less compulsive. Then, less natural.
The loss I had suffered became, imperceptibly over time, something that happened to me, not something I was. I wouldn't be who I am without it, but the same is true of many other experiences, horrific and transcendent and unusual and mundane. Birth and death, taxes and tacos.
Perhaps one day I’ll feel differently, and start writing and researching suicide bereavement again. It’s complex. I really value being able to write useful things to people who need something to comfort them, a future to hope for, and simple validation that what they're feeling is normal. I remember what it felt like, and I’ll never stop wanting to support and encourage anyone stuck in that godforsaken place. But I’ve reached a point where right now, I’m choosing not to spend more time here, because now I can choose.
So, how do you get to the other side, other than through time and maybe therapy?
Growing strong
I remember attending a workshop once on working with psychotic thinking. (There’s a case to be made that traumatic bereavement and psychosis have a lot in common.) The facilitator taught us something called “the image of the tree," which goes roughly like this:
Think of yourself like a tree. The trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, everything above ground, are the thoughts in your head, the stuff of the mind.
The roots below ground, on the other hand, are the stuff of the body: Working with your hands. Creating art. Walking, running, swimming, dancing, playing sport. Throwing a stick for a dog. Baking a batch of cookies and taking them round to a friend.
Learning to survive your mind and your memories is key to healing from traumatic bereavement. But you must remember that you’re adding weight to the branches as you do it. Beyond a certain point, more thinking, more living in your head, more trying to fix yourself with the same brain that is struggling, creates additional problems. Without strong roots, the tree becomes too top-heavy to stand.
Here in New Zealand, there’s a native tree called the pohutukawa. It grows mostly along the coastlines, and blooms brilliant red for a few glorious weeks in summer. Pohutukawa are enormous, both above-ground and below. Limbs so wide, you can hug them without your fingertips ever getting close to touching. Roots systems so vast they literally hold the cliffs in place. You'll find them clinging in the most unlikely spots, misted with sea spray, thriving bright.
I’ve come to think that in surviving suicide bereavement, one must by necessity embody a kind of pohutukawa approach to existing. Trauma gives you so, so much to contend with in the mind: So many thoughts, so many memories, so many emotions. So much work to do in your head to heal. Your branches and leaves and flowers, so to speak, are already unfathomably heavy. So you need to grow your roots. You need to live in the world. Even when you don’t feel like it, even when it’s hard, even when you don’t know where to begin. Even when you feel like you’re not real anymore, just a person-shaped shadow of a dream you can barely remember.
You can. You must.
Dying is a tragedy. You know that better than anyone, if you've lost a loved one to suicide. But not living is worse. So, in my experience, when you've found what you need online, when you've drawn strength from others who've walked the path, it's time to log off and touch the grass again.
It's almost summer, and the pohutukawa are beginning to come to life. Whoever you are, however you’re feeling, whatever terrible combination of Google search keywords brought you here, I hope that you, too, can find a way to grow beyond the worst thing that happened to you.
To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
