The Information DID and Loss

(Psychology Today, NAMI sources)

Trauma makes grief harder to resolve. Whether or not the trauma is simple or complex, it will reduce the effectiveness of one’s stress management systems in the brain, which can only impair one’s ability to manage grief. This impairment can be temporary (such as in the case of single trauma occurring to an adult), or sustained (as is likely in the case of complex trauma occurring in childhood). The latter is a special problem because it tends to cause developmental damage to the brain, specifically to parts of the nervous systems normally involved in managing and moderating feelings[4].Trauma always has in it loss, and that invariably leads to grief. Traumatic events disrupt the normal flow of life, and the result is NOT an improvement. If one’s memory of the trauma remains traumatic, the disruption continues and may even enlarge, resulting in ever growing loss, for which a debt of grief will be paid at some point.Trauma itself may centrally be about loss, and the grief associated with this will likely be especially problematic. The reason for this is fairly simple. In trauma not centrally about a loss, such as that resulting from an auto accident or an assault, one deals with the event, then with its loss-related aspects. In traumatic loss situations, such as the traumatic death of an important person in one’s life or the failure of one’s parents to provide a secure attachment, the trauma and the loss are so bound together that this sequential addressing of the problem is all but impossible.. Furthermore, cleanly resolving the pain of grief by means of trauma psychotherapy seems invariably to lead to a sustained period of appreciation for that which has been lost. 

The 5 stages of grief and loss are: 1. Denial and isolation; 2. Anger; 3. Bargaining; 4. Depression; 5. Acceptance. People who are grieving do not necessarily go through the stages in the same order or experience all of them.