In my last article on grief, I wrote about living below our baseline, and talked about how even our dopamine level may be very low when we are grieving the loss of a loved one. That article can be viewed in the link below.
AMPLIFIERS AND ROGUE WAVES
I want to talk about how trauma and grief collide and take that analogy of the sinewave and living beneath your baseline a little further.
When we have trauma in our lives, the trauma can come back and amplify the sinewave of where we are along our baseline. So, there is an overlap.
I find that I often talk about this in terms of how someone who is grieving may also be traumatized by that death, or by other things in their lives simultaneously.
In this case we have amplifiers of our sine wave.
These amplifiers may be from older traumas that are unresolved or possibly not even recognized for what they are.
Think of it like this; you may be on a downswing, beneath your baseline and then something else happens that is unexpected. This could be a pet dying, a car breaking down, an argument with a partner. It may be several things on the same day, a run of bad luck with appliances, your car, your job, a big sale that didn’t come through, or a date that went badly.
Suddenly we have these two waves, like a rogue wave is formed on the ocean, they amplify and become a much bigger wave. In this case, it is not the crest of the wave but the low point, the trough that is amplified.
We crash down to our lowest low and once again find ourselves living beneath the baseline, and maybe even experiencing something minor – in a profoundly bad way. We can become flooded with feeling that is tied to grief or trauma even if it feels like something else.
This is when a rogue wave of grief or trauma may overcome us, and we are feeling things deeply again like the loss is fresh.
We may once again be living beneath our baseline as we are overtaken by the rogue wave.
For some clients this rogue wave doesn’t necessarily feel like grief, it may feel like anger, or hopelessness or despair.
Depending on your struggle, what happens next depends on whether you reach out to someone for help, try to deal with it alone, or even recognize that something has got ahold of you.
UNPROCESSED TRAUMA AMPLIFIES
As I write this, I’m thinking of Michael Douglas in the 1993 film Falling Down. On the outside Falling Down is about a man estranged from his wife who is having a bad day which keeps getting worse (because he has untreated rage issues and has had a psychotic break).
At a deeper level though the film circles around feelings of loss for two men, William (D-Fens) Foster is played by Michael Douglas who struggles with being rejected by his ex-wife. William’s day seems driven by the need to get home to his daughter’s birthday, to which he has not been invited.
Opposite to William is Detective Prendergast (Robert Duvall) who is retiring to be with his wife who struggles with high anxiety. Prendergast and his wife are a couple grieving the death of their daughter and trying to cope in their own respective ways years later.
For these two men things in their past affect them in different ways, one has a past that gets in the way with his coping skills and leads him to violence.
This is likely because much of his trauma came during formative years of his life.
We can guess this by clues that the film leaves. He is a violent man, whose wife has left him because of his violent temper. He is not part of their life anymore, but now feels compelled to try again, which means he wants to force himself upon them. This sudden need is expressed while experiencing a total breakdown that leads him from one violent situation to the next increasingly violent situation.
Therapists in general know to look for things that impact us from our past. We call some of these things, “adverse childhood experiences.” We give what is called an ACE testto look for some of those experiences that may affect us as adults. I’m not claiming that this test is exhaustive or complete in any way. It does help as a starting place to identify things that can amplify that sinewave.
Michael Douglas’ character in Falling Down would likely score high on his ACE score, with possible alcoholism in a parent, neglect and physical abuse as a child. Perhaps though he had an attachment break with a significant parent earlier in life outside of memory that affects him.
Adverse experiences amplify hard things in our daily life, and make it harder to cope for those of us who have these experiences in our past.
This is where trauma and stress from the past may influence how hard we take a loss, and how long we spend beneath that baseline.
In this case those amplifiers affect our baseline, and the bigger the trauma or the adverse experience, the bigger the amplifier that comes in.
I want to be clear though, I am simply talking about how adverse experiences can affect our ability to cope with trauma and loss, but they are not the only indicators in how someone responds to loss, in part because part of that is connected to how deeply we are connected to someone that dies.
The deeper the connection, the greater the loss and I don’t know that there is a test or equation that can speak to that.
COMING UP FOR AIR
If trauma combined with grief is like getting hit with a rogue wave out on the ocean when waves combine, then we won’t be expecting to be hit by the wave until it’s too late.
We don’t see rogue waves coming.
But it is in the trough, where we are below our baseline, and effectively feel like we are drowning below water. I know this is not a perfect analogy, but if we consider that when things combine in ways to get us to our highest dopamine hit above our baselines on our best days, the rogue wave from a traumatic past can amplify the lowest part of our experience, the worst feelings below our baseline for a longer stretch.
Understanding that something has hit us is part of the process of coming up for air.
If we can anticipate that rejection from a job or a loss may bring back old wounds, then we can navigate the trough better.
This is complex work though, and there is no ONE answer. For each person there are multiple reasons from their past that may influence your resilience in any situation. Sometimes we simply don’t even know that we are carrying something like trauma with us, until we find our nervous system overreacting in the moment to a perceived threat to our safety.
That perceived threat, the overdue bill, the flat tire, the argument with a partner, all take on monstrous proportions in our mind and this echoes back to some of the things that I write about on this website.
PERCIVAL & THE FISHER KING
I use the metaphors from fairy tales and myths because these things allow us to visualize some of our experiences that are specific to ourselves and universal as humans.
In the past I have written about Robin William’s performance in the Fisher King for instance, and how he is being chased by the Red Knight. As Parry (Percival) from the tale of the Holy Grail, Williams is struggling with his trauma which becomes solidified in his mind as something real – namely his need to find the grail and fight the red knight.
When sitting in central park with Jeff Bridge’s character he reacts from a traumatic memory when he himself recounts the story of Percival and the Grail to Bridge’s character Jack. This is an important moment because Parry is sharing something that has struck him about Jack. Parry recognizes that Jack is suffering like the Fisher Kingfrom a wound.
As he does this it recalls trauma to mind that he has been repressing. His knowledge of the Fisher King comes from his own expertise as an academic, and when he touches on this it brings back the knowledge of the life (and loss) he has repressed.
With the door to his past cracked open, Parry is at the edge of dissociating and having a PTSD flashback until he is pulled back by Jack (Bridges).
While Parry’s grief is tied to trauma directly, we can experience past trauma when we are grieving that is not related to the current grief event we find ourselves in.
We are complex beings, that carry our past and even the multi-generational trauma from our family within us. Grappling with trauma and grief are difficult not just because trauma and grief are difficult, but because we experience life outside of the range of our linear memory, we “remember” with our bodies Bessel Vander Kolk would say, but we also remember with part of our brains that is tracking memories before our hippocampus could neatly create linear memories that we typically think of as a library of memories within ourselves.
It is often that older memory, the one mostly out of reach to us like a dream we are trying to remember, that can have a big effect on our emotions. It makes itself known in our reactions, like William in Falling Down having a big reaction to being stuck in traffic, or Parry in the Fisher King having a reaction when he told the story of the Grail to Jack.
Understanding our past, like trying to understand Parry or D-Fens – fills in some of the blanks in our lives that influence us. The more we are able to bring to mind where our reactions come from the easier it is for us to move forward, bring comfort to our nervous system, and heal some of the past so that we aren’t continuously being triggered into a death struggle with our own personal red knight.
Follow Your Myth 