When Grief and Trauma Show Up Together

There's something I notice a lot in the therapy room.

Someone sits down, and they want to talk about the person they've lost. They want to grieve. They want to go there, to pull the grief close and let it move through them. There's this deep, instinctive pull toward the loss. Toward the love and the pain and the memory of who they were.

And then something stops them.

They get to the edge of it and the body says: no. Not today. We're not going there.

For a long time, people can mistake this for not loving enough, or not being ready, or somehow failing at grief. But what's often actually happening is something quite specific. Grief and trauma are showing up at the same time, and they want completely opposite things.

Grief pulls us toward. Trauma pulls us away.

Grief, in its natural expression, wants us to lean in. To mourn, to remember, to sit in the sorrow. To access the love and hold it closely, even when it hurts. There is something in grief that is fundamentally oriented toward connection, toward the person who died, toward the experience of loving them and losing them.

Trauma does the opposite.

Trauma is a shutting down. A hiding, a blocking, an avoiding. It is the nervous system's very reasonable attempt to protect you from something that felt unsurvivable. The fight, flight, freeze response doesn't care that you want to grieve. It cares about keeping you safe. And if grief and the traumatic experience are tangled together, the nervous system will try to keep you away from both.

These two don't work neatly together.

What this looks like in real life

It's the person who talks around the death but never quite gets to it. Who changes the subject, or goes blank, or suddenly feels very tired, or finds that the hour has passed and they aren't sure what happened.

It's the person who starts to access their grief, feels it begin to rise, and then something shuts down. The tears stop. The words dry up. They feel numb, or disconnected, or suddenly very far away from themselves.

It's the person who tries to go there alone at home, maybe looking at photos or sitting with something that belonged to the person who died, and finds that the grief is instantly swamped by something else. Panic. Or rage. Or a kind of blankness that wasn't there before.

This is what it looks like when you have two systems in the body competing with each other.

When you start to dip into the grief, the trauma is activated. And the fight, flight, freeze response comes along for the ride.

The pointy parts

There are also parts of grief that carry their own particular weight. The parts that don't fit neatly into a conversation with a friend, or with family who are grieving too. The parts that are harder to speak out loud.

The guilt. The shame. The anger that arrived before the sadness did, or instead of it. The jealousy, which can feel so confronting, of people who still have what you've lost. The graphic details of how someone died that only you hold, that replay without permission. The complicated feelings about a relationship that wasn't simple.

These are what I think of as the pointy parts of grief. The parts that don't get spoken about much. The parts that can sit in the body and fester, because there hasn't been a safe place to put them down.

They are also, often, the parts that are most bound up with trauma. The parts where grief and trauma become hardest to separate.

Why naming this matters

Sometimes, simply explaining what is happening, naming the dynamic between grief and trauma, is enough to shift something for a person.

To say: there is nothing wrong with you. Your body is doing exactly what a body does when it has been through something terrifying, or shocking, or unbearable.

The fact that you can't access your grief the way you want to doesn't mean you aren't grieving. It means your nervous system is working hard to protect you.

That can give permission. Permission to tend to the grief, or the trauma, separately. Permission to not have to do it all at once. Permission to go slowly.

Both sides of this need different support. Grief has its own work. Trauma has its own work. And sometimes you need to do some of the trauma work before the grief work becomes truly accessible.

Where EMDR Therapy fits

This is something I've been thinking about a lot since completing my EMDR training earlier this year.

EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, is a therapy that was developed originally for trauma, and has a strong evidence base in that area. But it is also increasingly being used with grief, particularly where grief and trauma are intertwined.

EMDR doesn't fix grief. I want to be clear about that. It doesn't take the loss away or make it easier to bear. Grief is not a problem to be solved, and a good therapist won't treat it like one.

What EMDR does is work with what's stuck. The traumatic elements. The guilt, the shame, the intrusive memories, the splintered piece of the experience that keeps snagging. The thing that is sitting in the way of being able to access grief more fully.

It supports the ability to lean into grief in a way that can feel more healing. To go toward, rather than always being pulled away.

For some people, this is the missing piece. Not because talk therapy isn't valuable, because it is, but because some things are held in the body in a way that words alone don't always reach.

A note on what this isn't

I want to be clear that not everyone who is grieving has experienced trauma. Grief and trauma are not the same thing, though they can absolutely coexist.

And not every person who is finding grief hard needs EMDR, or trauma-focused work. Sometimes grief is simply grief. Hard, and slow, and in need of space and time and someone to sit with you in it.

But if you recognise yourself in what I've described above, if there is a yearning to grieve alongside a great distress at the thought of going there, if the grief keeps getting swamped by something else, it might be worth exploring whether trauma is part of what's unfolding for you.

That conversation is always worth having.

If this is where you are

You don't have to have the words for it yet. You don't have to fully understand what's happening in your body or know which part is grief and which part is trauma.

You just have to be willing to show up and sit with it, with someone who knows how to hold both.

That's what the room is for.

If you're curious about grief therapy or EMDR and whether it might be right for you, I'd love to hear from you. You're welcome to reach out or book a session at a time that suits.