Ask Clare: How to navigate grief and trauma in close relationships?

Softness is a form of strength

Thank you for reading Beyond Survival, a publication about life after trauma. This is the first instalment of Ask Clare, my new advice column.

How can we better recognize and have compassion for ourselves when we are struggling with our traumatic experiences and/or grief in the containers of close relationships? 

Obviously therapy is helpful for this, but I am curious what you think about this topic! I am in a deepening relationship and trying to navigate a better sense of the pause, a break between old feelings and actions, and it is helping, but I still wonder. 

For more detail, I have experienced multiple forms of violence in my past/family system (don't worry, I have a great therapist and support system) and I think about that - I have never acted out on that in a major way, but I can see over the years how strong I felt I needed to be to contain those experiences (and actively protect myself in the past) and how that sometimes led me to resent softness, vulnerability, anything that could have gotten me hurt. I don't do that too much now, but that fear of my own softness or vulnerability can still come up when fearful, even with people I love and would not harm me intentionally. 

I experienced the sudden loss of a parent a number of years ago as well due to medical issues and this was the only safe person in my family in my teen/young adult years, so there is sometimes death anxiety (if things are good someone will pass) and fear surrounding being close to someone in that sense. I hope this doesn't sound too unhinged - I am doing overall quite well but think a lot about these things! 

Also I love many soft things - like animals ❤️ (I'd die for my fur babies) or sort of everyday sensual pleasures (food, candles, good blankets, and the like) so I am not entirely lost to softness at this point - just sometimes very fearful. But I think that softness is required just as much as dedication/strength is in love and friendship. 

— An artist trying to make meaning

Dear Artist, 

Your fear makes sense. It is wise and necessary. I live alongside that fear too. It’s rare for it to crush me like it used to, but it is always there, hovering over my shoulder like an ominous cloud. A few things have helped me to live more comfortably alongside my fear, several of which you mentioned in your letter. Since this is an enormous, emotionally complex topic, I’m going to give myself the gift of structure and share them as a list. 

Things that have helped me navigate close relationships after grief and trauma

Therapy
You mentioned this in your letter. Kudos to you for doing the hard work of recovery. 

Self-compassion
You mentioned compassion in your letter, but I think it’s best deployed as an inward-focused tool. The seminal thinker on this is Dr Kristin Neff who wrote this book which I often recommend but have never read. I picked it once, many years ago, but flung it across the room with fury after reading a few pages! “What self-indulgence,” I thought. “What a fucking privilege”. I still haven’t gotten around to reading the book, but the science that underpins Neff’s research snuck into my brain and I think about it often. There are three elements to self-compassion: Kindness, mindfulness and common humanity.¹ There are some nice (short) videos on her website exploring each element in more detail. 

Find ways to calm your nervous system
Serious trauma, especially that which takes place in childhood, changes our brains and our bodies. We tend to jump into flight, fight, freeze or fawn mode quite quickly, and it can be hard to interrupt those instincts. You write about pausing before reacting, so you can discern if old patterns are being triggered and try to make a more mindful choice. I do this too. I think about it as a muscle that needs to be strengthened and seek out ways to calm my nervous system so that I can better understand how I actually feel. For me, traditional meditation rarely works but walks (ideally in nature), yoga and journaling help me to calm my body and sort through the noise in my head. 

I am also deliberate about trying to absorb the joyful aspects of life into my body. Like you, I often get a flash of anxiety about a car crash or some other horrible tragedy especially in happy moments. My body is trying to warn me that this joy might be fleeting, but I try to breathe into the positive things and let my system experience what it's like to feel loved, connected and happy. This doesn’t always work, but I try.  

Keep an eye on your resentments
You write about how you’ve “never acted out [as a result of your experiences] in a major way”. How you sometimes “resent softness, vulnerability, anything that could have gotten [you] hurt”.

This struck me because it feels like me. In the aftermath of serious trauma, I turned my rage inward, developed disordered eating and a foreboding sense of unworthiness. There was no dramatic public meltdown or spiral of self-annihilation. For the most part, I suffered in silence. I do sometimes resent the people who burned down their lives and still experienced love from the people who cared about them. I suspect that some of this is gendered (women and femme people don’t always get the space to collapse) and some is personality-based, but the roots don't really matter. All that matters is that I’m pissed about it, and that resentment is a clue. For me, it’s an indicator that I need to take better care of myself. That I need to be more vocal about what I need and put myself first a bit more. Is this always possible? No. But feeling resentful is one of the data points that I pay the most attention to. 

If you quietly resent the people who haven’t had to carry the burdens you’ve experienced, I’d suggest exploring that in therapy. Is there a way that you could be a bit less responsible in your present life? Could you lean on the people around you a bit more? Maybe not, but I think that’s worth exploring. 

But, my tidy list of things to do feels so puny next to the chaos of other people. 

People with their own histories and biases and messiness. People who might understand your grief and trauma and still take it personally when you snap at them. People who are kind and loving, but also dense with raw human need to be seen and known for who they are. People who scare you, even as you love them, even as you know they wouldn’t intentionally hurt you.

Judith Herman wrote that trauma survivors can only heal in relationship with others. I can’t begin to tell you how annoyed I was when I first read that. Back then, I had no close relationships and very little capacity to navigate the relational world. I lived in the cocoon of my own mind. For a handful of years, I didn’t have a genuine conversation with anyone². I don’t know where to begin in describing why that was. It feels both incredibly complex and incredibly simple: I had been so hurt for so long that I had to withdraw from other people in order to survive. 

Reading a not-great book in bed, during my lonely years

As my recovery began to take root, I started trying to be more social. I’d go to MeetUps, and come home so exhausted after 3 hours of socializing that I’d have to lie on my bed for the rest of the day. I went on so many first dates, looking for both friends and a romantic partner. I’m sure my desperation was obvious and off putting. I was very vulnerable and had very little resilience. I remember one disastrous coffee with a woman I hoped might become a friend. She told me about how her employer was trying to cover up the historical sexual abuse that had happened in the organisation. Another person worked with the Gardai and treated me to a long tirade about a young woman who had lied about being abused so her mother could get more money in the divorce. I came home from those failed friend-dates and cried for days.

The work of reconnecting with people (and I do think of it as work) was only possible because I took very good care of myself. Being in relationships sometimes means getting hurt. There’s no way to prevent it. You can’t control how people treat you or what they trigger in you. 

What you can control is how you treat yourself. 

You can honour your desire for connection. You can build a strong relationship with yourself which will be the foundation for your relationships with other people. You can choose who you want to be in relationship with and who has earned the right to witness your vulnerability. You can speak to yourself kindly when things don’t work out. You can celebrate the courage it takes to try and take the time you need to heal. It is a beautiful thing to want to connect more deeply with other people. It is proof of the depth of the love you have to share. 

I wonder, Artist, if you are giving yourself enough credit for the things you are already doing? Trying to unravel old patterns is complex, uncertain, difficult work. It is relentless and exhausting. Those un-traumatised people we secretly resent have never had to do it. I was struck, reading your letter about how you tend to create a dichotomy between strength and softness. To me, softness is a form of strength. You’ve had to face the terrifying vulnerability of losing a parent. You’ve experienced multiple forms of violence and are working to navigate a deepening relationship while acknowledging how those experiences have shaped you. Not everyone has the strength to do what you’re doing, Artist. This work demands tremendous vulnerability and you are showing up to do it. 

We all come to our relationships shaped by our past experiences. For you and I, that’s the heavy load of grief and trauma. Society tends to pathologise our experiences. We’re often thought of as “damaged goods”. Folks imagine that we’ve been so scarred by our experiences (things that most people can’t bear to imagine, not to mention live through) that we need serious help before we’re allowed to interact with “regular folks”. They pay a lot less attention to what it takes to survive. Recovering is a complex process. We have to face the past while also imagining a better future. It requires courage, faith, compassion, vulnerability, perseverance, hope and a lot of hard work. 

I would never wish my trauma on anyone, but rebuilding my life has brought enormous gifts to my life³. I am the someone people call in a crisis. I can accompany them in their darkest moments and help them plot a way forward. I am great at celebrating the small things. Many people don’t know how to live joyfully, but I can help them learn. These are some of the gifts of my recovery, and I share them with the people I love. Our society rarely acknowledges the work we’ve done to survive. I wonder, Artist, if you’ve ever considered how your strengths show up in your relationships? You’ve written about the things you find challenging, but what about the things that come easily to you? Do you celebrate those? 

I’m also curious how much you've shared your fear with the people close to you. Do they know that this weighs on your mind? Can you speak openly about it? This often depends on the other person's ability to hear you, without interpreting your experience as being about them. Not everyone will be up for it, and it mightn’t feel right to you in every circumstance. But it has been useful for me to think about navigating eachothers triggers as a joint project in close, intimate relationships. In practice, this means revisiting conflicts after the emotional heat has dissipated a little in order to better understand what happened. Ideally, this means that ruptures (big and small) move from being things that threaten the connection to being things that strengthen it. With each disagreement, you learn a little more about what you and the other person wants, needs and fears. You become a team working toward the shared project of loving each other more fully. 

Your fear makes sense, Artist. It is logical and important to pay attention to. It shouldn’t guide your choices, but it will always be there so perhaps you should try to get to know it? I know you think (worry?) about this question a lot, so I’m going to leave you with one final suggestion. You are an artist. Try to capture the complexity of this experience in your creative work. Find ways to get it out of your body and into the world. You don’t need to show it to anyone but if you did, I bet they’d see themselves inside it too. 

1. I'm always conscious that mindfulness and other spiritual practices are often culturally appropriated and whitewashed from their original contexts. Here's an interesting article if you'd like to read more!

2. Except for my therapist who I was paying to listen to me!

3. To be clear, I don’t think the things I’ve gained through the hard work of recovery have made up for the things I lost. Nothing will ever make what happened to me OK. But I also want to acknowledge not only the trauma, but the the things I learned from rebuilding my life in the aftermath.