Moving Beyond Trauma : Grieving and Mourning

I've read a fair amount of articles and books, more written at the practitioner level than at the pop-help level, about How To Get Past Trauma. Mostly they say that to get past the trauma, you have to grieve and mourn what was lost, and then you need to wrap the trauma into a bigger meaning, a bigger context.

Generally the professionals use both words, grief and mourn. I would have thought they were equivalent, but I gather they're different. What I read is that grief is internal, it's between the ears; mourning is external, it's spoken and interactive, it's public and involves other people. Mourning is a social/ cultural construct.

I mourn what I lost from my father's beating me, including:

• I didn't have a normal childhood, whatever that is.
• I spent years worrying about getting in trouble and getting beaten by a grown man.
• I don't have healthy relationships.
• I don't ever relax. I'm constantly vigilant for threats and meanings and being in trouble. My mind has the 100-meter stare.
• I suppress feelings, because feelings never helped and often hurt my experience.
• I think I'm a hard person to be around. Empathy and feelings aren't in my core.
• I learned to suffer in silence and thought it was a virtue. I never ask for help or relief.
• I spent 55 years inside my survival habits. I lived with that virus.
• I lived out my father's script, which he explicitly gave me. What I did, where I went, who I dated, a career, marriage - they weren't the result of my process or choices, I was doing what he had told me to do.
• I believe I could have developed an intellectual side, but I never really did.
• I have so many blank spots in my memory. I don't know what's in there, and that's a startling thing for a person like me that once thought they had a good, reliable memory.
• I am all fucked up. I'm not reliable now.

I mourn what I lost from my priest raping me, including:

• not trusting authority figures
• learning when I told my dad about the priest that there is no safety net
• getting a malformed introduction to sex
• not knowing the degree to which the priest and my desire for other men interacted
• feeling jilted in the 7th grade, when he started in with new 4th graders and dropped me
• being deeply ashamed about sex
• loss of innocence

There's an overlap of my father and the priest. I told my father about the priest raping me. The priest was in my mouth and in my ass. My father told me I was lying. I wouldn't retract it. I'm sure he beat me. Then he said, "so you're a tough guy? Let's see". He took me to his station house, where there was an empty cellblock and an empty cell he'd arranged. He put me in the cell, said "let's see how tough you are", and locked me in, and left the cellblock, and locked that door with a heavy clang-noise.

Everything you may have read about the noise of a jail cell closing when you're inside the cell is true. It's the loudest sound in the universe. It startles you. It shakes your bones. It rivets your attention. Now you're a prisoner, in a world that you have no influence over. It was terrifying. It splits your life: the time before you were locked up, and the time after you were locked up.

He came back. Asked if I had anything to say. I refused to take it back. We drove home together in silence, and never discussed it again.

• I knew I was alone against the world.
• I knew that fairness and justice where empty words
• I would put up with anything to stay out of trouble and never get locked up again.