I am home from three weeks on the road working mostly at the intersection of trauma and leadership. Organizational leadership. Community leadership. Personal or family leadership.

Over these weeks I listened as the groups spoke about trauma that is nameable –the Alaska Native elders who were sent to boarding schools as children and who were physically abused and culturally abused—having their language and traditions erased. And people in organizations who were battling wildfires—both literal and metaphorical. Where there were murders and deaths of colleagues. And the personal losses—the deaths of spouses or children.

And there was trauma that was less nameable or graspable. Trauma that rolls in like a fog and obscures language or words. The inability to protect their people from the onslaught. The inability to change a system. The regrets or shame that came with periods of time that they weren’t proud of—where they chose survival or coping strategies that had the unintended consequences of hurting others. The loss of the way you thought it was going to be. The loss of the way you thought you were going to be.

Trauma creates a lot of reactions and distractions. It creates a lot of defenses and protections. These are all required and expected. These are what help you survive. But talking about trauma—in a safe and supported way—begins the mending process enough for another set of experiences. To name the grief. To hold the sorrow. And begin to imagine new growth or possibilities.

These shifts happen not just because people talk about the trauma—but it’s how they talk about it, and how they are supported and listened to as they do. We place a lot of weight and worth on the stories of trauma –the plot and action, if you will. But just telling the story of what happened to you isn’t usually enough to heal. It’s the bigger story. It’s the story of not just what happened to you, but what you brought to the experience. It’s the meaning you made of it then, and the meaning you make of it now. It’s the strengths you brought to the experience and the strengths you wished you’d had. It’s the pain and the loss. But it’s also the moments of beauty or the gains you experienced that you are often embarrassed to have noticed.

Talking about trauma in this way helps you see that you were more than your trauma when it happened, and you are especially more than your trauma now that it is over—now that you  are able to see that it all already happened. The more you wrap your experience of trauma with new words and a richer and broader understanding –the softer the edges of the experience become. And your wrapping of words to the experience is mirrored in the brain—as you wrap and myelinate the neurons—and build a memory that has expanded to include your perspectives and your experiences in a different way.

And talking about trauma this way helps you and others hear the deep humanity in the experience of trauma—the very human experiences of losses and harms. They very human experience of protections and reactions. And the very human experiences of sorrow and hope.

We talk a lot about hope. But I don’t think we talk enough about sorrow. In fact, much of what we do and much of what we are inundated by seems to be an intentional defense against sorrow. Against the sorrow of aging. Against the sorrow of our collective histories. Against the sorrow of violence or inequality. Against the sorrow of our limitations or the limitations placed upon us.

And yet, if our hearts are working, sorrow is unavoidable. Or, more to the point, sorrow is the sign that we are connected to what is important to us—that we are connected to our desires, our love, our hope, our integrity. Sorrow is the loss of something we hold dear. But sorrow is something we often carry alone. And it can be healing to share sorrow. To understand that you are not alone. That you never have been—that sorrow is a sign of connection—it is what makes you part of the group.   

But sharing sorrow can also be frightening. It can feel like separate rivers of sorrow will combine into a flood. And in the absence of ritual, we have little experience of collective sorrow. Funerals, memorials, vigils, and moments of silence. These are the containers we typically use. But these containers are tight. They name only the nameable loss. And the conversations are scripted and limited to a few chosen narrators. Or no narrators at all. Silence is often the conversation of sorrow.

What I know for sure, after the work and conversations these past three weeks, is that we need to get better at holding, hearing, and healing sorrow. What I know less about is exactly how we do that. I am writing as much to learn, as I am writing to offer understanding.  But I have a hunch that learning to hold and heal sorrow is much more of a motor skill than it is an intellectual pursuit. I can picture the hundreds of times that an infant pulls themselves up to standing to learn to stand and walk—and that seems the kind of learning I need way more than conceptual understanding. The practice of listening to someone without trying to fix it. Listening with a certain helplessness, and yet openness that is uniquely healing for sorrow. The moment when someone holds your worst fear, your worst moment, and you can breathe fully for the first time in a long time. Where telling your story and having it heard is what makes you truly understand you have survived. And now can finally imagine what next?

© 2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD