IDENTIFYING TRAUMA VS GRIEF

INTERVIEW WITH SARAH DOUGLAS, LMFT :: TRAUMA PROGRAM MANAGER

HOW DO YOU IDENTIFY TRAUMA?

We’re always at the beginning asking what somebody’s subjective unit of distress is related to the target that we are working on. And what I tell people is to recognize the difference between trauma and grief is that the trauma is fear-based. It’s terrifying. There’s distress.

HOW DO YOU IDENTIFY GRIEF?

Grief feels sad. It feels heavy, but it’s not terrifying. There’s the loss feeling. When a person’s working through their trauma initially and their subjective unit of distress is high, it’s not sad, it’s terrified, it’s shaking in their bodies, it’s feeling the tremors, it’s feeling maybe even paralysis. It is a felt sense of fear and terror. Grief in the body, it feels sad and there’s the loss. And so when I’m asking people, when I know that we’re making the progress, they said, “what’s your SUD?” And they’ll tell me. And I said, “do you think it’s fear or do you think it’s sadness and grief?” And they can differentiate, and I can see the difference of sadness or terror.

Once you get through the reconstructing of the memory, and they’ve been able to process those emotions that they didn’t get to process at the time that the trauma has happened, and that’s if we’re talking about event trauma. When we’re talking about developmental trauma that has been pervasive and ongoing and chronic, we’re gonna work through the PTSD symptoms and then we’re gonna work through a great deal of grief.