Step 7 of 12 · Feel Safe Again
Relationships After Trauma
Relationships After Trauma
Step 7 · 11 min
🎬 Video lesson coming soon
Something was taken from you.
It might have been safety. Trust. Innocence. A relationship. A version of yourself that existed before something happened.
Whatever it was — even if you cannot quite name it — something changed. And with that change came a loss that may never have been fully mourned.
This lesson is about that mourning. Because grief, when it is allowed, is not defeat. It is the way the wound finally begins to close.
Trauma involves loss — of safety, innocence, trust, version of yourself, or relationships
Ungrieved losses remain active — they must be acknowledged to be integrated
Complicated grief vs. natural grief: the difference is the presence of shame and suppression
The practice of acknowledgement — witnessing your own losses without minimising
Judith Herman's model of trauma recovery identifies grief as an essential stage — not because it resolves the trauma, but because ungrieved loss remains active. When a loss cannot be acknowledged — because it feels too painful, or because acknowledging it would require feeling things that seem unsurvivable, or because the culture around you says it doesn't count — the grief doesn't disappear. It becomes stuck. It colours perception, relationships, and mood in ways that seem disconnected from the original loss.
Trauma involves multiple concurrent losses: the loss of what happened, but also the loss of how things might have been. The loss of the trusting version of yourself that existed before. Sometimes the loss of specific relationships, or of a period of life, or of a sense of the world as fundamentally safe.
Complicated grief — the kind that becomes stuck and chronic — is most often complicated by the presence of shame. "I should be over this." "Other people had it worse." "I'm being dramatic." "I shouldn't still be affected." These shame-laden self-evaluations prevent the natural processing that simple acknowledgement enables.
Kriss Kevorkian's and Colin Murray Parkes' research on grief consistently shows the same finding: grief acknowledged, witnessed, and allowed to move — even without resolution — is less harmful than grief suppressed. The act of witnessing — simply saying, to yourself or another: "this happened, and it was a real loss, and I am still affected by it" — is itself therapeutic.
Find a comfortable position · Read slowly
Name three things that were lost — taken, changed, or ended — by the difficult experience(s) you carry.
1. ___ 2. ___ 3. ___
For each one, offer yourself the sentence of acknowledgement: "I lost ___. That was real. That mattered. I am allowed to grieve it."
Let yourself feel whatever comes — even briefly. A moment of tears is not a breakdown. It is the wound getting air.
If this feels too difficult to do alone, save it for a session with a therapist or a trusted person. Not all grief needs to be private.
You are allowed to mourn what you lost. You are not being dramatic. You are not being weak. You are doing the most human thing: acknowledging that something real happened, and that it mattered.