But.. what else can you even say? The alternative is remaining in misery for the rest of your life. And internalising your pain into a characteristic of your personality is among the worst ways to process it.
I feel like there's a misunderstanding here of there being a choice for victims of complex trauma to make between "suffering" and "coping". It is not as binary as this and I know people to whom this advice would be not only unhelpful but actively destructive.
If the answer is nothing, we might as well not have this and the parent discussion at all then. Do you not see how that's directly analogous to supporting moving on silently?
No, the alternative is working through it, processing it, and integrating it into your story of yourself as something you've overcome.
"Letting it go" lands the same as "excise it from your life," which isn't possible. Your body and your mind were shaped by it whether you wanted them to be or not. You have to find a way to integrate it or you'll just keep fighting a losing battle for the rest of your life.
Sorry, but "integrating it into your story" sounds a lot like forcing victimhood down yourself unnecessarily. It is unfair - both to the present and future you, and to everyone around you who had no hand in the tragedy. Wounds heal and leave behind negligible scars that don't hurt the same; they don't shape your body and mind unless you keep "processing" them and make them fester.
This is...so oblivious to trauma that it's hard to respond.
The perpetrator (or the situation, in cases of unforeseeable accidents) makes you a victim. You do not.
Many, many wounds are debilitating for life. Body parts don't grow back, and the fact that the scar doesn't hurt as much as the gaping wound when your arm came off doesn't give you the ability to use the arm. You have to learn how to function in a world designed around two-armed people even though you can't have yours back.
Neural pathways that didn't form correctly because your childhood lacked safety similarly aren't replaceable. There is no amount of thinking about it differently that undoes what happened.
You can never be a person these things didn't happen to. You can become someone who understands that they did happen in the past, that they changed you, but that they are not happening now.
You will always have to approach reality as someone who went through what you went through, but that isn't the same as living your whole life as though it's still happening in the present.
You are perhaps describing prolonged abuse, but we were talking about typical one-shot tragedies or losses one has to endure. They don't maim you for life unless you choose to hold on to the pain extensively. Though it is true that "moving on" by itself does involve you adapting to the new normal, which can concur to the notion of "integrating it to your story".
I apologize if my replies sounded unnecessarily oblivious or insensitive; it is true that each trauma and pain is unique and we can't possibly know what other people are going through.
> You are perhaps describing prolonged abuse, but we were talking about typical one-shot tragedies or losses one has to endure. They don't maim you for life unless you choose to hold on to the pain extensively.
No, I'm even very literally talking about things like an industrial accident that yanks your arm off, or a problem that arises in surgery that leaves someone you love without any of their previous mental faculties (see original post). I'm talking about major tragedies, major losses, major grief.
If you're talking about the death of your childhood hamster or something, fine, maybe we're talking past each other, but I'm talking about the kinds of losses where you are not the same afterward as you were before, and you have to do the hard work of learning how to be your new self in the world.
How many people have to reply and tell you you're completely and totally wrong about this before you'll at least take a step back and consider that you've missed something important?
Serious question. I'm genuinely wondering if there's a number.
