The Clinical Side

We are firm believers that God's word is our ultimate comfort. God's promises and the grace and mercy spoken of in them have carried us these last (almost 4) years since Austin was taken Home.

That being said we also know that there is a clinical side to Austin's death that needs to be dealt with.

When trauma, like the death of a child occurs, the brain is injured. Not in a physical aspect, so to speak, but certain parts of the brain are rewired when trauma occurs.

A broken bone won't simply be healed because our faith is strong enough or we've prayed enough about it. There is almost always the need for a cast and even sometimes surgical intervention to help a bone heal properly.

The same is true for the brain. We often hear that if we believe (have faith) or pray enough about our grief it will go away and we'll be "done" with it.

This is simply not true.

Just as a broken bone requires help from a physician, so an injured brain requires help from a psychologist or psychiatrist.

It has helped me so much to know that what I'm experiencing is not my fault. It's not that I'm just not trying hard enough to get better.

Injury to the brain from a traumatic event is REAL!

You don't know the freedom I feel in knowing that the way I feel isn't my fault. ❤



The following is an excerpt from an article I found. It addresses the struggle so well.

"Part of our culture, especially our clinical culture, would look at somebody who's still thinking about their baby who died 70 years ago, and say there's something wrong with them.

The way I look at that is that we carry our losses with us.
That doesn't mean that we're pathological or that we're doing things wrong. It means that we are connected and related to each other and we carry those relationships with us.

That's just not the way the culture looks at it though. We have such an idea in this culture that grief and sadness are wrong. They get lumped in with the so-called dark emotions, jealousy and anger and fear.

We assume that if something is uncomfortable, it means something is wrong. People conclude that grief is 'bad" because it hurts. Anything that's not happiness is an aberration.

Grief is seen as a disease, where we think that a return to happiness is a measure of health. When you think about the things that we say to somebody when we hear that they're having a hard time: We tell them to, "Be strong." or "Lean on your happy memories." We tell them, "They wouldn't want you to be sad." or "You can always have another child/find another partner."

Saying something like, "You're stronger than you think," "They're in a better place now," or "At least you had them for as long as you did," might seem like a comfort. The problem is, there's an implied second half of the sentence in all those familiar lines. The second half of that sentence unintentionally dismisses or diminishes your pain; it erases what is true now in favor of some alternate experience. That ghost-sentence tells you it's not OK to feel how you feel.

Telling people to suck it up, move on, put it behind you, pretend you're happy has created epidemics of addiction, depression, and suicidality. I would even argue that it has created interpersonal violence because if you can't say, "I'm in pain," and have that pain heard and honored and validated and acknowledged, it's not going to go away. It is going to find some other way to speak.

To truly feel comforted by someone, you need feel heard in your pain. You need the reality of your loss reflected back to you--not diminished, not diluted. It seems counterintuitive, but true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away."

Adapted from Refuge in Grief ~ Megan Devine ~