What are you supposed to do with the heaviness of step four? Those narratives are very “sticky” or wouldn’t be able to create the level of disruption that they do. They are also plausible; if they didn’t make so much sense in light of a trauma, then we would just shake them off and move on with our lives.

The fifth step may not seem intuitive at first, but once you think about it, it should seem very logical. You need to take time to mourn the trauma you experienced and its impact. Now that you’ve begun the process of removing the destructive suffering messages, you can grieve the experience without the emotional contaminants that are so tempting (i.e., blaming yourself, being angry at God, isolating from safe people, or generally be cynical about life).

Until we remove the destructive narratives that attached to our suffering from our experience of trauma our, sadness is perpetually interrupted by arguing against the things we fear our trauma means. We get stuck trying to solve theological riddles about God or reasoning ourselves into trusting again.

“This is exactly why Lamentations was inspired by God as sacred Scripture—it teaches us how to mourn overwhelming losses and yet find hope in God (p. 155).” Steven R. Tracy in Mending the Soul

Grief is a process by which we embrace the fact that God agrees with our sorrows. We don’t have to convince anyone of anything. We can be weak, sad, and cared for like we longed to but didn’t feel safe to ask for. The counter narrative that the gospel provides for our experience of trauma only makes sense from a context of safety; otherwise we are only frantically arguing with fear, which is like trying to put out a grease fire with water (makes sense, but doesn’t work).

To help you understand what it means to grieve your experience of trauma and the impact it has had, we will consider the subject of mourning in three sections.

1. What Is Being Mourned?
2. Mourning’s Traumatic Twin: Fixation
3. How to Mourn

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