The PTSD Solution by Alan D. Wolfelt

Author:Alan D. Wolfelt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Companion Press
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mourning Need 5: Search for meaning

After a significant loss, we naturally question the meaning and purpose of life. We review our philosophy of life and explore religious and spiritual values as we work on this need. This need relates to renewing your rationale for life and living after it has been torn apart.

“All of us suffer some injuries from experiences that seem to have no rhyme or reason. We cannot understand or explain them. We may never know why some things happen in this life.”

— James E. Faust

“Why” and “How” questions are common when you search for meaning. “Why did this happen now, in this way?” “How will I go on living?” The “Why” questions often precede the “How” questions in this unfolding process. The search for a reason to go on living is a vital part of grief work that is usually missing from standard PTSD treatments and requires an expenditure of physical, emotional, and spiritual energy.

You may experience a profound lack of sense of direction or future purpose, particularly if your hopes, dreams, and plans for the future were invested heavily in people, places, or things damaged or destroyed in the traumatic event. At times, overwhelming sadness and loneliness may be your constant companions. After all, you are faced with finding some meaning in going on with life even though you may feel empty and alone.

Traumatic loss forces you to explore your worldview—that set of beliefs you have about how the universe functions and what place you, as an individual, occupy in that universe. Some studies have observed that people in modern Western culture tend to travel through life believing that the world is essentially a nice place in which to live, that life is mostly fair, and that they are basically good people who deserve to have good things happen to them. But when a traumatic event occurs, the pain and suffering that follow undermine these beliefs and can make it very difficult to continue living this happy life. Pain and suffering are often intensified as you try to reconstruct meaning in life.

So, where do you begin your search for meaning and renewal of resources for life and living? You might begin with your religious or spiritual traditions. Doubt may arise. For example, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a foundational belief is that the universe was created by a good and just God. Traumatic events naturally challenge this belief in the goodness of God and the understanding that the world is essentially a nice place in which to live.

When such beliefs or longstanding worldviews are challenged in the early days and weeks after a traumatic event, there is often little, if anything, to replace them right away. This is a part of the “suspension” or “void” that grief creates—an absence of belief that must come before any renewal of belief. The void happens in liminal space. Limina is the Latin word for threshold. When you are in liminal space, you are not busily and unthinkingly going about your life.

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