Trauma lodged inside grief. And the two are not the same thing.

When my father died, I was grieving, obviously. What I didn’t realise at the time and for years after, was that some of what I was experiencing wasn’t grief at all, it was trauma in disguise.

The panic every time the phone rang. The pounding in my chest when someone shouted, gasped or said, “oh no!” The stomach churning. The looping, ruminating, ROAD TO NOWHERE thoughts. The guilt, sleepless nights, the sweats, the sense that disaster was always just around the corner.

I tried to 'manage' my system’s want to catastrophise.

That was trauma lodged inside grief. And the two are not the same thing.

Grief is natural. Trauma is 🤔 well, unhelpful.

Grief is what comes when we lose someone we love. It’s the gut-wrenching ache of absence, the soul searching for a way to live with what’s missing, the future emptiness, the longing for THAT face, THAT voice, that specific loved one. It shifts and morphs and reshapes itself over time. Grief may stay with us in some form, but it is part of being human, part of loving.

Trauma is different. Trauma is the body’s survival alarm still firing long after the loss has happened. It’s the nervous system sensing a current, present threat, locked into fight, flight, or freeze, as if the danger is happening right now.

Grief says: I love, and I miss.
Trauma says: I’m not safe. Maybe nothing is safe.

5 signs you’re still in survival mode after loss

How do you know if trauma is tangled up in your grief? These are some of the signs:

Heightened fear and panic – your heart races when there is no obvious reason.

Flashbacks or dread – sudden waves of fear that feel bigger than the moment you’re in.

Sleep disruption – nightmares, jolting awake, or a heavy body that won’t settle or doesn’t/can’t move.

Frozen grief – feeling stuck, numb, or unable to process, talk about the person or look at photos, even years later.

Hypervigilance – always braced for bad news, unable to relax into ordinary life.

If these experiences sound familiar, you may not just be grieving; you may also be living with trauma.

Why grief can feel like anxiety

For many people, grief doesn’t only show up as sadness. It can feel like racing thoughts at 2am, a knot in the stomach, the tight chest of panic, or the sense that something terrible is about to happen. These are the same signals we call anxiety.

Grief itself is not anxiety, but when trauma is also present, the nervous system struggles to tell the difference. The body stays on high alert, convinced danger is still here. This is why bereavement can feel like living with anxiety, because grief has become entangled with trauma.

PTSD and traumatic grief

When a loss is sudden, violent, or deeply shocking, the nervous system can encode it as trauma. This can lead to symptoms that can be classified as PTSD: intrusive memories, nightmares, emotional numbness, emotional activation, avoiding reminders of the loss, dread, terror, flashbacks, or being easily startled.

Not everyone who grieves will develop PTSD. But for those who do, grief becomes heavier, bound up with the body’s survival response. While grief will always be part of love, PTSD can be resolved. Trauma can be healed, so grief is no longer amplified by the nervous system’s alarm.

"If I let go of my pain, I’m letting go of them. If I heal, I’m betraying their memory."

I felt it too. For years I carried the belief that the depth of my pain equalled the depth of my love. That if the grief softened, I was somehow letting go of my Dad, or disrespecting what his life and death meant to me.

But here’s the truth I eventually uncovered: grief and trauma are not love.

Love is love. Love is the bond that exists, whether you are hurting or not. Love doesn’t require you to stay broken open forever.

Pain is not proof of devotion. If anything, pain can block you from being fully with the love that still exists. It can keep you locked in the moment of loss rather than in the relationship that continues inside you.

Healing trauma does not erase grief. And moving through grief does not erase love. What it does is take away the noise, the alarms, the fear, the guilt, the should-haves, so that what is left is the relationship itself. The love itself.

You may still cry. You will still ache. You'll still long. But you can do so without being swallowed whole by your body's danger system. That is not betrayal. That is integration.

It’s not about “moving on.” It’s about moving forward, carrying them with you differently.

Your hurt does not honour them. Your wholeness does.

Why the grief/trauma distinction matters

When trauma and grief are blurred together, it’s easy to believe something is wrong with you. You might think you’re grieving badly or that you’ll never move forward.

But grief itself doesn’t need fixing. Trauma, though? That can be healed.

When trauma is resolved, grief remains, but it is no longer unbearable. You can carry the love, the memories, and the sadness without being pulled into constant alarm.

The neuroscience of healing trauma

Trauma isn’t just emotional, it’s biological. An innate part of our nervous system that very helpfully records danger and threat. When we experience a traumatic loss, the amygdala (part of our limbic system) in the brain encodes the memory with survival-level urgency. That’s why triggers like a phone call years later can still send your body into panic: the brain has linked that signal to danger.

This is where psychosensory methods like Havening Techniques® can help. Havening uses gentle touch, attention, and imagination to create electrochemical changes in the brain. In simple terms, it allows the nervous system to release the alarm attached to the memory.

Unlike years of trying talk therapies that asked me to activate this trauma, the Jentle processes I use work from the bottom up, through the body and brain, not just through conversation. The result is that the trauma response is removed, resolved, decoded, delinked, depotentiated (see depotentiation blog) and what remains is grief alone.

Moving through grief without carrying trauma

Grief may always live within us in some way. It’s the echo of love. But trauma doesn’t have to.

When trauma is resolved, grief becomes something you can hold, feel, be in, rather than something that drowns or consumes you. You can tell the stories, remember the person, and feel the feels without being hijacked by fear, panic, flashbacks, shame, shutdown, dread, guilt, should’ves, or numbness.

This distinction is powerful: grief is part of life, trauma is for danger.

When to reach out for support

If years have passed and your pain is as raw as the day of the loss, it may be trauma.

If you are in grief right now, but cannot “go there,” it may be trauma.

If your body still reacts as though the danger is happening now, it may be trauma.

If you find yourself unable to move forward, not because you don’t want to, but because something in you won’t let you, it may be trauma.

This doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means your nervous system is still doing its job, trying to protect you, but ramped up too high.

In my 1:1 sessions, I work with people to gently resolve trauma so that grief can be felt for what it truly is, love reshaped, not fear repeated.

You don’t have to carry both.

📍 Book a confidential free discovery call and well plan your first session to reconnect to love. 

Suicide Awareness and Prevention Month

As part of Suicide Awareness Month, I shared a short reel on why trauma and grief must be separated and a good question to ask when you do.n't know what to say. You can watch it here, because this message matters not just for those grieving, but for those we can still reach in time.

Watch Things Nobody Tells You About Grieving After Suicide Loss here. 

Rumi never fails to deliver, faith or not, let the light in.

I said: what about my eyes? God said: Keep them on the road... I said: what about my heart? God said: Tell me what you hold inside it?... pain and sorrow? He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you. Rumi

Much light

Jenna

P.S. If you are a parent, you’ll need this process not only for your own grief, but to guide your children through theirs, and to parent from a place that is healed, not haunted.