Ecdysis
Diamond Member
I'm trying to work out how my trauma has shaped my experiences and thoughts and feelings about death.
I think our modern secular society has a weird relationship to death for starters.
I guess part of my experience regarding trauma/death was a total lack of support or care as a child when deaths would occur. So I think going through grief and all the feelings that surround death like fear, guilt, questions of meaning etc take on whole other dimensions when you go through them on-your-own as a traumatised child.
Then, I guess trauma also taught me what so many of us have experienced - the idea of your own death as an escape - with suicide making death seem like a welcome option, rather than something to be avoided. Which I guess is a source of endless cognitive and emotional dissonance.
I guess trauma has also taught me that "there are fates worse than death". That in some circumstances, death is merciful.
Then, some deaths have also been a source of trauma.
As I've entered the second half of life and dealt with serious health issues, death has also become a reality and a certainty and basically a question of "when" - sooner or later. As a young person, I like so many, felt like my own death was some far away theoretical thing... but that's no longer the case.
I volunteer in end-of-life hospice care now, because it felt important to me to face the topic of death head-on. And because good end-of-life care makes an enormous difference to people. It can remove so much fear and suffering.
On a personal level, experiencing more and more deaths makes me wonder about what on earth we spend our lives doing. So much of it is so utterly meaningless and irrelevant. At the end of your life, nearly none of it matters.
I believe we all just borrow the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies for whatever span of time we are here on this strange planet. And then, we return them and they get recycled and some other living beings like a tree turn those molecules into leaves and branches and stuff for a while and so on.
I think our modern secular society has a weird relationship to death for starters.
I guess part of my experience regarding trauma/death was a total lack of support or care as a child when deaths would occur. So I think going through grief and all the feelings that surround death like fear, guilt, questions of meaning etc take on whole other dimensions when you go through them on-your-own as a traumatised child.
Then, I guess trauma also taught me what so many of us have experienced - the idea of your own death as an escape - with suicide making death seem like a welcome option, rather than something to be avoided. Which I guess is a source of endless cognitive and emotional dissonance.
I guess trauma has also taught me that "there are fates worse than death". That in some circumstances, death is merciful.
Then, some deaths have also been a source of trauma.
As I've entered the second half of life and dealt with serious health issues, death has also become a reality and a certainty and basically a question of "when" - sooner or later. As a young person, I like so many, felt like my own death was some far away theoretical thing... but that's no longer the case.
I volunteer in end-of-life hospice care now, because it felt important to me to face the topic of death head-on. And because good end-of-life care makes an enormous difference to people. It can remove so much fear and suffering.
On a personal level, experiencing more and more deaths makes me wonder about what on earth we spend our lives doing. So much of it is so utterly meaningless and irrelevant. At the end of your life, nearly none of it matters.
I believe we all just borrow the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies for whatever span of time we are here on this strange planet. And then, we return them and they get recycled and some other living beings like a tree turn those molecules into leaves and branches and stuff for a while and so on.
