Letters Dealing With Losses That Life Brings To the Editor: “The Trauma of Being Alive,” by Mark Epstein (Sunday Review, Aug. 4), is a deep and honest reflection of how “life is filled with endless little traumas.” Ordinary events like being ignored by a friend, failing at a relationship or missing out on a job promotion are all small traumas. Sure, these are not cataclysmic events, but Dr. Epstein astutely argues that life is hard and that it’s O.K. for us to acknowledge the ups and downs and to feel emotional about it. It’s even healthy: a novel concept to those who embrace the elusive quest to be “normal.” HELEN M. FARRELL Boston, Aug. 4, 2013 The writer, a psychiatrist, is an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a staff psychiatrist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston. To the Editor: Mark Epstein’s essay does a grave disservice to trauma sufferers when he says people must live with trauma. There are many psychotherapies that heal trauma. The most effective therapies for trauma that truly clear the shock, fear, flashbacks, bad dreams and emotions include eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or E.M.D.R.; many somatic therapies, and Brainspotting. In my work with grieving people, I first help them clear the trauma of the illness, accident or moment of finding out about the death. Then we target the grief. People still move through the grieving process but are no longer stuck in the past. When the grief resolves — and it does resolve — patients still miss the person who died but are no longer stuck in the moment of the death or in active, acute grief. Trauma runs through everyone’s life. But unending suffering need not. ROBIN SHAPIRO Seattle, Aug. 4, 2013 The writer, a social worker, is the author of “The Trauma Treatment Handbook: Protocols Across the Spectrum.” To the Editor: Thank you, Dr. Mark Epstein, for accepting the duration of your widowed mother’s grief. Those who lose a spouse through divorce may also take years to recover, and divorced women do not receive the support often available to widows. People I know whose spouses left them took “10 years” or “half the number of years the relationship lasted” to recover. As Dr. Epstein warns, if we expect our grieving friends or family members to “get over it” before they are able to do so, they are likely to feel estranged from us. If we communicate that we don’t want to hear about their continuing grief, we are denying them the support they need. Moreover, “in defending ourselves from feeling its full impact, we deprive ourselves” of trauma’s “full truth.” Divorce is one such trauma. (Rabbi) MARGARET MOERS WENIG Brooklyn, Aug. 4, 2013 To the Editor: While Mark Epstein contends that “daily life is filled with endless little traumas,” there are also good reasons not to view the everyday as traumatic or to view trauma as an everyday occurrence. One reason people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder may frequently feel misunderstood is that what they’ve experienced is categorically different from the sorrows we encounter ordinarily. It serves our ability to empathize with the victims of trauma to keep this difference in mind. On the other hand, viewing the human condition as traumatic pathologizes what is normal and necessitates the kind of “reflexive rush to normal” that Dr. Epstein warns against. WARREN MILLER Sausalito, Calif., Aug. 6, 2013 The writer is a marriage and family therapist. To the Editor: As a bereavement counselor for a large regional hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I see death every day. Lately, I have become concerned with how the psychiatric community has positioned the word “traumatic” next to the word “death.” Families that sit next to their loved ones during a perfectly normal death often speak of the experience as “traumatic.” Ten or 15 years ago, this language was unheard of. I often have to do considerable teaching to help families understand that death is natural and that the experience, though painful, is a rite of passage. The death of people can be traumatic, but these instances are less frequent than one might think. I fear that medical professionals like Dr. Mark Epstein are schooling our grievers to experience trauma in places where it does not belong, thus creating a culture where loss is equated with trauma, and death with victimization. ROY ELLIS Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Aug. 6, 2013
Posted on: Sun, 11 Aug 2013 04:46:59 +0000
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