As for injuries, pain is not always felt when and where it is inflicted. Grief is slow internal bleeding. And it turns out that my father was right, or almost right, about trauma being in the blood.

Buddhist thought has been helpful for me with this because the Buddha’s first noble truth—that life is tinged with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness (or suffering)—takes it as a given that there is always some way that we feel unseen, unknown, or unrecognized.

Psychoanalysis has explored many of the most obvious parental failings that contribute to such feelings but, in trying to find the source, or the cause, of personal uncertainty, it has encouraged people to overly blame their families of origin rather than taking on the responsibility of reaching out to establish whatever kinds of connections are actually possible in life.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.

The emotional consequences are too intense for the child to bear and, to protect himself or herself, dissociation takes place in which the unbearable feelings are closed off and put aside so that the child can go forward safely. A kind of armor is created, but the unmanageable feelings lurk and rise up unbidden at inopportune times as if out of nowhere. Winnicott described such feelings as like being “infinitely dropped,” and eloquently wrote of how the afflicted person often fears a breakdown that has already happened. The person projects the thing from the past into the future because they were not able to be present with the breakdown when it was actually taking place. To be free, they have to be able to remember the trauma that was never fully experienced, and they have to be able to put it in its proper place in history.

Temporary insanities, like those of hard loss and grief, are always potentially creative, depending on how you deal with them. The temptation always is to sink too far into self-pity and to find relief in the compassion of others. It’s important to feel the sadness, but emotion is always only a partial resolution. Grief is complete only with a shift in being, in the way you live, think, and relate to the world.