You feel stuck between wanting to move on but needing to grieve, and you don’t know where to go. Trauma therapy in Milwaukee, WI, can be a great place to start. When you lose someone, the body can experience high levels of stress and emotion. These can impede the quality of your life for months and years to come. Despite the importance of these emotions in the grief and healing process, you don’t need to sacrifice the quality of your life.
When Loss Feels Like More Than Just Grief
Grief is a natural response to losing someone you love, even for men. The severed bond that happens after we lose someone is what causes grief. Grief by itself has many different stages and can feel like it comes in waves. However, if you notice yourself getting stuck in grief and unable to move forward in life, trauma therapy can be greatly beneficial to help your nervous system reregulate and to heal the stress response that happens when we lose someone.
What Does Normal Grief Actually Look Like and When Does It Become a Problem?
Grief is a natural occurrence when losing someone close. Grief typically involves immense levels of sadness, loneliness, regret, and anger. At first, it might feel like you are shutting down in your life. After some time passes, you’ll notice that the grief is still there, but you’re able to execute on your daily needs in life. However, if you find yourself continuously getting stuck, that may be a sign that trauma therapy can benefit you.
Grief has five stages. It involves denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But these stages are not always linear. It’s often a circle that continuously oscillates backwards and forwards as the years to come are filled with memories, anniversaries, and birthdays that pass. As time moves on, your ability to execute and complete the things that you need to do in life typically improves.
Grief Doesn’t Always Come from Death — The Range of Loss Men Experience
Grief and loss can stem from many different things in life. This could be the loss of a spouse or a partner, or the loss of a child or a grandparent. Some of your best friends may even pass away, or maybe you lose coworkers that you are very close to, especially for those in the military and first responder communities. Other life events, such as divorce, family moving away, or changes in daily functioning due to traumatic brain injury or other medical diagnosis, can also create grief. What’s important to know is that grief is a sign of significant change. But it can be visceral and create issues in your life. Trauma therapy for men in Milwaukee, WI, for grief can be immensely beneficial to your healing process.
Grief is trying to give us time and space to mourn. These intense emotions can give us pause to reflect, connect with family, and grieve. Grief is about honoring the person or change in functioning that you’ve lost as life continues to move forward.
What Is the Difference Between Grief and Trauma?
Trauma, by itself, is different from grief; however, they can go hand-in-hand. Trauma occurs when your well-being or someone else’s well-being is immediately jeopardized, or you unexpectedly lose someone close to you. It’s important to distinguish that trauma responses may be different than Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). With trauma responses, there’s hypervigilance, emotional numbness, dissociation, and difficulty navigating life as it was. Grief, on the other hand, is filled with intense emotions, some levels of emotional numbness, and is more temporarily paralyzing than trauma responses.
Trauma is anything that creates a threat response within the body. Some examples include a near-death experience, invasive medical procedure, car accident, or learning of the unexpected death of someone close. When the body experiences a threat response, that threat response needs to be completed; otherwise, it’ll stay stored within the body and in the nervous system.
Grief and trauma differ in how they show up in your life. Grief stems from the loss of something: a person, a level of independence you once had, or a marriage. Trauma is a threat response that’s held within the body. Grief can have visceral and intense emotions and be intimately linked with trauma. As time goes on, grief slowly becomes more subtle but can still be unpredictable. Trauma, on the other hand, can include a constant state of being on guard, restlessness, thinking that others are out to get you, or that the world is unsafe. Trauma symptoms don’t always decrease over time, as most grief symptoms do. You can have grief without trauma and trauma without grief, but sometimes they go hand-in-hand.
Why the Overlap Between Grief and Trauma Can Freeze Your Healing
The overlap between trauma and grief can freeze you in the healing process. When trauma and grief are intertwined, the body struggles to process through the visceral emotions of trauma, as well as the pain and agony related to grief. Grief can feel like a slowly moving through your system or your body, whereas trauma feels like it never ends and can be rapid. While addressing both grief and trauma in trauma therapy, both can become integrated and healed so that your body can then readjust back into normalcy and nervous system regulation.
How Does Grief Become Trauma and What Are the Turning Points?
Grief can become trauma at many different points in someone’s life. Here are a few scenarios where trauma can become intertwined with grief.
- After a separation or divorce, one partner may become threatening or controlling to the point where the other partner fears for their safety.
- The grief of watching a loved one decline in a nursing home becomes traumatic due to unforeseen medical issues that require invasive medical intervention.
- Losing a child to an illness or accident.
The loss of someone or something that we care deeply for can feel like a stomach punch. Often, loss leaves a gaping hole in your life. The struggle with unpredictable loss is that it’s a shock to the body, the mind, and the nervous system. This can lead you to a trauma or stress response.
When and how we lose someone greatly impacts how we grieve, the length of the grief process, and how we reach out for support. Experiencing grief is a challenging experience by itself; this can be complicated by the environments in which you experience grief.
Depending on the loss in your life, grief can take longer than normal to process. The emotions can feel more intense and, at times, feel unbearable. Sometimes, it takes a long time for grief to subside. Trust in yourself and those around you. If you need extra support, trauma therapy for grief may be beneficial to your healing process.
When Is It Time to Seek Trauma Therapy for Grief?
Trauma therapy by itself can help you address trauma, yes. It can also help facilitate internal movement around the agony of grief. Trauma therapy, even when grief is intertwined, is beneficial to your healing process. When it’s time to seek trauma therapy, it will be different for every person. Consider trauma therapy in Milwaukee, WI if:
- You are struggling to maintain productivity at work due to a loss in your life.
- The emotions from a recent loss or traumatic experience are causing you to miss out on life, events, and celebrations.
- You feel like you’re isolating to a greater and greater extent.
All of these signs and others could indicate that trauma therapy in Milwaukee, WI, can be beneficial to your healing process.
How Is Trauma Therapy Different from General Grief Support?
Grief support is typically centered around talking through and bringing together others who are experiencing a similar situation around grief. This is typically done in a group therapy session. However, trauma therapy is very different because it’s bottom-up oriented, meaning you start with nervous system regulation, moving into integration and processing through both grief and traumatic experiences. When integration begins to occur, the body itself is more at peace and calm internally.
Every person’s response to trauma therapy will be different and unique. Trauma therapy for grief can help reduce the intensity of the emotions that you experience in the grieving process. You’ll notice a greater ability to be at peace in your body; however, grieving is a process, is natural, and takes time. We can’t circumvent what it is to be human.
Finding Trauma Therapy in Milwaukee and the Surrounding Area
Whether you are searching for a trauma therapist in the Milwaukee and surrounding areas or looking to heal from grief, Revitalize Mental Health is accepting new clients at this time. In-person sessions work well for those who live in Southeastern Wisconsin, including Lake Geneva, Burlington, Franklin, and Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Virtual trauma therapy is also an option for those who live outside that area or who simply prefer virtual therapy in general.
You Don’t Have to Carry Grief Alone — Trauma Therapy in Milwaukee WI Is Here
Grief is a natural but painful process in your life. Trauma therapy can assist with reducing the intensity of these emotions and integrating these emotions into your body so that you can continue to execute your daily life. You don’t have to carry this weight alone. Trauma therapy in Milwaukee, WI, for men navigating grief can greatly benefit their lives.
If things have reached a point in your life where you feel stuck or you don’t know where to go with your grief, trauma therapy may be able to help. Trauma therapy can be done via virtual or in-person sessions. I have found that in-person sessions at Revitalize Mental Health’s office location work well for people who live as far as Lake Geneva, Burlington, Wauwatosa, Brookfield, Oak Creek, and Waukesha, Wisconsin. Of course, if you live closer and you prefer virtual trauma therapy, that can be a great option too. For people who live far distances, online trauma therapy may be your best option.
Why Grief Becomes Trauma and How Trauma Therapy in Milwaukee WI Helps You Finally Heal
You have spent long enough feeling frozen between the grief you need to process and the trauma that won’t let you move. Trauma therapy in Milwaukee, WI, gives you a space where both can be addressed at the same time, where your nervous system can begin to find its footing again, and where the weight of what you’ve lost doesn’t have to define every day going forward. At Revitalize Mental Health, we go at your pace, we build safety first, and we work with your body rather than against it. You don’t have to carry this alone any longer.
- Complete the online form or call 720.295.6703 to get started.
- Begin meeting with a compassionate trauma therapist to see if we’re a good fit.
- Take the first step toward healing from grief and trauma today.
Additional Services Offered at Revitalize Mental Health
At Revitalize Mental Health, I understand that grief and trauma rarely exist in isolation. The loss you’ve experienced touches every part of your life, how you sleep, how you show up for your family, how you function at work, and how connected you feel to yourself and the people still around you. While this blog focuses on the intersection of grief and trauma and how trauma therapy can help men heal, I also work with men navigating a range of challenges, including Perfectionism, Anxiety, Panic, Mood Disorders, Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI), Schizophrenia, EMDR Trauma Therapy for First Responders and Military Personnel, and Men and Infidelity.
I frequently work with men who are quietly falling apart beneath the surface while trying to hold everything together for everyone else. Sessions are collaborative and intentionally paced, using evidence-based approaches such as EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, CBT, and ACT, bottom-up therapies that help your nervous system process both the grief and the trauma that have become intertwined in your body. I offer both in-person therapy in the Milwaukee area, as well as virtual therapy throughout Wisconsin and Colorado.
About the Author
I’m Daniel, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and the founder of Revitalize Mental Health. I specialize in working with men who are navigating the complicated and often overwhelming intersection of grief and trauma. Many of the men I work with come to me carrying losses that never fully healed — losses that over time crossed into trauma and left them feeling frozen, disconnected, and unsure of how to move forward. I understand that reaching out for help while you’re still in the middle of grief can feel like one more thing to carry. But continuing to carry it alone slowly costs you your health, your relationships, and your ability to honor the person or the life you lost in a way that feels meaningful.
My approach works with both the emotional pain of grief and the stored trauma response that can become tangled up in loss. As a certified EMDR therapist with advanced training in Somatic Experiencing, ACT, and CBT, I help men process what the body has been holding and find a way to move forward without feeling like they are leaving the person they lost behind. The result is a man who can carry his grief with grace rather than being consumed by it.
