Why Grief is Essential in Healing Trauma and Anxiety: How Somatic Yoga, Breathwork, and IFS Therapy Help You Move Through Pain

As a therapist and social worker for 20 years, I have noticed that grief is often one of those topics that many avoid. I was talking to a friend the other day and she was mentioning some of the transitions she was going through. Changes with her kids school, with her work, and their family moving. As I was listening I couldn’t help but wonder about the grief she may be experiencing and where that was in her description of all she was naming. As we were chatting I recognized that she, like many didn’t even conceive that grief would be considered with transitions. She just thought they were changes, yes hard changes, but ones that were “easier to get over” and grief is “more difficult”.

I know she isn’t alone in what she was naming so let’s break this down. Grief is not just about death. It’s about loss. Loss can mean different things for different people. It can be a loss of identity, loss of relationships, loss of safety, loss of time. According to Francis Weller’s book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, there are 7 gates of grief he discusses. Samantha DiRosa breaks them down as:

1. First Gate: Everything we love we will lose
   ● Losing someone or something we love
   ● Loss of those who depart this Earth before us; our parents, spouse, children, friends
   ● Loss of home, beloved animals, places you have loved
   ● Loss from illness or injury; treasured skills and capacities
   ● Loss of a life dream

2. Second Gate: The places that have not known love
   ● Places in ourselves never touched by love; parts of us we had to cleave off to receive a provisional welcome or acceptance
   ● Places within us banished and wrapped in shame
   ● What we judge in ourselves and hold in contempt (which we deny the healing salve of community)
   ● Places within ourselves that live outside of compassion, warmth, and welcome
   ● Outcast portions of our soul appearing as addictions, depression, anxiety and other symptoms calling for our attention.

3. Third Gate: The sorrows of the world
   ● The losses of the world around us
   ● Daily diminishment of species, habitats, indigenous languages, and cultures noted in our psyches
   ● Sadness for the Earth
   ● Where we experience the soul of the world
   ● The legacy of human and white-supremacy

4. Fourth Gate: What we expected and did not receive
   Things we may never realize we have lost because we weren’t born into villages with a full joyous welcome of our gifts. The expectations that have been coded into our psyches over the past 200,000 years in our evolution as a species.  And so we carry:
   ● Unconscious disappointment
   ● Feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and aloneness
   ● Diminished experience of who we truly are

   At the core of this grief is our longing to belong and longing to be longed for.

5. Fifth Gate: Ancestral grief
   Unacknowledged and untended sorrows of those who came before us, born of:
   ● Lost connection to land, language, imagination, rituals, songs, stories of our ancestors
   ● Sense of homelessness, orphaned between old and new worlds
   ● Collective soul grief of abuses and oppression of millions (in our country of the United States, all BIPOC people)

6. Sixth Gate: Grief for harm done
   ● Harm we have caused to ourselves and others
   ● Collective harms we’re complicit in, such as racism, patriarchy, ecocide, and inequity
   ● Moral injury
   ● Bystanding (not intervening when we can)
   ● May include choices we’ve had to make to assure our own survival

7. Seventh Gate: The gate of trauma
   Grief work is a necessary component of trauma recovery and healing. With traumatic events, we find:
   ● Loss of trust in oneself and others
   ● Loss of a sense of safety
   ● Loss of identity
   ● Loss of innocence
   ● Loss of emotional regulation / a sense of agency in our body
   ● Loss of a sense of competence
   ● Loss of bodily/sensual pleasure and comfort
   ● “What happened that shouldn’t have happened and what should have happened that didn’t happen” (Linda Thai).

From this place of understanding we can expand our breath of experience when it comes to grief. For many women, anxiety and trauma symptoms are deeply tied to unacknowledged grief. Trauma-informed healing can help support these unprocessed places of grief so that there can be a sense of internal safety when being with difficult emotions like grief.

Why Grief is Essential in Healing Anxiety and Trauma

Since many of us are disconnected from grief, we often don’t recognize grief as grief. Instead we often see or feel the anxiety that comes from unprocessed grief. This can look like tightness in the chest, restlessness or difficulty sitting or being still, feeling a sense of fear or dread, difficulty sleeping at night, running thoughts, and/or brain fog. It is only when we slow down enough to be with anxiety, is it able to gently point us in the direction of what must be processed. When we repress emotions, anxiety is often the part of us that works hard to keep it at bay through proactively managing and controlling our lives in any way possible. Through this, it depends on certainty and will do anything in it’s power to find you in places where certainty is available. When it is not, anxiety can often be expressed through the body in the above named symptoms.

Grief that is processed is not necessarily grief that no longer exists. Instead grief is there but lives in us where we can be with it without needing to go into survival mode. Unprocessed grief will move us into a flight/fight/shutdown response as it will trigger our threat system. Processed grief allows what needs to be there to exist and be felt. Whether that is anger, sadness, heartbreak, and/or vulnerability. The gifts of processed grief can come with a greater sense of compassion, forgiveness, and/or resilience.

Samantha DiRosa (from Francis Weller’s work) lists the medicines of the above 7 gates as:

First Gate: Everything we love we will lose
Can manifest as isolation, devastation, acute shattering
Moving into vulnerability opens us to the medicine of being permeable to love.

Second Gate: The places that have not known love
Arises as shame
Inhabiting our adult self opens us to the medicine of compassion.

Third Gate: The sorrows of the world
Appears as despair, overwhelm, hopelessness, holy outrage
Remembering our immutable bond with the world opens us to the medicine of sacred entanglement.

Fourth Gate: What we expected and did not receive
Arises as loneliness, emptiness, reaching for secondary satisfactions (i.e. addictions, over consumption, etc)
The mystery of our deep time lineage and our true inheritance opens us to the medicine of belonging.

Fifth Gate: Ancestral grief
Manifests as confusion, lack of connection, unresolved trauma, disconnection from ancestors
The mystery of transgenerational transmission of courage and an invitation to elderhood opens us to the medicine of wisdom.

Sixth Gate: Grief for harm done
Appears as regret, guilt, shame, and self-blame
Our capacity to wound and be wounded opens us to the medicine of accountability and forgiveness.

Seventh Gate: The gate of trauma
Manifests as hypervigilance, dysregulation, disassociation, and exhaustion
The mystery of the body’s enduring memory and capacity to heal opens us to the medicine of resilience and integration.

Somatic Yoga: Moving Grief Through the Body

Grief is a natural and normal response to trauma. It is inevitable that when trauma occurs, so does a loss. Something within us was experienced as too much, too fast, and too soon and from that place we had to lose a connection within us. Trauma and grief are stored in the body and the body will hold what our mind cannot make sense of. The body will show us what we must tend to and will hold it for us until we are ready to be with it. This can show up by being stuck in the hyper or hypo arousal state, where our body is seeking safety via action or disconnection.

The Polyvagal Theory created by Dr. Stephen Porges, “is a way of understanding how our nervous system evolved to both be regulating the internal state for our heart, etc. but also whether things are safe or unsafe, whether there is a threat or not, and if there is an openness to connect with others via social engagement.” -Dan Siegel

When a loss occurs, grief unprocessed often makes us want to isolate and not engage with others. In our society too often grief is privatized and believed that one ought to experience it alone and not share too much of it with others. This combination is detrimental to the healing of grief, which is never meant for one to hold alone. Grief is often so large as an expression to state that it is meant to be supported and held by others.

Ways to begin to move some of the ways in which our body may feel isolated, is beginning to allow some safe, gentle supported movements as ways to be with the body in all that it’s holding. Somatic yoga can help release emotional tensions without re-traumatizing by first going slowly and finding movements that feel good and supportive. It can be as simple as rocking, or humming. Or yoga poses such as child’s pose or forward fold with a hip sway.

Transcending Trauma with Yoga has a beautiful deck of cards that offer supportive yoga poses and affirmations. See below for an example:

Breathwork: Reconnecting with Safety

“Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness,
which unites your body to your thoughts. 
Whenever your mind becomes scattered,
use your breath as the means 
to take hold of your mind again.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh* , The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

Focusing in on the breath, we can increase our attentional control systems and use a voluntary response system towards a involuntary system of our body (the breath). When we extend or slow down the breath, we slow down the inhibitory control systems which are critical for emotional regulation. That ability to slow down the breath, allows us to regulate our nervous system. So anytime we slow down our breath, we allow more oxygen to our body, and send more signals to our brain to allow us to enter into different regulatory system.

Being with the breath when one has experienced trauma or has high anxiety can be difficult at first. The breath is often disrupted in trauma so gaining back that relationship, where the breath can be safely held can be a challenge. There are techniques that can be helpful to engage, but should do so under the support of a provider or a trauma-informed meditation/yoga teacher that can assist you in co-regulation and find safe supports in being with the breath. For instance if closing your eyes create more dysregulation than support, find a safe way to rest your eyes, whether thats on an object, a candle, or something soothing. Use your hands to help support the attention on the breath if that is helpful, such as tracing your fingers as you breath in and out. Peace By Piece Therapy offers 1:1 support, mindfulness coaching, and group somatic yoga classes that are trauma-informed.

Conscious breathing creates space to feel grief without overwhelm. As the nervous system grows in its capacity to move towards different regulatory states, it will no longer than need to be stuck in a state of overwhelm. This will make it easier to move towards grief tending in a way that feels more supportive, than fear-based. And finding a community that can be a container of holding for you is no doubt the ideal when it comes to grief tending.

Internal Family Systems Therapy: Making Sense of the Grief Story

When grief comes up, there are often layers intertwined of guilt, shame, or confusion. Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a vital therapeutic healing tool that works with each of these layers as they come up. In IFS, we work with each part that is grieving and allow space for it to be heard, seeing if it is willing to connect with the inner resource that is available in each human. Through this way of therapy, self-regulation naturally occurs when there is more availability with this inner resource, as it allows a greater sense of inner stability. From this flowing, loving energy, there is space to be with the grief without bypassing all that it is holding. Through IFS, we can gently uncover the loss and all the emotions that may be there as well.

Therapy can validate your experience and hold space for the complexity. A therapist that is trained in these modalities, will know confidently how to be a container to support all that is needing to express and find safe ways to begin to move into the material. You don’t have to witness it alone, and it can be so powerfully healing to have someone hold your hand as you go through the raw emotions that come up with grief.

Holistic Integration: Why Combining These Tools Is Powerful

These 3 tools named above work synergistically to create a powerful healing environment:

• Therapy- gives voice

• Yoga- gives movement

• Breath- gives regulation

Through each of these areas, emotions within then can be experienced and the energy that is taking up so much space of repressing, fighting, causing more stress and tension, can then be released. From this place we no longer have to fight ourselves from the fear of feeling, but allow ways in which the feelings can finally be felt and seen. In this witnessing we can learn to be with our grief. And when we can be with our grief, we can allow the medicines to pour into our beings. The compassion, the gratitude, the sense of belonging, the wisdom, the deep connection, and bring back the lost parts of our souls that are looking for our attention and care.

Final Thoughts: You are Allowed to Grieve

Grief is not a weakness, it’s a doorway to healing. Lets begin to breakdown all the walls our society has built up around grief and find the medicine our souls have been yearning for. More than ever, we feel isolated and alone and it’s a deeper calling for humanity to move into more depth with ourselves and each other.

I invite you if this calls your soul in, explore a 1:1 session, join one of our groups or yoga classes, or access and grief and anxiety resource.

Below is a free guided Grounded Meditation for breathwork for emotional healing that can also be of a support during your walk with grief: