Dawn Wever, LMHC shares her experience with the tragic loss of her daughter.

Links to purchase Hannah's Books https://amzn.to/46DrjJ9 Dawn's website https://dawnweverlmhc.com/ Dawn's post on Facebook that was the catalyst for this podcast: This is what it’s like to live inside traumatic grief. This is my attempt to describe the indescribable. A record of consciousness under traumatic grief. One of the toughest side effects of Hannah’s death is the requirement of continued participation in the world. The violence of function after catastrophic loss. To continue to live when it’s too painful. To reestablish and invest in a new life without her in it. It’s like trying to walk on broken legs every day with the expectation to “just keep moving.” A critical, cultural engrained narrative. The mind turns off due to the intensity of the pain. It’s like living Life as an amnesiac without recall from one day to the next. An Etch a sketch erasure every night of everything. Each day like the day before. Groundhog Day. Perhaps a merciful state and not a flaw. Divinely designed. Defense mechanism. A definitive before and after occurred. I am someone else that I don’t recognize. And I am the same. The paradox of continuity and rupture. I no longer know myself. The internal geography shifted significantly. I have no coordinates. I am not sure that I recognize the world either. It seems strange now. But it hasn’t changed. Like I’m in a cage but I don’t want to come out. I’m out at the same time. The cage is in the mind. I cannot open it this time. Too heavy. Too much. Not enough. Learned helplessness? Defeatist? No longer resilient? Inherently resilient. Self evident. A cataclysmic, seismic event. Replaced by another mind, a brain that operates under a new system. The world is always a stage. Perhaps I am just no longer part of the performance. And I am as well. There is a duality of presence and absence. A dialectic. Ambivalence. However, not myself. Anew. Transfixed. Disenchanted. Capricious. Mercurial. Still. Unchanging. Annihilated. Gone. Here. My traumatic grief. My stream of consciousness this evening.~d.