I remember when Brian and I moved to Nashville after our year of traveling the country in an Airstream, and I was convinced that putting down new roots in a new city would be the final step in our healing journey. Both individually and together.

I thought Brian would finally be able to meet new friends, get excited about getting a job, we could go on dates to places we've never been before, and enjoy the culture of a big city.

There was nothing I wouldn’t do to help us move forward. I just didn’t realize at the time that the one thing I couldn’t do was move Brian forward with me. And I tried.

Each time we had a conversation where I was ramping us up to move forward, it felt like the two of us were sitting in a car, and I had my foot pedal to the metal on the gas. And Brian not only had his foot on the break, but he had the car in reverse. He didn’t just want to stand still, he wanted to go backward. I’ve got my eyes on the road ahead, and he’s looking out the rear view mirror.

And we’re just stuck.

Brian’s regret was keeping his eyes fixed on the past.

Most times, I think regret is just unfelt grief.

And regret is totally unproductive. Focusing on what you wish happened differently has no power to keep it from happening again.

The best way to move forward with clarity is to reexamine those memories and events in your life that have brought you grief. Not so you can wallow in what you wish had happened differently, but so you can learn what has made you who you are. Only then can you grow into something more.

So what does it look like to honor our past trauma and use it to move forward with wisdom and clarity?

Let’s talk about it.

**MY TELL-ALL MEMOIR**

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Grief is not a disorder, a disease, or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical, and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.”

- Earl Grollman

First things first. When we go to examine trauma in our own lives, it’s essential to point out that comparative trauma does no one any good.

We can all agree that some people have survived more traumatic events and situations than others. I was in a car accident that killed my sister when she was eight, but I didn’t have to survive the holocaust. Telling myself that I need to get over my trauma because I don’t have it as bad as someone else does no one any good.

How many of us have shared the earth shattering loss of a friendship, a job, or even a pregnancy only to be told, “Well, at least ____________.” You fill in the blank. I’m sure you could!

When I say you need to examine your own history of trauma in order to move forward into who you were meant to be, that means uncovering the events that were traumatic to you.

It could be as seemingly insignificant as getting lost at the Walmart as a kid. We don’t get to decide why these things stick with us, but we owe it to ourselves to figure out why.

For example, when I first moved back to Conway after separating from Brian, I was alone alone for the first time in my adult life. I was the head of our household. Me and the kids flying solo. Having already examined the trauma of losing my sister and growing up with parents who, while taking care of my every physical need, taking me to every activity I could want, and giving me all assurances that I was loved, were so deep in their own loss and trauma that I often felt emotionally alone and misunderstood, I knew abandonment was a recurring trauma for me.

That’s why when I opened Instagram a few days after my return to Conway, something seemingly silly and unimportant retraumatized me in a big way.

I saw a post of a group of college friends– a group that I thought I was a part of– gathering for a friend’s baby shower. They were all about twenty minutes from my house. Some had driven hours to be there.

We’d all been at each other’s big milestones. Weddings, baby showers, reunions. And I hadn’t gotten an invite.

This feeling of abandonment, of not being chosen, took me out. I was in the midst of a little self-pride. I’d done something hard– separated from Brian– and I was surviving on my own. I was grateful to be in a space with new energy. I was beginning to feel some self-love again.

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And just as I felt like I was getting it, this unexpected post on Instagram felt like the universe asking me if I was really committed to learning the lesson.

Because my first feelings were of betrayal. Abandonment. Pain. Loneliness.

Why was I left out?

Don't they know that I'm going through this transition?

Isn't this the time to reach out and include someone more than ever?

And then I put my phone down. And I asked myself, “Jessica if you had been invited to this, would you have wanted to go? Are you in a place right now where you can be around a bunch of people? Are you in a place where you can answer questions about you and Brian? Are you in a place where you want to socialize and answer all these questions?”

No. I wasn’t.

I took it a step further and I asked myself, “Is it possible that even though you have great memories with these people and you have a lot of love for them, is it possible that that was a chapter of your life you're meant to move on from? Is it possible that you yourself would have never made the decision to move on from this group? So God made that decision for you?

Is it possible for you to look at this from the perspective of “thank you God for showing me so clearly where my energy is best spent right now. Thank you God for not putting me in a position where I have to make a decision to say yes or no to an invitation. Thank you for just making that decision for me.”

I realized that just because these beautiful friends had been my partners in life so far didn’t mean that they were the people I needed to walk into a new season.

I realized that had I been invited to that shower, I would have probably in some way declined.

All of this happened in the span of a few minutes. Learning what are triggers and traumas for me, noticing when I felt re-traumatized, helped me to see this situation for what it was, feel the grief in the moment, and then trust that everything was happening for me, not to me.

I knew then that I had learned this lesson. I knew that it didn't mean these people didn't love me, it didn't mean I didn't love them, and it didn't mean that the time we spent together wasn't beautiful and filled with love and filled with beautiful memories. It just meant that I was growing, and I was moving in a different direction, and I was able to look at this with such gratitude to where when I looked at the photo again, I was grateful for each of those people, and I was grateful that I was exactly where I was.

It wasn’t rejection. It was redirection.

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Once I examined myself and uncovered the truth, I was able to put my phone down and smile.

And for the record, none of this would have happened if I had told myself, this is a stupid thing to be sad about. People have it way worse than feeling left out. Get over yourself.

Trust what hurts. Grieve deeply so you don’t regret. Even trauma can be transformed into growth when you honor it with your attention.

If you are grieving the loss of someone, whether it's a death, a job loss, a breakup in any form, the death of a dream even… that grief and that sadness shows you how much you loved that person or how much joy a situation brought you and for that we can only have gratitude.

I believe our capacity for grief mirrors our capacity for love.

So let grief crack you open and show you your fullest self. The good, the bad, the ugly. And let it guide you to the path back to you.

Because once you realize that the path you’ve been on needs to change direction in order for you to become the person you were meant to be, there’s one big thing you need to grieve:

Losing the life you thought you’d live.

dive even deeper on this topic here

If you want to know more about finding gifts in unexpected trauma, and specifically what that’s looked like in my life in the past few years, I encourage you to join The Path Back to You. In the coursework, I share my own personal story of Embracing the Darkness, moving from theory to reality as I share the nitty gritty details of my own life.

I also share a workbook to go alongside each chapter in the course, which gives you tools like meditations, prompts, playlists, and more to help you engage with the course content throughout your week.

Whenever you stumble across this, trust that you are ready to do the work and I’ll walk alongside you as you do, in The Path Back to You.