The difference between absence and loss of identity

It’s a rainy, grey Saturday afternoon in central London.
I am currently sat in a study room alone at my university library, doing research for my PhD on Iranian trauma. The large window opposite me faces an empty courtyard with large, greener-than-life trees, sprinkled with squirrels that have no business being this hyper.

“Paradise absent is different to paradise lost”

What a perfect backdrop to read about Dominick LaCapra’s thoughts on absence and loss in his book ‘Writing history, writing trauma’.
It’s easy to conflate the two, but understanding the difference between the terms can allow your healing journey to take on completely new dimensions.

Absence is abstract; transhistorical. It has never existed to begin with.
Loss is specific, historical. You know exactly what once was, and is no more.

LaCapra, in his book, is speaking as a historian about significant events such as the Holocaust. As someone recovering from CPTSD, I was reading his words on the great obsession victims of traumatic events have with being whole, or normal.
This idea that has been built up in my head, of my abusers having stolen an identity unblemished of their actions – Has it ever existed?
Even if the abuse wasn’t centered in childhood and I could remember a before, this ‘me’ that I imagine being now, it’s not real, is it? I have no idea who I would be, how whole I would feel, if these actions had not occurred.

“Trauma brings about a dissociation of affect and representation:
One disorientingly feels what one cannot represent, and
one numbingly represents what one cannot feel.”

By converting absence into loss we assume that there was an original unity, or in this case, perfect happy me. To regain our original identity, we must therefore eliminate those who have ruined this unity to regain what we have lost.
In my own healing journey at least I have learned that even if we cut our abusers out, enact revenge or expose them, the original identity is not regained.
It is by building new parts of our personality, coping mechanisms in the now to deal with interior reverberations of the past, that a semblance of what we deem lost is recreated.

When absence is approximated to loss, mourning becomes impossible.
We continually turn into endless melancholia.

Mourning is a form of working through our feelings, whereas melancholia is a form of acting out. We are haunted, but stuck in inactivity, unable to move on.
It is tempting to generalise a loss we have suffered to the absence of ‘something’ that would resolve our current issues.
I was robbed of specific experiences, I was not robbed of a happy life.

It’s now pouring it down outside. The squirrels have all taken shelter in the trees, hiding from my wandering eyes. I know they’re still there though.
It’s times like these that I am grateful for my traumas. They may tempt me to catastrophise and enlarge my issues, but they push me to be introspective enough to realise the fallacy in this thinking.
I know that once I leave or once I’m home tomorrow, the rain will have stopped.
And if it hasn’t, it will still be fine. If the squirrels can deal, so can I.