Therapy Chat · Laura Reagan, LCSW-C

475: Grief As A Portal To Healing Complex Trauma with Amber Trejo, LMFT

March 24, 2025·55 min·5 clips

Amber discovered her mom's journal confession: 'I regret the years I spent partying and not being present with you.'

This episode features therapist Laura Reagan and guest Amber Trejo, both licensed therapists and complex trauma survivors, discussing how grieving a parent's death can surface and heal childhood trauma. They explore the unique challenges and insights that arise when therapists with personal trauma histories navigate loss. Amber Trejo specializes in complex trauma and CPTSD, focusing on helping parents break intergenerational cycles. Laura Reagan's father died in November 2024, following a major health scare five years prior that initiated a long period of anticipatory grief. Amber Trejo's mother passed away in November 2023, and she describes initially keeping her grief private. Reagan shares that her father's death triggered a flood of previously inaccessible positive childhood memories, which surprised her. Trejo found unexpected healing by reading her mother's journals after her death, discovering heartfelt entries about family regrets and love that were never verbally expressed. A key insight is that a parent's death can allow survivors to see them as complex humans beyond their "parent" roles, releasing them from rigid labels like "abuser" or "narcissist." Both hosts note that grief can create a paradoxical sense of safety and connection with a deceased parent that felt impossible while they were alive, due to unresolved trauma dynamics. They discuss the trauma symptom of a "foreshortened sense of the future," where one cannot imagine things improving, and how grief can intensify this feeling. Trejo describes a personal moment of managing sadness by consciously allowing the emotion without believing its catastrophic narrative, a technique she uses with clients. Reagan references Peter Levine's concept that simple, somatic reassurance—like a hand on the arm—can be profoundly soothing for traumatized parts. They examine how societal pressures and lack of support often set mothers up for failure, contributing to intergenerational trauma. The conversation is intimate, reflective, and deeply personal, with both hosts sharing vulnerable anecdotes from their clinical and personal lives. The tone is supportive and normalizing, blending professional knowledge with raw, lived experience. This episode would deeply resonate with therapists, complex trauma survivors, and anyone grieving a parent within a complicated relational history. Listeners seeking a highly structured, clinical analysis of grief might find the personal narrative style less suited to their needs.

As heard by us

A reflective take on motherhood, support, and CPTSD.

Therapy Chat episode 475 keeps its focus on the strain around motherhood and the impossible standard of the perfect mother. The strongest moments are the ones that stay close to lived experience: the pressure women carry when support falls short, the way parenting echoes through…

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Why you'd press play

A grounded conversation for when motherhood and family history start to blur together.

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