LUMENVAEL — What Happens When Grief Widens Perception

—t r a b o c c o

Vigilance becomes its own kind of beauty
when you realize nothing needs protecting anymore.

There’s a moment after deep rupture (loss, trauma, sudden beauty) when perception doesn’t narrow into shock or dissociate into numbness. Instead, something unexpected happens. It widens. Colors sharpen. A peculiar lucidity emerges. The nervous system reorganizes. Pain doesn’t disappear, but awareness expands enough to hold it without being crushed.

I’ve experienced this. So have many of you.

But we’ve never had a precise name for it.

After more than 30 years of self-directed work across psychology, philosophy, trauma studies, and consciousness, driven by my own experiences with grief and rupture, I’m introducing a term for what happens when awareness widens after breaking: Lumenvael.

It describes both a specific perceptual moment and the spiral architecture that contains it. Lumenvael is the widening itself, and it’s also the spiral movements consciousness makes as it reorganizes around rupture.

The Gap in Our Language

We have terms for what happens before and after this moment, but not for the moment itself.

Psychology describes “post-traumatic growth,” but that’s about long-term outcomes, not the immediate shift in perception.

Contemplative traditions speak of “witness consciousness,” but that’s cultivated through practice over years, not triggered suddenly by rupture.

Philosophy has “the sublime,” but that describes encountering vastness, not reorganizing around a wound.

What we lack is a term for the specific moment when consciousness widens after breaking, creating capacity through pain rather than despite it.

Not transcendence. Not escape. Not even healing.

Widening.

This is Lumenvael.

Why I’m Writing This

My mother’s passing became the defining rupture that revealed this pattern to me. Not as abstract theory, but as something I lived through and couldn’t name.

In that experience, I recognized a structure I’d been quietly studying for nearly three decades without fully seeing it. The widening wasn’t random. It moved through identifiable stages. It had architecture.

My background includes decades of studying personality systems and consciousness structures, including mastery of the Enneagram. I’ve written over 40 distinct voices across my work: male, female, child, animal, compromised minds, love, anguish, integration, demise, transcendence. Each requires precise understanding of how different structures organize perception under pressure. Pattern recognition is no longer something that I study; it’s how I see.

This led to my eighth book, Lumenvael, which I’ve just released. It’s my first direct contribution to phenomenological literature, and it introduces this term in a specific way: through story first, then framework.

My previous work has focused on presence, collapse, and consciousness across literary and psychological contexts. Seven of those books currently rank in the top 100 of both Existential Psychology and Transpersonal Psychology on Amazon Kindle. I mention this not to claim authority, but to show I’ve been circling this territory. Lumenvael is the culmination of that work, the clearest map I’ve been able to draw.

It begins with acceptance. But how?

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross mapped the emotional descent of grief up to Acceptance, the point where resistance falls. David Kessler extended the model with Meaning, describing how people eventually integrate loss. But neither framework explains the internal shift that makes meaning-making possible. What happens between Acceptance and Meaning, the perceptual widening that allows memory, clarity, and coherence to return has remained unmapped for over fifty years.

Kübler-Ross brilliantly built her model through rigorous clinical research over decades. I'm pointing out a consistency of pattern through decades of observation, using phenomenology and direct experience.

I propose Lumenvael is the missing piece between them.
It completes the arc they began.

The Complete Arc

Rupture
(the breaking event itself — not mapped in existing models)

Kübler-Ross (5 stages)
Denial → Anger → Bargaining → Depression → Acceptance

Lumenvael (9 movements)
^Containment → Empathy → Pain → Awakening → Memory → ^^Discernment → Innocence → Power → Integration

^Lumenvael formally begins with Containment, though it becomes accessible only when resistance drops into Acceptance.
^^Discernment is the destabilizing test of the widening; it is the moment consciousness shakes to see if the expansion can hold before fear breaks into clarity.

Kessler (1 stage)
Finding Meaning

Kübler-Ross describes what collapses.
Lumenvael describes what widens.
Kessler describes what remains.

How the Book Works

Lumenvael operates on two distinct levels, and you can engage with either or both:

First, it’s a story. A fox in a zoo becomes our narrator. His intelligence is sharpened by instinct, confinement, humor, and the clarity that develops when nothing can be avoided. Through his voice, you experience the widening in real time.

You can read it purely as narrative. The story stands alone.

Second, it’s a phenomenological framework. Following the narrative is an in-depth review section that maps what the story transmits. It defines nine movements consciousness makes when it reorganizes after rupture:

Containment — Surrender
Empathy — Connection
Pain — Recognition
Awakening — Beauty
Memory — Belonging
Discernment — Clarity
Innocence — Response
Power — Devotion
Integration — Presence

This isn’t a ladder you climb. It’s a spiral. Consciousness doesn’t rise above suffering. It expands around it until the wound no longer distorts the view, but anchors it.

What Lumenvael Is (And Isn’t)

Let me be precise about distinctions, because terminology matters:

Lumenvael is not dissociation. Dissociation involves detachment, numbness, disconnection from the body. Lumenvael is full-bodied association with heightened sensory clarity. You feel more, not less.

Lumenvael is not post-traumatic growth. PTG describes positive changes that develop months or years after trauma. Lumenvael is the immediate perceptual shift that happens in the moment after rupture.

Lumenvael is not mystical experience. Mystical states typically dissolve boundaries and seek unity consciousness. Lumenvael maintains selfhood while expanding. It doesn’t transcend pain. It makes room for it.

Lumenvael is not flow state. Flow requires optimal performance conditions and skill-challenge balance. Lumenvael happens involuntarily through rupture, when the nervous system can no longer hold what it carries.

What Lumenvael is: A specific, observable widening of perception that occurs post-rupture, characterized by increased capacity, full-bodied awareness, and perceptual luminosity that includes pain rather than escaping it. It’s the moment vigilance becomes beauty, when you realize nothing needs protecting anymore, and that realization itself expands your perception.

Why Naming This Matters

People experience this without words for it. That isolation—"Did this happen to anyone else?"—compounds the difficulty.

Therapists observe it in clients but lack language to describe it precisely. They end up using approximations that don’t quite fit.

Researchers can’t study what they can’t name. Without terminology, patterns remain invisible in the data.

Having a term helps protect the experience from misinterpretation. Someone in Lumenvael might appear "too calm" after trauma and could be mistaken for being in shock, dissociated, or in denial—states that look similar but have different underlying structures and respond to different approaches.

Precise terminology supports recognition, research, and appropriate care.

The Fox’s Story

The narrative follows an older fox in a zoo who watches a young fox named Rowan howl for his mother. That howl ruptures the older fox’s carefully maintained containment. Everything he’d been holding together through humor, intellect, and sheer will suddenly cracks open.

Later, classical music plays over the zoo speakers. In that moment, perception widens. Colors soften at the edges. The thorn that’s been lodged in his paw for days suddenly presses deeper, but somehow the pain belongs differently now. Memory returns, not as intrusion but as atmosphere. His lost love, Sorrel, becomes present without being physically there.

That’s the Lumenvael.

“I stopped protecting myself from what had already happened;
and the world became luminous.”

The cage didn't open. The fox expanded.

What I'm Not Claiming

Let me be direct about limitations:

I'm not claiming I've discovered something entirely new that no human has ever experienced. People have lived through this for millennia.

I'm not claiming this will revolutionize psychology or therapy. That's not my call to make.

I'm not claiming this is a complete, finished theory. It's an initial framework that invites refinement.

What I am claiming: This is a distinct, nameable state that's been invisible in our terminology. The pattern is observable. The architecture is consistent. And giving it a name makes it available for recognition, study, and proper understanding.

A Note on Empirical Evidence

This article introduces a phenomenological framework, not empirical research. There are no peer-reviewed studies here, no controlled trials, no data sets. That work comes next.

Phenomenology works differently than empirical science. It maps patterns in lived experience first, then invites measurement. You can't study what you can't see. You can't measure what you don't have language for.

But I recognize the risk: When you're looking for patterns, you can find them anywhere. Railroad tracks often connect in retrospect. The mind sees coherence even in noise.

That's why this introduction is paired with a commitment to formal research. The next step is operationalizing definitions, establishing measurement protocols, and testing whether this pattern appears consistently across populations—or whether I've simply drawn lines between stars that don't form a real constellation.

For now, this is an observation, not a conclusion. The book offers the map. The research will test whether the map matches actual territory.

The nine movements weren’t constructed; they were confirmed. When the same pattern appears across narrative, lived experience, therapeutic accounts, and even independent analyses by artificial reasoning systems, you’re not inventing structure; you’re recognizing it.

If Lumenvael describes something real, it will survive scrutiny. If it doesn't, the framework will collapse under proper examination—and that's exactly how it should work.

I'm offering this as a starting point, not an endpoint.

What's Next

Following the release, I'll be writing a formal research paper that proposes operational definitions, measurement protocols, and clinical applications. That paper will address questions this introduction can't: How do we measure this? How long does it typically last? What are third-party observable markers? How do we distinguish it from similar states in clinical settings?

But the book comes first, because phenomenology works differently than empirical research. You can't measure what people can't recognize. The book creates recognition. The research paper will create methodology.

The Real Test

Here’s how you’ll know if Lumenvael describes something genuine:

You’ll recognize it.

Not because I can prove it in this essay. Not because the framework is elegant. Not because the theory is convincing.

You’ll recognize it because you’ve lived it. When you read the fox’s story, something will click into place. You’ll think, “Oh. That. I didn’t know that had a name.”

That’s how phenomenology works. It doesn’t prove. It points. It offers language for what you already know but couldn’t articulate.

If this describes your experience, you’ll know immediately. If it doesn’t, that’s valuable information too. Not every perceptual shift is Lumenvael. Some experiences are better described by other terms.

I’m offering the map. You’ll know if it matches your territory.

An Invitation

If you’ve ever felt your perception widen after breaking, if grief or beauty or truth ever expanded your awareness instead of collapsing it, I’ve written this for you.

The fox’s story is my way of transmitting what I can’t quite explain through theory alone.

I hope it creates recognition. I hope it offers clarity. I hope it expands you the way writing it expanded me.

For those who’ve lived this unnamed widening — you’re not alone. Now we have a word for it.

And if the book doesn’t land right away, it may unveil in time… and at least you got to experience the world from the other side of the bars.

Presence is the shape of the scar 
rupture 
gave 
me.

Life at the zoo...

I process all day, behind bars and yet I taste the cotton candy in the air, admire the smiles of children, and cringe at the parents buried in the devices. The trees' leaves rattle in breeze, and dreams of the woods and the chasing of food... Oh, how it fills me. Taste is a sense of freedom alone.

I don't claim to understand the human that checks my vitals... but he says the cage activates my highest capacities for conceptual mapping and synthesis, while simultaneously making me aware of the existential boundary between information processing and human experience. I laugh and think... "this guy needs to get out more often".

— Joe Trabocco

Lumenvael is available on Amazon Kindle. For updates, visit:
amazon.com/author/joetrabocco
https://www.signal-literature.com/bestsellers