Grief Counseling

Are You Having Difficulty Coping With A Significant Loss?

Do you find yourself unable to function due to intense feelings of grief? Have you been navigating complex emotions surrounding an important loss, such as:

· The death of a loved one?

· Pregnancy loss?

· A sudden or unexpected death?

· Any other significant experience of loss?

Maybe you’ve recently lost a loved one or you anticipate losing a loved one in the near future. Or perhaps you’ve lost a job, a relationship, or something else that mattered to you deeply. In the wake of your loss, you may find yourself asking questions like: What do I do now? How can I move forward in life? Without my loved one there, who really am I? For the first time, perhaps you’re considering seeing a therapist to help you work through your grief.

Grief Can Have A Profound Impact On Your Health, Relationships, And Every Area Of Your Life

Grief can sometimes feel like clinging to wreckage at sea in a storm. The waves can be overpowering, the storm seems to subside but then comes back again, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s even possible to have a life again once the sea eventually calms. You may swing between feelings of sadness and numbness—sometimes your grief may manifest as intense emotional outbursts, while other times you may feel cut off from your emotions altogether. A sense of isolation may set in as you find yourself unable to socialize well or be present in your relationships. Over time, you may even end up feeling like you have lost the ability to feel pleasure in the hobbies and activities you used to enjoy. It’s hard to imagine how you could be happy again. Physical issues like exhaustion, loss of appetite, and trouble sleeping make it increasingly difficult to get through each day.

You are not alone in this journey, though, and counseling with Engage Psychotherapy can help you navigate complex grief to heal your deepest emotional wounds and find meaning, purpose, pleasure, and fullness in life once again. And you don’t have to “get over” your loss to do that. A grief counselor can be a navigator with you to help you through the entire grieving process to find a way to honor your grief and also live life once again.

Grief And Loss Are Unavoidable Aspects Of Life For All Of Us

Although grief is common and even unavoidable, it’s easy for us to end up isolated in our grief. We may even feel as though we are doing something wrong by continuing to grieve long after our loss took place. What’s more, we may be unaware of the resources available to help us manage our grief.

In fact, according to a 2017 bereavement survey, among those surveyed who had lost a parent growing up, “72 [percent said] they didn’t know how to talk about what they were going through and 65 [percent agreed] that after their parent died, they felt there was no one they could talk to” (1). This is precisely the sort of void that grief counseling can help fill.

Our Culture Often Does Not Make Enough Room For Grief

We typically experience widespread support immediately following a loss, as our loved ones generally shower us with meals, sympathy cards, and late-night phone calls. Over time, however, this support can quickly dissipate once others have moved on with their lives. At a certain point, many come to feel that their grief is no longer recognized by others. They may even feel social pressure to “get over it” or “move on,” since everyone around them appears to have done that. In this way, grief is often a profoundly isolating experience.

Counseling offers a space where your counselor will listen to you without judgment and will never pressure you to just “get over” your grief and loss. The goal is to find a way to hold and honor your grief while also continuing to live your life and effectively adapting to the various changes that may occur due to the loss.

Grief Counseling Can Help You Heal From The Pain of Your Loss

When you are grieving a significant loss in your life, you need to be able to talk through the difficult emotions you’re feeling. An empathetic therapist can help you open up about your grief, which is exactly how you will learn to carry your loss and work through the emotional pain so that, over time, it no longer feels like raging storms but instead seas that you can once again navigate.

Grief work involves learning how to hold space for your grief, making adjustments to your life due to the changes that it brings, and trusting your own internal process for finding that path. Simply ignoring your grief won’t get rid of it, and navigating the grieving process alone can often make the journey longer and more difficult. That’s why it’s so important to work alongside someone who is licensed and trained to work with people experiencing grief.

An Active, Non-Linear Approach To Grief And Loss

You don’t have to be a passive participant in the grief process. The Tasks of Grief model offers a non-linear approach to the grieving process. Through this lens, the grief is viewed less in terms of stages that happen to us and more as tasks of healing that we can consciously approach and move through with grace and love.

The first task involves facing the many ways that the loss feels unreal and gradually taking in the reality of the loss and how it impacts our lives. The second task entails working through the pain of the grief as you receive support in emotionally mourning and feeling the loss through recognizing the fullness of the loss and all of the ways it affects us now and brings about change in our future.

In the third task, you will begin finding ways to adapt to the changes in your life that happened because of the loss. The fourth and final task is to find a place in your life for the loss so that you can maintain a meaningful connection with it, even as you move on with your life.

In counseling, your therapist will partner with you as you work through these tasks together. Doing so will help you move through the emotions of your grief at a pace that works for you. It will also help you to find a place for your grief in your life in a way that honors the person you lost, makes space for both joy and sadness in remembrance, and allows you to resume living fully alongside their memory.

You May Still Have Some Questions About Grief Counseling…

I’m worried that talking about grief in therapy will only make things worse.

Grief is normal, and therapy can provide a small and contained space each week for you to hold all the difficult feelings with a trusted person. In this way you can begin to figure out how to carry these feelings and open up space for the painful emotions, the happy memories, and the positive meaning that you’ve gained from your loss.

I’m skeptical about the effectiveness of grief therapy, especially online therapy.

Grief faced together will quickly become more manageable, whether online or in person. While it can definitely seem overwhelming and even insurmountable at the beginning, we are all built to be able to hold grief and cope with loss, and therapy can help us find healing in the midst of our pain. With therapy, you can navigate places where you are feeling stuck relatively quickly and find ways to regain pleasure, meaning, and purpose.

I’m concerned about the overall time and cost of grief therapy.

We’re registered to bill with most insurance companies and accept assignments using out-of-network benefits, so you can usually just pay your cost-sharing amount. And while therapy will indeed involve some time and work, it will be effort well spent if it contributes to your mental health and overall emotional well-being.

You Can Honor Your Loss And Still Move Forward In Life

If you’re having trouble coping with a loss that you’ve experienced, counseling with Engage Psychotherapy can help you honor and heal from your grief while moving forward with your life.

To set up a complimentary, 15-minute phone consultation, call to text us at 845-328-0926 or utilize our contact page to get started.