Finding a good fit with a psychotherapist has been shown in studies to be the most important factor in determining a successful outcome. To make finding a good fit affordable for you, I offer first sessions at $60.
Please contact me to learn more about Grief Counseling & Loss treatment.
When we experience such a trauma, we are suspended between two realities: the world we have known and a life that is entirely unfathomable. Grief counseling is a place to make sense of what happened and what all this means. In a culture fixated on pleasure and happiness, death, grief and sorrow are generally not well tolerated because so few of us know how to grieve. Even well intentioned friends and families may find their words failing them, nor are most of us equipped to make sense of the sorrow and guide us through. Grief counseling is a place where all the messy feelings, guilt, confusion, anger, and sadness are welcomed and seen as natural and healthy attempts at healing.
Will these feelings pass if I just give them time?
Grief and sorrow, though unwanted and unasked for, can teach us much and this discovery of ourselves is one of the possible benefits of grief counseling. From a neurobiological point of view, integrating the brain, mind, and body responses to grief mitigate and heal the stress that grief can wreak on the body. Social psychologists believe that character is built out of resiliency, the grappling with our difficulties and coming out the other side.
On the most archetypal level, this grappling that can occur in grief counseling is the hero’s journey. The “riches” we return with however, are our capacity to again feel love and joy. As the famous poet Khalil Gibran so elegantly put it, “When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” Our grief is created from the joy and love we have shared with another. When we grieve, that joy and love are often suspended and instead of pleasurable, become painful to experience. Guilt, shame, loss, and longing make getting close to our others seem risky and so we pull away. Working with grief in counseling is centered around how you have been impacted and transformed by this relationship. Grief counseling is the space for honoring ourselves and the impact our relationships have had on our lives and our beings. This is true even when we had a complicated or disharmonious relationship with the person. We do this work to honor them, as well as ourselves and those in our lives still very much worth our love and care.
When we experience grief, we are suspended between two realities: a life that no longer exists and a truth we don’t yet know how to live.
All I keep hearing is, “This will pass” and it doesn’t help
While meaning well, comments like, “it’ll get better” (even when that is us telling ourselves that!) miss the mark. While that might turn out to be the case someday, it misses the present intense emotional experience in our tears, pains and aches in the belly or chest, exhaustion and fatigue or disconnection from everyday life. Death, disability, and separation dramatically disrupt our lives emotionally and physically in a way that the “get over it” type comment, even when very nicely worded, just won’t help. Grief counseling gets to the deeper point which is that grieving is a transformative sorrow. While not a catalyst we would ever wish for, perhaps the most sacred way we can honor a relationship is to let ourselves be transformed by it.
While death, disability, and loss are a natural part of life and there is nothing we can do to convince fate to spare us, how we move through the process, how we find acceptance and are transformed by the love and that is signed with sorrow impacts our current and future relationships for years to come.
Working with grief is centered around how you have been impacted and transformed by this relationship.
Do I have to go through the five stages of Grief?
No, no you don’t. Kubler-Ross, the psychiatrist credited with the five stages, was actually studying the process the person dying goes through, not, as is popularly understood, the process of grief experienced by the survivors. Kubler-Ross’s work is based on interviews with more than 500 dying patients in the 1960’s America and was meant to explain the process that the dying person goes through. However, the book and the stages became popular and almost immediately became re-interpreted as stages for the bereaved. The Five Stages of Grief are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. To add to the confusion around Kubler-Ross’s model, which remains incredibly popular, proponents of Kubler-Ross are quick to add that the stages are not sequential, are not all completed or experienced, and many do not go through them at all. If that makes the model sound a little shaky, critics such as Researcher, Ruth Davis Konigsberg and psychologist and bereavement expert, George Bonanno have popularly criticized the Stages as being empirically unsubstantiated and misleading.