grief and loss
Counseling for Grief and Loss
Grief is an intensely painful experience that’s in a category all its own. Grief is often associated with losing someone, but it also comes in many different and less-obvious forms. You might relate to one or more of types of grieving or loss, and would benefit from counseling:
- Acute Grief: Fresh grief over the death of a loved one or another type of loss.
- Non-Death Loss: Losing a relationship, a job, your health, your home, your country.
- Ambiguous Loss: Grieving someone who is still living (e.g., with dementia), someone who is a missing person, a loved one who now lives too far away to see them or other situations with no closure.
- Cumulative Losses: Experiencing one loss after another, with no time to process or grieve in between.
- Disenfranchised Grief: Caused when your relationship with the deceased is not recognized, your loss is not acknowledged, you have been excluded from the group that is grieving, or the cause of death of your loved one is stigmatized by society.
- Complicated Grief: About 7% of bereaved people and 3% of the overall population experience this. Complicated grief is an unusually persistent form of acute grief, where something interferes with being able to adapt to your loss.
- Anticipatory Grief: Grieving before a loss has occurred in order to help you prepare for it.
How Grief and Loss Counseling Can Help
First and foremost, this is a place where you can talk freely about your thought and feelings. Moreover you do not have to be concerned about overburdening friends and family (which is a common worry). Therapy is a safe space to sit with someone who will listen and let you express yourself fully, with no judgment.
Additionally, grief counseling helps you identify and pay attention to your symptoms of grief; the emotions, thoughts and physical sensations that you are struggling with.
Another part of healing is to work through the main tasks of grieving so you can move past the acute grief stage and begin to integrate your loss into your life. This is where you still remember, but with less pain.
Please click the Send a Message button if you would like to schedule a consultation. Or to learn more about me, click on About Dawn.
