Is A Recent Loss Causing You To Feel Sad And Aimless?

Are you devastated and disoriented following the death of a loved one, pet, or other sudden and dramatic loss? Have you recently undergone a divorce or separation, had a miscarriage, or received a distressing medical diagnosis? Do you find yourself thinking I should know how to handle this on my own, or I should be over it by now?

The grief process is unique to each person who experiences it. You may have noticed increased anxiety or symptoms of depression, including hopelessness and extreme sadness. Maybe you are often tearful or find that you can’t seem to regulate your emotions.

The Demands Of Life Don’t Stop For Grief

Getting through the day is a struggle in and of itself, and when the stress merges with family dynamics, work, and other obligations, you may feel unseen or undervalued as you attempt to navigate life after loss.

This sensation has naturally impacted your relationships. Perhaps those close to you don’t know what to say or say the wrong thing as they attempt to support you. Or maybe your partner, friend, or family members have endured the same loss, but the two of you are handling it differently, creating a sense of tension and disconnection.

Sure, you know about the stages of grief and understand the permanence of this loss. Yet you can’t help but bargain, desperately wishing to go back to a time before the loss, when life was simpler—untainted by grief and the expectation that you should be feeling better by now.

Therapy provides you with a space where shoulds and expectations don’t exist. In grief counseling, you can learn how to give yourself permission, process the loss, and develop skills for coping.

Grief Is The Most Human Of Human Experiences

Though debilitating at times, loss is one of the most profound and universal human experiences. All of us experience grief sooner or later, but many of us don’t have tools for coping or the ability to give ourselves permission to understand and process our emotions.

Instead, we often tell ourselves that healing is just a matter of time or that someone else has it worse than we do. We perceive others as handling their grief better than we have, causing us to minimize our own feelings and experiences.

Our Society Lacks Norms To Address Grief In A Meaningful Way

It doesn’t help either that our culture is pretty lousy when it comes to providing the necessary time and space it takes to process loss healthily and effectively. It’s often assumed that a sense of closure is reached at the funeral, or that it’s only appropriate to be sad at certain times. And there are people whose “words of comfort” are actually quite alienating, making us feel like grief is a contagious illness that they’ll catch just by talking to us.

The longer we go without feeling better, the more pressure we put on ourselves to handle the grief alone, move on, and just get over it already. Soon, we stop opening up to others and begin to think there is something wrong with us that we haven’t figured out how to manage our emotions by now.

The truth is that it takes understanding and accepting grief to move through it. The therapists at Catalyst Counseling can help you process your grief experience so that you can begin to heal.

Counseling Is A Chance To Process And Accept Grief

The first step on the path to healing is understanding that grief will always stay with you, but therapy allows you an opportunity to make your grief more approachable and manageable. At Catalyst Counseling, our clinicians offer you a chance to unload the burdens you’re carrying so that you can begin to let go of the shoulds and accept the loss.

Our intake process begins with an extensive 90-minute session in which you will share your story and experience. During this time, your clinician is likely to ask you routine questions about your history and circumstances of the loss so they can tailor therapy to your needs. Following the intake, each grief counseling session will take 50 minutes.

Your Catalyst counselor will then use a solution-focused and person-oriented approach to customize grief counseling so that you can see results and begin to comprehend the ways that grief has impacted you. Using psychoeducation, you will learn how loss affects both mind and body, tracing your distress back to its core.

We are also likely to incorporate mindfulness and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) into counseling so that you can identify triggers and learn meaningful skills for coping with grief. In addition, elements of Motivational Interviewing and parts work may be used to reinforce positive intention and give yourself permission to feel—and even embrace—your grief.

At Catalyst Counseling, we believe that coping is possible when you can acknowledge, accept, and appreciate your emotional experiences—especially challenging ones like grief and loss. Working with your therapist, you can connect the dots between your experiences and extract meaning from your loss to gain new perspectives.

Maybe You’re Ready To See A Counselor To Process Your Grief, But You Still Have Questions…

I am just being dramatic. I know of other people who’ve had it worse than me and handled it better.

It sounds like there is a reason you’re worried about being dramatic—maybe someone has labeled you as dramatic in the past or minimized your emotions somehow. As a result, you’re holding on to a belief that makes it difficult for you to grieve.

Counseling gives you a chance to explore your grief exactly as it is, and all feelings are welcome here. Working with our therapists at Catalyst, you can gain more awareness about why it’s essential to express your emotions and how to do so in a way that promotes healing.

It’s selfish and excessive to spend time and money on myself in grief counseling.

If you’re worried about investing in therapy, it might mean that you have a hard time justifying doing things for yourself. Yet grief counseling is a way for you to pause and take time to process your emotions so that you can feel more functional and hopeful. An investment in therapy is an investment in better understanding your grief and yourself.

I am so tired of dealing with this grief; I just need to get over it and move on.

We hear you—you want things to be different. However, you don’t need to grapple with these emotions alone. Grief counseling gives you an opportunity to identify the parts of yourself creating disharmony or discomfort so that you can begin the process of coping and healing.

We are confident that the more you let go of the pressure to move on, the better you will feel exploring your emotions.

You Can Learn How To Grow Around Your Grief

If you are reeling from a recent loss, the therapists at Catalyst Counseling are here to help you acknowledge, process, and accept your grief. For more information, please contact our grief specialist or call (281) 660 – 1351.

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