Is Grief Keeping You Stuck In Painful Emotions?

Have you experienced a loss and are overcome with grief? Are you finding it hard to get through each day productively? Is the emotional pain you’re in keeping you from moving forward in life?

When you first suffer a loss, it can feel like your world has turned upside down. You may feel like it’s hard to get up each morning and face the day. The moment you wake up and the protection of sleep is shed, the reality of your grief can feel overwhelming. Conversely, you might find it difficult to quiet your thoughts and fall asleep at night.

Perhaps you’re crying alot, and it’s exhausting you. You might have a hard time staying focused and your memory is also being affected. When you’re coping with grief, it can sometimes cause your heart—or even your entire body—to physically hurt. Grief might be zapping you of energy and leaving you with feelings of deep sadness, hopelessness, loneliness, and despair.

Grief may also cause you to avoid the company of others, even though being around people could help you feel better. It may seem like you and your partner are disconnected and no longer able to relate to each other. If your partner can’t hold your pain with you, it can cause you to withdraw from them, and that isolation can make you feel even worse.

Fortunately, grief and loss counseling can help guide you through the stages of grief so you can make sense of what has happened and begin to heal.

Many Of Us Were Never Taught How To Grieve

Every one of us will experience grief at some point during our lives. Loss comes in many forms: the death of a partner, a child, a marriage or friendship; suicide; miscarriage; cancer or other debilitating illnesses; losing our home due to foreclosure or disaster; the list goes on and on.

While most of us have heard about the stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—few of us know how to process our emotions surrounding loss in a healthy way. Our society teaches us that we should always be happy. When we try coping with loss and experiencing grief, it can make us feel like something is wrong with us or that we’ve failed to live up to society’s standards. Our cultural norms have forced sorrow, pain, and fear underground where it festers and grows larger, seeping out in painful or addictive ways.

We live in a society that is afraid of loss and holds little regard for matters of the soul. From friends who perhaps send a card but fail to express their condolences face-to-face, to those who say something insensitive like, “It was God’s will,” our culture’s discomfort with grief can intensify our feelings of isolation. Because we are seldom taught how to support each other in grief, this lack of acknowledgment can lead to further anger and confusion when we are coping with the loss of a loved one.

Arriving at the final stage of grief—acceptance—comes from being able to hold complex and even sad emotions within us, welcoming each feeling that arrives at our doorstep as an honored guest. As Franz Kafka said, “Everything we love, we will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

When you seek therapy for grief, you learn how to process your emotions and move beyond the pain back into love.

Grief Counseling Can Help You Heal And Find Peace

Loss happens to each of us throughout our lives, and grieving is the task of addressing and healing from this pain. With over 20 years of experience with bereavement counseling—first as a pastoral counselor and now as a licensed therapist—my hope is that, when you come to me suffering from grief and loss, you will feel that I am helping you hold your pain.

At our first session together, I’ll give you plenty of time—with my undivided attention and support—to share your sorrow. Just telling the story of your loss is a powerful component of your healing. From there, I will help you develop practices that keep you steady in times of distress over your loss.

As a therapist focused on the mind/body/spirit dimensions of healing, I will turn your attention to how grief is showing up in your body and how feeling it is a necessary part of your healing process. Teaching you breathwork—and even simple body movements—can help relieve the tension, tightness, and heaviness that come with grief and loss. We will acknowledge the way grief shows up as physical pain and touch it with gentleness and compassion.

In subsequent grief counseling sessions, we will work on you acknowledging and feeling your feelings, practicing self-care and self-compassion on a daily basis, and giving yourself as much time as you need to process your loss. Everyone’s journey through grief is different—new grief can stir up grief from the past—so your path to acceptance will be uniquely yours.

Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) is a proven and effective modality to help uncover and process the emotions underlying the grief and loss you’ve experienced. It allows for a safe, nurturing space to tell your story and to make sense of your loss, and to begin the process of healing.

Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR), is another modality that can help you process and heal from a painful loss. TIR is a method of locating, reviewing, and resolving traumatic events. Once you have used TIR to fully and calmly view a painful memory or a web of related memories, life events no longer trigger you and cause distressing symptoms.

Grief is not as much a problem to be solved or a condition to medicate against, but it is a deep encounter with what it means to be human. Sometimes it is the deep grief we feel after a loss that awakens us to the depth and sincerity of our love. As Richard Rohr says, “Love and grief go hand in hand. It is the deep grief we feel during loss that awakens us to the depth and sincerity of our love.” Having lost our first child at birth, I know first-hand that talking with someone can help with going through the painful process of grief and loss. 

Though loss is a life-changing experience, if resolved, it can help us more deeply appreciate the gift of life and its blessings. As William Blake said, “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.”

But you may still be wondering whether grief counseling is right for you…

I don’t see the reason why I need to speak to someone about my grief.

When our grief is not expressed, it sinks deeper down inside of us and resurfaces as symptoms like depression, anxiety, loneliness, or addictions. Numbing our feelings with alcohol or drugs, social media, or even work, may help us ward off our painful feelings, but only for a time. When we fully honor our losses and grieve them, we are able to reach a deeper and truer joy.

Talking to a therapist about my grief would be too painful.

Facing grief is hard work; however, being comforted and reassured in a safe, nurturing environment helps make grief tolerable. Grief counseling ripens and deepens you, providing resources to help you face future sorrows with more strength and equanimity.

It’s embarrassing to talk to a therapist. I can handle it on my own.

It can feel embarrassing or cause anxiety thinking about speaking with a grief therapist, but it is so worth it. My clients tell me, after we have formed a positive alliance and begun our work together, how much it relieves their pain, stress, or sadness to have someone to talk to who is a source of unconditional positive regard and who cares.

From The Seeds Of Grief, Love Can Blossom

Acknowledging the depth of your grief can awaken you to how deeply you can love. Grief counseling will help you feel lighter, restoring your sense of connection and vitality about life. For a free, 15-minute consultation, please contact me via my website or call 561-866-6607.

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