Therapy

There is no correct way to do this and no schedule you are behind on. But you do not have to do it entirely by yourself, and there is a difference between grief that is moving, however slowly, and grief that has become stuck.

People sometimes hesitate to come in because their loss does not feel like it qualifies. It qualifies. We work with grief after:

—  The death of a partner, parent, child, sibling or friend

—  Miscarriage, stillbirth and infertility — losses that are often barely acknowledged by anyone else

—  The death of a pet, which people apologise for and should not

—  Divorce or the end of a long relationship

—  A diagnosis — yours or someone else's — and the future it takes away

—  A parent with dementia, where you grieve someone still alive

—  Job loss, retirement, or the end of a career that was part of who you are

—  Estrangement, and the loss of a relationship with someone still living

—  Miscarrying a version of your life that was not going to happen after all

Most grief does not need therapy. It needs time, and people, and permission. It is worth reaching out when:

—  Months have passed and the intensity has not shifted at all

—  You cannot function at work or at home

—  You are avoiding every reminder — rooms, photographs, people, the whole subject

—  You are drinking or using more than you were

—  The loss was sudden, violent or traumatic, and the way it happened keeps intruding

—  It has tipped into depression — or you are having thoughts of not wanting to be here

—  You are supporting everyone else and have not grieved at all

Not a technique applied to you. Mostly it is space to say things out loud that you cannot say to family without managing their reaction as well as your own — the anger, the relief, the guilt about the relief, the things that were never resolved, the things you said or did not say. That last category is where a lot of stuck grief lives.

Depending on what you need, that may draw on trauma-informed approaches where the death itself was traumatic, EMDR or ART for intrusive images, CBT for the thoughts that circle at night, and simple, unhurried, witnessed grieving — which is often the most useful thing on the list.

Several of our clinicians work specifically with grief and loss, including Andréa Johnson, MSW, LGSW and Aurora Abbott, MS, LPCC.

A death rarely lands evenly. One person needs to talk and another needs silence; one wants the photographs up and another cannot walk past them. That mismatch causes a lot of secondary damage inside families that are already hurting. Family counseling can help everyone grieve in their own way without it becoming a second loss.

FAQ