Grief counselling aims to provide patients with more helpful worldviews and better coping skills to process a variety of life losses.
The losses in question involve primarily deaths of family and friends or love interests, but not only. Grief is highly personal. Depending on the client and the unique situation they encounter, grief therapy can apply to break ups (romantic, friendships) loss of employment or status, loss of cultural, social or even financial assets (homes, foreclosures, etc.)
Grief and acceptance follow proven patterns, the most famous being probably the “Kübler-Ross model” of denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance. Grief however varies substantially from client to another. The type of events that will demand grief and acceptance, the length of time (if completed) for each patient to go through the acceptance process, the relapses, the functional impact on the patient all vary enormously.
Grief, loss and acceptance.
Individual responses to grief vary from denialist laughter to angry depressive states. Grief and loss often precipitate patients into a withdrawn, de-socialised state further expounding challenges. Psychological acceptance of the real-world loss is the ultimate goal of a sound grief counsel. Acceptance implies that the event is now understood by the patient, integrated in their deeper psyche, in their short and long term memory and is now part of them and how they see the world. It does not mean “being OK” or being content with the situation, and major grief and losses can take years to process. It is positive, transformative pain.
Of particular import is that the patient somehow manages to “process” grief, and not see their acceptance process interrupted (by frantic circumstances following a death for example). Acceptance may then be delayed and internalised unprocessed, resurging in darker, more nebulous shapes later and potentially making the process more painful and longer than necessary.
Symptoms & Treatments
- Personalised Diagnostic: Life inventory, past experience and traumas, anger management, functional impact, meaning.
- Symptoms & Indications: Loss of appetite, loss of social contact, loss of energy, insomnia, existential Angst, self-talk, rumination, unhelpful compulsive thoughts.
- Resources & Related: Talk therapy, person-centered approach (PCA), existential therapy, mindfulness, quest for meaning, acceptance. Depression.