Loss, like joy, is unique to each case, which is what brings beauty to the former and tragedy to the latter. You have lost someone special with whom you must have imagined a whole future, only to come to this present state of bereavement.
Grief is a heavy burden to bear – but you don’t need to bear it alone. Sharing that grief with trained grief counselors can help you come to the kind of resolution you need to move past grief and heal.
Why Grief Counseling Is Important
While Claudius mocks Hamlet’s supposed “unmanly grief,” sharing your grief is the only way to move past it. That said, sharing such enormous loss naturally requires an immense amount of trust. You may fear toxic or manipulative people like Claudius who may shame you for your grief, or that otherwise think less of you for it.
This is why proper grief counseling is so essential. According to Fort Lauderdale grief and loss therapist Courtney Lancianese, LMFT, regular sessions with a counselor can give you an essential outlet through which to share your feelings and come to a greater understanding of them in a shame-free setting.
Grief is not a simple solvable puzzle, but complex pain. Post-bereavement pain is referred to as “complicated grief” and it is characterized by several factors, including:
● General depression
● Feeling like your life lacks purpose now
● Not being able or willing to perform basic activities
● Extensive guilt and/or blaming yourself for your spouse’s death
● Wishing yourself dead as well
● Isolating yourself and not wanting to talk to others
Simply being told by someone that these feelings are unhealthy is unlikely to be effective. If anything, it could make you feel worse because feelings aren’t always rational – but that doesn’t make them any less real or valid. Empathy is just as valuable a tool for recovery as understanding. The best grief counselors don’t lecture – they listen, which is the first step to hurting giving way to healing.
In addition, there are many resources to help those grieving from loss, including:
● Online Therapy Programs and Applications
● Support Groups for Those Who Lost Partners/Spouses
A grief counselor can help you understand which one will work for you.
Moving Beyond Grief
Today, we often think of the Five Stages of Grief – Denial, Anger, Fear, Bargaining, Acceptance – because grief is not a permanent state but rather separate stages which, with help, can be cleared on the path to healing. Likewise, while Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso are eternal, with light either forever absent or present, Purgatorio is the only poem in which the sun moves, symbolizing the passage of time – which is essential for healing.
Purgatorio is not permanent. Pain here will end, once people complete their long, arduous climb to the summit before Paradise. Likewise, recovering from the shock and pain of losing someone as beloved as a spouse is a long process – but grief counselors can act as the Virgil to your Dante, helping you along your journey.
Part of that role as a guide is finding a therapeutic approach that works for you. If the Five Stages approach doesn’t fit you, a grief counselor can work to find other outlets for your feelings and ways to confront and resolve them. For example, the Dual Process Method of grief therapy involves issues such as:
● Excessive crying
● Yearning for what’s lost
● Denial, sadness, or anger
● An inability or unwillingness to move on
● A refusal to resume old activities or take up new habits
Grief counselors can help diagnose issues in each of those categories while suggesting and modeling patterns and practices for change.
What you are feeling right now is real. It’s legitimate. But it does not have to be permanent.
Get the help you need with qualified and compassionate grief counselors today.
WRITTEN BY
Clara Rose