Affordable Adult Counseling

Affordable Rates

• Rates for a full 60 minute session are $120.00, which can be paid with either MasterCharge or Visa credit cards, check or cash.
• A complimentary copy of  Dr. Leslie’s book, ‘GRIEF: You CAN Survive It! Here’s How,’ is available at the conclusion of an initial office visit.
• To keep clients’ cost from ballooning from time consuming red tape by insurance companies, billing statements are provided, free of charge, for  clients’ reimbursement.

Loss From Divorce

“That SOB Doesn’t Deserve My Tears!”
Why Grieving a Divorce Is A ‘Must Do’

My 30 years of experience as a Grief & Loss Specialist has deeply impressed upon me just how many experiences in life cause loss and intense grieving. Death is not the only cause of grief, though it is the most traumatizing. In fact, when any relationship that is the glue in our lives is either severed or significantly diminished, a serious disruption to our emotional equilibrium or stability is created, triggering grieving and, oftentimes intense grieving. Because death is not the cause AND we may have chosen this loss, family and friends often fail to recognize our ensuing emotional struggle as grief.

Divorce – and break-ups of long term relationships – are such a loss and should trigger grieving. But because divorce is not usually associated with losing something, especially when WE decide and initiate, divorce can be easily overlooked as a loss and therefore, there’s nothing to grieve. Indeed, ‘let’s celebrate!’ Nothing could be farther from the truth. Why?

Because we start marriage, or any meaningful relationship, deeply in love with goals, dreams & future plans that embody our commitment and love to each other. Neither partner would ever envision an outcome, for US, like breaking-up [See Loss From Life Transition, Below].

But ‘stuff happens,’ like annoying frustrations, serial disappointments, rejection, maybe betrayal and the marital glue begins to breakdown, eroding into the hurt-filled middle of the marital journey. When emotions begin to challenge their ‘til death due us part’ commitment to each other, the marriage has begun to dissolve and without help, dies. Oh it’s not the same kind of death as dying, but the joyous relationship that began this marriage is indeed dead to one or both of the partners. Unfortunately, the majority of any grieving done by divorcees tends to precede the break-up rather than follow it. Afterwards anger and bitterness towards their once beloved partner is the only vestige left of that relationship.

What about divorce or break-ups that are not our choice, when we are the rejected one – instead of the one doing the rejection? It isn’t anger that dominates the fabric of our daily lives but the painful sting of rejection. Not feeling good enough, desirable or loved enough to be chosen. Because rejection sucks, it definitely makes us behave in ways detrimental to our well-being, like how it keeps us repeatedly going back to this broken relationship seeking acceptance, making us unable to extricate ourselves, despite what logic dictates.

Grieving done in anticipation of any separation fails to acknowledge and deal with the chaos to our emotional equilibrium or balance that occurs after the actual divorce. Most divorcees refuse to grieve because ‘that SOB doesn’t deserve any more of my tears and s/he ain’t gonna get them!’ Instead my client has built sturdy walls of steel to shield them from future pain of loss. Walls that while protecting, hinder developing ‘full range of emotion’ and healthy healing. [See When Others Think:  ‘You’re a Rock’, Leslie’s Blog].  Walls that can cause us to duplicate the same patterns of behavior that resulted in our original mistakes with its ultimate outcome being similarly repeated: ending again a once hoped-filled relationship.

Don’t keep repeating these same cycles, hoping for a different ending. Choose emotional well-being and health. Choose grief counseling. Now.

Loss From Death

This Thing Called GRIEF: Initial Reactions

It’s odd, this thing called grief.  At first glance, we function fairly well the first few months – at least in comparison to those first days – tending to the demands of life after loss.  There’s so much to do and like a robot, we do what we must do.  We start thinking, ‘I’m gonna make it, after all’  with others joining in, applauding our toughness, praising our strength [See When Others Think: ‘You’re A Rock’ , Leslie’s Blog].

What’s really going on here is that emotional anesthesia – as I like to call it – has taken over and we are numbed, stunned and disbelieving of this new altered reality we‘re living in now.  Stumbling & fumbling along on automatic, this emotional anesthesia momentarily protects us from the worst of our sorrow, just like pain meds take away the rawest edge of a physical pain.  Such numbness lulls us into thinking that we’re getting better.  It’s only in retrospect that we realize there are huge gaps in our memory.  Unbeknownst to us at that time, we were apparently ‘out to lunch!’

When clients have asked me ‘how long will this last?’ – meaning this blessed anesthetic state – I know they’re hoping my answer is something like ‘forever!’  The truthful answer is the cause of our loss is the best predictor – or the best educated guess – for how long this emotional anesthesia will last.  For example, the more sudden, unpredictable and unexpected the loss, the longer we remain in shock and numbness.  So deaths caused by violence, like homicide, or deaths caused by accidents create the longest period of numbness, as do deaths caused by suicide.  Most of my clients with these types of loses don’t reach out for my help for many months past the death, too stupefied to think  coherently and seek out assistance.

With the passage of time, our numbed and disbelieving world begins to shift.  We start to have emotional reactions that are different.  Pain-filled imprints that we’ve squashed and avoided in the past are now pushing upward, unbidden, often blind-sighting us with vivid recall.  Our ironclad control starts melting.  We’re either crying more, without any notice, or are choking back the tears.  The anesthesia that initially numbed most of our emotional reactions these past weeks and months is, quite frankly, deserting us.  ‘What’s happening to me?’   Now we are raw with a whole range of emotions, some of which make no logical sense.  We are confused by this loss of rational thought that, in the past, kept us in control of ‘messy’ outbursts [See Parent Guilt, Leslie’s Blog].

Before this devastating loss, we erroneously believed that emotional healing should logically parallel physical healing.  That is, it should be linear, like recovering from a surgery: initially painful but improving with each passing day until, finally, recovery.  But instead, the reverse is happening: time has passed and we’re not better.  We’re worse!  We begin to question ourselves, ‘This is crazy, or maybe I’m crazy!  What’s happening?’

This thing called grief is defeating us, or that’s how it feels. This is often the juncture where I meet my next client.

Loss from Life Transitions

People – Places – Things:
Loss is Not Just About Death

In the course of our lifetime, there are many transitions, or Rites of Passage, we all experience. Some are celebrations – like births, graduations and marriages – while other transitions bring about grief and mourning, most notably death. But from my years of experience as a Grief & Loss Specialist, I have been deeply impressed by the number of losses that triggers grief but remain unacknowledged by both clients and their loved ones. Mostly because they are losses that do not involve a death of a loved one and so the ensuing emotional struggle is not recognized as grief  [See Adult Counseling, Loss From Divorce].

This is because we tend to assign one cause to grief : death. But I’ve come to realize that grief is triggered by more than one type of loss. Along with death, loss also occurs when any attachment that is the glue in our life is either severed or significantly diminished, causing a serious disruption to our emotional stability, triggering grief.

Additionally I contend that as these significant attachments are either severed or diminished throughout our lives, how we react and adjust to these experiences becomes incorporated into our memory bank -or our emotional road map as I like to call it – guiding and directing us through future life experiences of loss [See Teen Counseling]. Okay, let me switch from abstract to concrete of what I’m asserting here. Bear with me a moment longer.

Let’s first look at some of our earliest attachments we had, then lost because of a change in circumstances beyond our control: a best friend moves away impacting our friendship in multiple ways, including severing it; a favorite family pet dies or is lost; we move to a new neighborhood, a new school, leaving behind a whole range of broken attachments, from people – friends and teammates – to places – home with its neighborhood, including our church or synagogue. Most of these changes to what had been ‘our norm’ were not recognized as a ‘loss,’ per say, by family, peers or even ourselves. After all, we were just kids so what did we know? We made adjustments we were expected to make and did so, generally, without a lot of drama. Some kids complied easily. Others struggled inwardly.

As we leave behind our relatively carefree childhood and ‘rite of passage’ into the greater responsibilities of adulthood, we store these childhood transitions, recalling at will the ‘best or right ways’ we managed the adjustments they caused. Those lessons are now our compass. Adulthood again requires us to adjust our attachments to people, places and things as factors outside of our control once again demand we adapt to unwanted change. Such as: people we once loved fall out of love and divorce us. Things like dreams and goals about what our future will be, provide the glue in our present. Then unforeseen circumstances alter, sometimes shattering forever – those dreams. Emotional struggles follow in its wake.

Then there’s things like the familiar transition in adulthood we know as the ‘empty nest,’ with its mixed bag of ‘bitter-sweet’ emotions: joy alternating with sadness – and sadness, an emotion that is often unacknowledged – is denied and buried. After all, it is incompatible with the joy we genuinely feel too. As we ‘rite of passage’ into the Sunset Years of our life, places like home – that we lovingly call ‘our castle,’ – have to be left behind as we re-location into retirement homes and nursing facilities – a zest for life stolen by physical disabilities and decline. One more loss piled upon a mountain of a lifetime of accumulated losses. This is why I contend that loss is not just about death but rather the result of multiple losses from people, places and things, all undoubtedly the glue in our life [See Grief Counseling].

These are just a handful of examples of how, over the years, we’ve learned the ‘right way’ to manage the pain from our losses; namely push down and bury them. Each loss becomes one of many other unacknowledged losses from our past that has been presumably ‘safely buried away.’ Just one more body, so to speak, to be added to the other buried ‘bodies.’ These analogous buried bodies become the lessons we then draw upon to direct and guide us – become part of our unique emotional road map – when additional life transitions and changes challenge us.

Sometimes all it takes is a ‘last straw’ from life to break our surprisingly fragile stability and emotional equilibrium. Give a voice now to these lifetime losses and learn tools that can assist with future changes so that you avoid unhealthy healing and the unhappiness it can festers in your life. Call now….please.