Grief Counseling

Understanding ‘Grief Work’:
How Its Completion Heals Our Broken Heart

Life is never the same again when death becomes up-close-&-personal.  It steals from our lives that person who is the very center of our world!  We are forever changed with grief consuming the world we now occupy.

However, it has long been my philosophy that there are other losses that don’t include death, per say, but nevertheless trigger intense grief.  Why?  Because when any relationship that is the glue in our life – that is, gives it meaning, direction or purpose – is either severed, as with death, or significantly diminished, as with divorce or other life transitions, a serious disruption to our emotional equilibrium is created, triggering grief [See Adult Counseling].

This grief can be so all consuming, it makes some survivors believe it is never ending, even immune to healing.  I’ve had spouses and parents of loss tell me they believe ‘healing’ means ‘forgetting’ their beloved, which makes them unwilling to get better [See Parent Counseling].   While this belief is a strong feeling for survivors, it’s not a fact.  If it was indeed a fact, that grief could never be healed, that healing required forgetting their beloved, then I’d have quit being a Grief Specialist – it would have been too depressing, too discouraging!

Instead the good news is that we CAN get beyond this all consuming, all engulfing loss of emotional balance.  While loss has many beginnings – started by a phone call, a knock at our door, the ‘we need to talk’  statement that doesn’t bode well, or entering a hospital room that sets off mental alarms – grief also has an ending.  I’ll tell you how, just keep reading.

We can reach the end of this painful grief journey by doing our ‘grief work’ which moves us to a place where we can finally reinvest in Life Again, Living Again.  Doing our grief work gets us emotionally unstuck – that is, living in the past where the trauma and devastation began – and instead gets us living in the present where seeds of hope for a future can be planted.  Survivor Guilt is the primary culprit that sticks us in the past.  This is where we feel really bad for momentarily pushing aside our sadness and instead take pleasure from life.  We then feel so guilty for having forgotten our Beloved – if only momentarily – we crawl back into our profound sadness which then relieves us of our guilt.  Sadness feels ‘better’ than guilt.  I told you feelings aren’t logical and yes, they are messy.

Doing our grief work enables us to resign ourselves to what we can’t change.  I did not say accepting but resigning!  Experience has taught me that accepting the loss of our Beloved, especially if they’re taken unexpectedly or out of life’s natural order – as in the loss of a child – is never an option for survivors.  But we can resign ourselves to living with what is Reality, despite how we feel about it.   Grieving makes this an achievable reality while no other ‘fix’ accomplishes this outcome.

But there is no emotional ‘wall switch’ that when offered, allows a client to flip ‘ON,’ to emotionally resigned.  If there was, I’d either be without a job or v-e-r-y  wealthy.  Rather, there is a season to grieve, a time to mourn.  Because feelings are not bio-degradable, they don’t disappear over time by using such tricks as staying really, really busy, refusing to think about ‘IT’ and never talk about ‘IT,’ or other ‘fixes.’  By avoiding and attempting to bury our pain, our pain is instead only prolonged, sometimes for years, by these band-aids.

Committing to healing ourselves by completing our grief work is the only way we achieve health in our body, mind & spirit.