Grief Counseling
Has A Significant Loss Thrown Off Your Sense Of Purpose?
Are you struggling to cope with the loss of a loved one, a job, or a relationship?
Does it feel like your safe place of refuge isn’t there anymore and you don’t know where to turn?
Have you been feeling sad, angry, confused, and devastated?
No matter what kind of loss you suffered, you probably feel like the ground has come out from underneath you. Perhaps you feel untethered or lost at sea, as if you’re drifting through life without any greater purpose. Your sense of grounding isn’t there anymore and you might have difficulty concentrating or feeling present in your life. Your loved one or your relationship was your whole world, and now you’re not sure who you are without them.
Deep down, you probably wish you had someone who could walk with you on your journey of grief.
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Grief Is So Much More Than Just Sadness
One of the hardest parts of the grieving process is the emotional chaos that it creates. Some days you might be unbearably sad and tearful, but other days you might feel light, happy, and full of joyous memories of your loved one. Additionally, you might feel numb or flatlined at times, as if you’re cut off from your emotions and unable to process what you really lost.
Grief can be especially chaotic or unpredictable when you’re mourning the end of a relationship. On one hand, you might miss your ex deeply; on the other, you may resent them for hurting you and feel relieved that they’re no longer in your life.
Weaving through the tangled webs of grief is incredibly hard and you aren’t meant to do it alone. At Sacred Ground Psychotherapy, our goal is to help you build a rich and fulfilling life even in the wake of your loss. You may not be able to change the fact that your loss hurts, but with the right support, you can change the way that your body holds onto grief so that life is enjoyable again.
Everyone Experiences Different Types Of Losses Throughout Life
Grief can take many forms. Most of us associate grief with losing a loved one, but there are all kinds of other losses that can bring about grief. Losing a relationship, a job, a career, or a way of life can all throw off our sense of purpose and make us feel like we have no safe place to turn to.
What’s more, all of these experiences impact our nervous systems in complex ways. They create pains and strains that are deeply felt within our bodies and minds. This is why it’s so hard to work through grief alone. Our bodies hold onto our emotional pain and prevent us from being able to process it. To truly understand how grief affects our emotional and physical health, sometimes we need the help of a compassionate professional.
Our Culture Expects Us To Grieve Quickly And Get On With Our Lives
Many of us are surrounded by kind and loving people, but they may not deal with emotions well. Perhaps they don’t know how to talk about our loss or make room for our pain. After all, we as a culture are not taught to lean in to our emotions. The expectation is that we’ll grieve for four to six weeks and then “wrap it up.”
But grief isn’t this simple. It’s impossible to move on and pretend that everything is okay when our whole world has changed. The socially prescribed timeline of grief that we’re given just doesn’t work for most of us. If we don’t have people that can help us get success with our grieving, it’s only natural for our grief to be prolonged.
We are social creatures, and we need each other to cope with the pain of significant losses. Working with a grief therapist gives us a chance to experience healing, growth, and transformation in the context of a deeply supportive relationship.
Counseling Can Help You Live A Rich And Resilient Life Amidst Your Grief
We understand the agonizing pain when bonds of the heart are broken, or you lose someone or something that you love dearly. At Sacred Ground Psychotherapy, we offer a compassionate and clear path forward so that you can work through your grief and reconnect with life wholeheartedly again. We want to help you hold your pain, not just here and now in this season of loss, but for the rest of your life.
Our approach to grief therapy is all about leaning into your emotions instead of pushing them away. There is real scientific evidence to show that how deeply you can process your emotions is correlated to the depth of healing you can experience. We will help you develop a closer relationship with your emotions and your body, allowing you to draw nearer to feelings of loss, organize your pain, and reshape the way you engage with grief.
As a Christian-Catholic counseling practice, we specialize in helping clients work through both the emotional and spiritual aspects of grief. That said, we are open to working with anyone and strive to cultivate an atmosphere where clients feel accepted regardless of faith!
What To Expect In Grief Therapy Sessions
How we conduct grief counseling differs from client to client, since everyone grieves in their own unique way and there are many kinds of losses we work with. In general, the main approach we use to assist with grief is Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT). The beauty of EFT is that it gives you real-life skills to help you move through distress, process tough emotions, and build stronger bonds.
EFT can also help you identify your emotional style and put words to it. For example, most people who are grieving tend to go in one of two directions—they either end up sinking in their grief and thinking about it 24/7, or they push their emotions away entirely and refuse to deal with them. EFT can help you feel comfortable turning toward your pain and do so without feeling like you’re sinking in grief. As the pain begins to stabilize, we’ll go deeper to answer questions like “Why does this aspect of your loss hurt so much?” and build a meaningful relationship with your vulnerabilities, fears, and longings.
You May Have Some Questions About Grief Counseling…
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While there is no clear end date for grief, the pain can soften to the point where life doesn’t feel disrupted, but renewed and refreshed. At the beginning of grief, your pain can feel like a tablespoon of salt in a cup of water…overwhelming and hard to drink. But with therapy, we take that same tablespoon of salt and help you hold it in a 500-gallon vat of water. In this way, counseling can empower you to process and resolve your grief sooner rather than later.
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It’s normal for a major loss to shake up your beliefs or way of life. You have endured a significant change, and adjusting to a world without the person you love takes time and reorientation. We can help you organize and transform how you engage with your pain, enabling you to live a more fulfilling life. By leaning into your emotions and turning toward your grief rather than away from it, you can deepen your faith or sense of purpose in profound ways.
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This is more normal than you might think. Some people experience huge waves of emotion after a loss while others experience hardly any emotion at all. Perhaps the person or relationship you lost meant a lot to you, but you can’t quite seem to touch the pain. Part of counseling involves normalizing your feelings so that you understand that grief is experienced differently from person to person.
