Susan Drysdale, PhD

Grief and Loss

Loss is a part of life. It is clichéd but true that nothing remains the same. Letting go of a family member, a friend, a pet, a relationship, or a dream are experiences that are usually sad or painful or excruciating. Each loss will lead to different emotions for each of us.

Counseling is important when you are having trouble accepting a loss in your life. In order to better understand your own experience, you will learn about the cycles of the grieving process. You will learn that bereavement often includes normal episodes of depression, shock, despair, protest, anger, withdrawal, avoidance, physical symptoms, anxiety, and loneliness. Let me help you understand the process.

Combinations of feelings can occur and breaks in the grieving are normal. Special days will bring us back to difficult emotions or make us experience them more deeply: e.g. holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. You will learn that as time passes, the intensity of the emotions usually lessens and the time between difficult episodes lengthens. Understanding the process helps you to cope by normalizing the experience.

You will learn that everyone does not go through each part of the process and that the depth and duration of each stage of the experience is different for each of us. Everyone has his or her own timetable and ways of handling loss. The bereavement experience will be determined by who we are psychologically and biologically as well as the other events going on in our lives at that point in time. It will also be influenced by how much the person we have lost was involved in our daily lives, the intensity of our feelings for the deceased, and if there were unresolved ambivalent feelings towards that person. And finally the experience will be determined by the age of the person who died, as well as the type of death with which we are coping: one after a long illness, one that was sudden and unexpected, one resulting from violence, or one as the result of suicide.

With counseling, you will also learn where and how to look for support (e.g. family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, health care professionals, clergy, groups, classes, and volunteer work). You will gain knowledge about how to help yourself using various healing techniques such as the following:

• experience and share the pain

• take time to grieve

• balance grieving times with activities that distract you

• confront guilt

• learn about the grieving process itself

• look for support

• allow yourself to remember

• don’t pressure yourself to "get back to normal"

The counseling process allows us the time and space to grieve. We learn that there is no one right way to grieve a loss. We all need to find our own way, and therapy normalizes the differences among us. This process gives us a holding place, while we try to make sense of the loss and recover to the best of our abilities.