In grief and bereavement counseling, you’ll work with licensed clinicians and potentially a group of peers who are also healing from personal losses. Your providers and peers will meet you where you are so you can safely feel your emotions, process them, and resolve any unanswered questions.
You’ll learn about how grief affects people and practice new coping skills to help you get through tough days. The goal isn’t to go back to “normal,” but to reconnect with your life and reimagine your relationship with yourself.
Each person’s experience of grief will be different for each significant loss. If intense emotions and physical symptoms are getting in the way of your life, or if you feel like you can’t go on, you may be dealing with prolonged grief disorder. You may have the disorder if grief lasts longer than 12 months in adults or six months in children.There is hope that you can find relief and live a full life in a way that honors your loved one. Grief counseling can help you take your first steps forward.
Are you or a loved one experiencing a mental health crisis while grieving? Call or text 988, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, for immediate support.
In this article, we’ll share five things you can expect during grief and bereavement counseling.
5 things to expect from grief and bereavement counseling
In grief counseling, your therapist will help you find the language to talk about what you’re going through. You’ll learn to manage your emotions and recognize when you should reach out for help.
In higher levels of treatment, you’ll attend group treatments and family therapy sessions as well as individual therapy. If you need medication to help reduce your symptoms during treatment, you may work with a psychiatrist for medication management. While there are no FDA-approved medications specifically for grief or prolonged grief disorder, medication may be prescribed for co-occurring conditions such as depression, anxiety or insomnia.
The following are some benefits you can expect from grief and bereavement counseling:
A safe space for all emotions
In grief counseling, there’s no pressure to keep your feelings inside or put up a front. In fact, you’re encouraged to do the opposite. Expressing your emotions in a safe environment where you can feel seen and accepted is therapeutic in itself. Receiving compassion from others in grief and bereavement counseling can help you start to feel compassion for yourself. This also creates opportunities to practice emotion regulation skills.
Education about the grief process
Learning about the different ways people experience grief can help you gain insight and perspective on your own healing process. You may be familiar with the classic five stages of grief, but today we recognize seven stages:
- Shock
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Testing
- Acceptance
These don’t happen in the same order for everyone, and you may not experience them all. Healing happens when you can validate and normalize your feelings.
Practical coping strategies
You can’t necessarily change your feelings. However, you can learn more helpful ways to respond to them and manage them. In treatment, you’ll try different strategies to see what works best for you.
You may practice grounding techniques, somatic methods or visualizations to help you “ride the wave” of your feelings instead of trying to resist them. You’ll also create a proactive self-care plan to help you feel your best
Working through relationship implications
When you lose someone who’s close to you, your grief can affect other personal relationships. You may have a hard time relating to others while you’re grieving, or you may want to withdraw and isolate yourself.
Loss within a family can affect family dynamics in complex ways. In treatment, you can talk things out in a structured way and rebuild your roles so you can support each other’s well-being.
Integration and meaning-making
Grief can bring up tough questions about who you really are and what your life means to you. These are things you could ponder for a lifetime. During grief counseling, you can explore these questions safely and find answers that feel good to you.
Rather than “moving on,” you can find ways to memorialize your loved one and keep them with you as you move forward into a new chapter.
Explore treatment for prolonged grief disorder at Lightfully
Grief counseling doesn’t take away your pain but provides a compassionate container for it, helping you navigate your unique journey with additional support and understanding.
A therapist is a partner who can help you navigate the toughest parts of your healing process. Sharing your experiences with peers who understand and hearing other people’s stories may help you start to feel a sense of acceptance and validation.
At Lightfully, we provide treatment for the whole person that puts your experiences first and supports the life you want to live. If you’re not sure exactly what that looks like yet, that’s OK. Figuring it out is part of the process.
We create a personalized treatment plan for each client using our Precision Care Model (PCM). We combine evidence-based therapies to help you manage four core processes: your thoughts, feelings, behaviors and relationships.
Are you considering your options for grief and bereavement counseling? Let’s talk about your goals for recovery and how we can help. Reach out to our Admissions Concierge Team today.
