Grief Counseling

A Natural Way To Cope With Love and Loss

Grief counseling is a very important part of the process whenever we suffer feelings of grief due to loss. The grief can come from just a change in our life like a job or a new location to a significant loss of a pet, spouse, child or parent. Grief is a human way to deal with the feelings of love that we believe have ended. There is no one way to grieve. As we all are individual we all grieve different. Also, our society at large does not have a general way to honor grief. Since we are a society that is always struggling with time management and high demands taking time to grieve or knowing how to grieve is not part of our system. However, religion often fills this gap in our society.

Each religion has rituals to follow for grief and how to grieve a loss. These rituals can provide us with a way to get through the initial shock of grief, but as many people know who have been through a loss, that when the rituals of religion end there is still grieve and the adjustment of loss to deal with.

There are many books written about grief and many suggestions as to how to deal with loss. But as stated before there is no one way to grieve. Part of that is due to the physical and emotional reactions we have to grief. When we as human beings go through a loss our body’s initial reaction is to go into shock, to disconnect from the reality of the situation we are dealing with. After the initial shock of grief we begin to feel fear and become overwhelmed with the idea of how this will affect our lives. This can cause us to become confused and feel hopelessness.

Our significant loss affects our life in many ways. How are we going to manage without this person in our life? How will we adjust financially, socially and personally? How will we be able to take on the role of the other person? A major element in how we grieve is what kind of support system we have. Do we have family and friends who can help us deal with the changes in our life? When we have people we have people to turn to it can really help the grieving process. When we don’t have good support system grief can become too much for one person to deal with. If the case of the latter, this would be a time to seek grief counseling.

Grief counseling can help you move through the grief easier and more effectively. A good grief counselor or program will help you identify where you are in the grief process and understand what needs to occur to develop a new way of coping with your life without the significant person you have lost. Grief counseling will also help you deal with the feelings and emotions of your loss. There are many examples of the different stages of grief. Elizabeth Kubler Ross was a pioneer in the area of grief and loss. She developed the stages of grief that are now an important aspect of grief counseling.

Grief Usually Has Five Different Stages

The five stages of grief are as follows, the first is shock or denial. This is at the initial time of loss, when we cannot believe what is happening. The second stage is anger, when our grief makes us be angry at the person we are grieving or the situation that put us into grief. The third stage is guilt when we feel guilty about the person we grieve and blame ourselves in some way, that we should have done something or could have done something, though we have no control over the loss. The fourth stage is depression. Depression is anger turned toward ourselves and we feel powerless and helpless over our grief and fearful about our future without the significant person in our lives. And the final stage to the grief process is acceptance. Acceptance does not mean we forget or ignore our grief and loss; it is more that we accept our situation and begin to rebuild our lives. There is no such thing as building on these stages. They come and go as time goes by. Through the process of grief counseling you will be guided through the stages and given coping skills to help you along the way. But there should not be time constraints or pressures regarding strict adherence to the stages. It is simply not realistic to believe our emotions can be neatly packaged into categories during periods of grief.

How do you know what kind of grief counseling will work best for you? There are numerous types of grief counseling. What is important is that when you start grief counseling, you find a therapist that is qualified and that you feel a sense of comfort with. Grief counseling is now a specialty and can be found on the internet in any city. There are two significant types of grief counseling. The first is individual grief counseling where you work with a grief counselor one on one. In this type you get personalized guidance through the grief process. The second is group counseling. In this type you share the grief counseling with people that are experiencing the same thing. There are advantages to this type of counseling because you hear from others with feelings similar to your own.

There are also groups that specialty groups within the field of grief counseling. There are groups that specialize in spousal loss, the loss of a child, the loss of a family member and the loss of parents. Grief counseling groups can help you feel less alone and help you understand that other people are getting effectively healing from this difficult period of life.

The most important thing to know about grief is that it is a normal natural process of life and through grief counseling recovery and healing can be achieved. Reaching out during a time of grief will help people move through the process with less pain and more hope.