Complicated Grief
No one is ever prepared for the loss of a loved one.
Life can feel pointless when we experience the shock and finality of death. The world seems to keep moving as though our partner, friend, parent, pet, or sibling never existed - never mattered. You may feel angry, confused, broken, or lost. Maybe you are constantly consumed by thoughts of them and what you left unsaid. Right now, you don’t see a way out. How can you go on laughing, loving, or living without them?
You may worry the people in your life are tired of hearing about them or your grief. Work is relentlessly asking you to come back when you can barely get out of bed. Your loved one may have left you suddenly - an accident, an illness, murder, or a suicide. Or maybe you’ve been experiencing their gradual loss for a long time, experiencing the pain of their ongoing slow death to a degenerative illness. They may have been much too young, or lived a long full life, no matter how or when it happened, the pain does not discriminate.
The finality of the end of their life can leave you looking for answers, hoping for some kind of relief from the hole left in your world. But relationships don’t end with death, they are only transformed. As painful as it can be to hear right now, it is true that you will someday be able to laugh, deeply love, and live fully again.
How Therapy Can Help
In grief counseling you won’t be asked to be “over it” on any timeline. You set the timeline and the pace - of course knowing we’re never truly ‘over it’ when we lose a loved one to death. You won’t be told “everything happens for a reason” or that their death was all “part of a plan”. You will receive gentle support reflecting your values and views of death and of life. You will find guidance on the emotional and physiological impacts of grief, and how to navigate your new world, all on your terms and your timeline. You will learn you are not alone, how to find your purpose again, and honor what it means to have loved so deeply that their loss can have caused so much pain.
“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
- Jamie Anderson