What is Grief Counselling?
Grief counselling aims to help people cope with the physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and cognitive responses to loss. These experiences are commonly thought to be brought on by a loved person's death but may more broadly be understood as shaped by any significant life-altering loss (divorce, bankruptcy, death, or job loss).
Grief counselling provides work with their clients to help them find a healthy resolution to their loss. When the process of grieving is interrupted, for example, by the one who is grieving having to simultaneously deal with practical issues of survival or by their having to be the strong one who is striving to hold their family together, grief can remain unresolved and later resurface as an issue for counselling.
Everyone experiences and expresses grief in personally unique ways shaped by family background, culture, life experiences, personal values, and intrinsic beliefs.
Grieving and Mourning
Grief is our natural response and private reaction to loss, and there is nothing unhealthy or problematic about the act of grieving. Grief is the feeling of wishing things would have ended differently, better, or less painfully.
Mourning is the process we go through to adapt to our loss. Emotional and physical experiences are clues that let us know we’re managing a loss that means something to us.
Approximately 40 percent of grieving people will struggle with anxiety in the first year following their loss. Grieving people find themselves crying unexpectedly, waking up with headaches, feeling emotionally numb, having trouble sleeping, eating too much or too little, and carrying around a weight of sadness all day.
The Counselling Session
Counselling sessions are typically held once a week for 60-minutes. Clients share personal feelings and thought in an open and supportive environment.
Counselling can be short-term (a few sessions), dealing with immediate issues, or long-term (months), dealing with long-standing and more complex issues.
What is Grief?
Grief can vary between individuals. However, there are still global trends in how people cope with loss. Psychologists and researchers have outlined various models of grief. Some of the most familiar models include the five stages of grief, the four mourning tasks, and the dual-process model.
The Five Stages of Grief
In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified five linear stages of grief:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
Denial
Grief is an overwhelming emotion. It’s not unusual to respond to the intense and often sudden feelings by pretending the loss or change isn’t happening. Denying it gives you time to absorb the news and begin to process it more gradually. This is a common defence mechanism and helps numb you to the intensity of the situation.
As you move out of the denial stage, however, the emotions you’ve been hiding will begin to rise. You’ll be confronted with much sorrow you’ve denied. That is also part of the journey of grief, but it can be not easy.
Bargaining
During grief, you may feel vulnerable and helpless. In those moments of intense emotions, it’s not uncommon to look for ways to regain control or want to feel like you can affect an event's outcome. You may find yourself creating a lot of “what if” and “if only” statements in the bargaining stage of grief.
It’s also not uncommon for religious individuals to make a deal or promise to God or a higher power in return for healing or relief from the grief and pain. Bargaining is a line of defence against the emotions of grief. It helps you postpone the sadness, confusion, or hurt.
Depression
Depression may feel like a “quiet” stage of grief. In the early stages of loss, you may be running from the emotions, trying to stay a step ahead of them. By this point, however, you may be able to embrace and work through them more healthfully. You may also choose to isolate yourself from others to cope with the loss fully.
Like the other stages of grief, depression can be difficult and messy. It can feel overwhelming. You may feel foggy, heavy, and confused.
Depression may feel like the inevitable landing point of any loss. However, if you feel stuck here or can’t seem to move past this stage of grief, talk with a mental health expert. A counsellor can help you work through this period of coping.
Acceptance
Acceptance is not necessarily a happy or uplifting stage of grief. It doesn’t mean you’ve moved past the grief or loss. It does, however, mean that you’ve accepted it and have come to understand what it means in your life now.
You may feel very different in this stage. That’s entirely expected. You’ve had a major change in your life, and that upends the way you feel about many things. Look to acceptance as a way to see that there may be more good days than bad, but there may still be bad— and that’s okay.
The loss is never forgotten, but the grief survivor has more clarity, understanding and meaning. They have started the process of knowing themselves at a deeper level. Resiliency begins to surface, and they learn their inner strengths outweigh the loss. Their memories will live on and are a source of comfort and hope for the future.
Grieving is Unique to Each Person
Grieving is a process that’s unique to each individual. The immediate impulse of the grief survivor is to feel well quickly and make the feelings go away. This is a completely understandable and healthy reaction to difficult feelings. Sometimes the process feels like it’s taking too long, and at other times the grief survivor may question if they are doing it “right.”
