Grief and Loss
Are you feeling overpowering sadness after the death of a loved one?
Are you experiencing excessive guilt about something left unsaid or undone?
Maybe you're gripped with fear, caught in a cycle of anxiety, depression, helplessness, or panic?
Or are you having trouble resuming an everyday life with grief and pain as your constant companions?
Grief is a natural human response to loss, but that doesn't mean the grief of a loved one isn't an intense and, at times, lonely experience. While painful experiences are normal during this time, your emotions may feel trapped on a nonstop rollercoaster, with downs and deeper downs interspersed with periods of brief respite.
Who Should Seek Grief Counseling?
If you're grieving the loss of a loved friend, family member, or pet, grief counseling can help. The grief process heavily depends on the nature of our loss, our emotional state before the loss, and what support system we have in place.
That said, there are five recognized stages of grief, also known as models of bereavement. We tend to enter and exit these stages throughout our grief process. If you’re grieving a tough loss, you might experience the following:
Denial and seclusion: The last thing anyone wants to hear is that a loved one has passed. Instead of accepting this news, we reject it and insist that it can't be true. This is our way of avoiding the devastating feelings that come with a difficult loss.
Anger: Many also respond to loss in anger or other “negative” emotions because it’s easier to lash out than to feel the pain.
Bargaining: Another emotion that often takes over after a devastating loss is guilt. We start to wonder if and how we could have prevented it from happening or what we should have said before “it was too late.”
Depression: When those painful flood in, they often overshadow everything else. When we enter this stage of grief, it’s important to lean on our support system.
Acceptance: In this stage of grief (which often marks the end of the grieving cycle), we accept that we’ve lost this person and find the peace that we need to move forward.
Maybe you’d like professional support through a period of mourning?
Loss is a personal journey. While grieving for the same person can often foster compassion and connection among family and friends, it's also common for the grieving to struggle with anger, conflict, a lack of understanding, or an inability to fully share your feelings with others. Grief and bereavement counseling can provide you a much-needed safe space to work through your struggles with a caring, non-judgmental professional.
At Therapy for Women Beverly Hills, we can help, whether you're struggling to accept the reality of your loss, you're lashing out in anger, feeling extreme guilt, or suffering the severe pain of grief. In any case, we help people understand and cope with their grieving experience by learning to express and come to terms with the broad range of emotions involved in the grieving process, from those that you may expect — sadness, loneliness, exhaustion – to those that come as a surprise, such as relief, anger, and a sense of confusion. Our supports you as an equal collaborator to empower and engage your healing.