My Approach to Grief and Loss Work

Here are some of my key thoughts on working with grief and loss, starting with a few quotes from Megan Devine's excellent book. 

“You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.” 

― Megan Devine, It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

“Each of us, each one of us, has to find our way into that middle ground. A place that doesn’t ask us to deny our grief and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.” 
― Megan Devine, It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

1. Most of us associate grief with bereavement. When someone loses a loved-one, feelings of sadness accompanied by debilitating suffering follow. This is a great time to see a therapist who can provide a designated space to process the pain and sort through a complicated array of emotions. 

2. Despite the obvious association grief has with losing a loved one, it is very important to work through feelings of grief and associated emotions that arise from other losses in life. 

3. Many who struggle with addictions have difficulty processing emotions in general. I'm always curious about the possibility of unresolved grief that may be part of a person's addiction story. 

4. Stages of Grief? Competent professionals are always careful to point out that there is no 'one size fits all' process for grieving, and the grief stages are not accomplished in a linear fashion. There are not discreet stages of grief that people graduate from. Like, "okay, I'm through the denial stage. . . now on to the bargaining stage." Nope.  

5. Dual processing model: when dealing with traumatic loss such as bereavement we normally go back and forth from grief and pain, then eventually to a sense of hope, or coming up for air. Then we will be plunged back into the grief painful grief. Get to know your own rhythm of grief while accepting it's wisdom.

6. Normally we need support of others to process powerful emotions such as grief in a healthy way. If we don't have experiences of finding comfort and support in safe relationships we at risk for 'complicated grief.' This means we have a much harder time healing from major life losses. Further complicating factors include traumatic loss, like suicide of a loved-one, or a complicated, troubled relationship with a loved one. 

7. Grief is a powerful emotion that slows us down to reckon with a painful loss. It takes our brain time to do the math as it were, that someone (or something) that was vitally important to our life, emotional health, is now gone. Therefore we can consider grief to be a friend joining us to help us make sense of a loss, to lead us towards acceptance for a new, hopeful and fulfilling life. Eventually we get there.

"Grief allows you to let go of something you have lost only when you begin to accept what you now have in its place. As our mind clings to the familiar, to our established expectations, we can become trapped in feelings of disappointment, confusion, anger, that create our own internal worlds of suffering." (Daniel Siegel, Mindsight)

8. Sometimes it's helpful to consider that the strength of our grief is commensurate to the strength of our love. It hurts so bad because we loved so much.