There is an unspoken awareness that in our lives, we will experience loss, and yet, it feels easier to stray away from the idea of losing someone or something as if the mere thought of it could make it into reality. And so, we are unprepared to grieve.
After all, no one taught us how to grieve.
And yet, there is a shared belief that grieving is supposed to look a certain way because it is a natural human response to loss. Because of this, sometimes we might believe that what we feel isn’t aligned with “the right way” of grieving, which can lead to guilt or self-judgment, thus risking to feel stuck in our emotional experience. That’s when I believe therapy is the most helpful. I have worked with clients who had to explore feelings of anger, confusion, numbness, sadness, vengeance and guilt (to name a few) in order to make sense of their grieving experience and move forward.
The chance to have a space where they could explore their experience and understand their emotions helped normalise how they felt, and how to grieve in their own personal way. As a result, it helped them move away from that feeling of being stuck in their emotional state.
In a nutshell, therapy helped change how they felt about how and what they feel.
As a person-centred counsellor, with personal lived experiences of grief and loss, I strongly believe a compassionate approach to our unique grieving journey can be a first step to healing during what is, for most, an incredibly challenging time.
What I found most clients appreciated is also having some knowledge to back up that feeling of living a normal, yet individual, emotional experience, as a tool to support their therapeutic journey. This involves sharing with them some of the therapeutic theories that explain the process of grief. This post briefly explores two of the most popular ones that inform my therapy practice. How to grieve: popular grief theories
The following theory is one of my favourites because it focuses on the one thing we all have: ourselves. As a matter of fact, one of the core beliefs of person-centred therapy is that clients have an innate healing capacity within themselves to “move forward”, or process their emotional experiences. Personally, I believe this helps us focus on what we can do, and can help us build a compassionate kind of resilience.
Tonkin’s model of growing around grief suggests that grief does not completely disappear but becomes integrated into your life over time. Instead of the grief lessening in intensity, it’s about your life “growing around” it, adapting and adjusting. The person does not “get over” the loss but learns to live with it, acknowledging that the grief becomes a part of their ongoing existence.
● This model highlights that grieving is a lifelong process, and while the pain may diminish, the loss remains a significant part of who you are: a grieving person doesn’t eliminate grief but learns to live with it.
Livewell’s approach to grief is based on Kübler-Ross’s famous five stages of grief. The idea is that people go through five distinct stages when grieving a significant loss:
● Denial: When a loved one passes away, you may not accept that they are no longer with you, believing that they will come back or that the death was an accident.
● Anger: You may feel angry at the person who passed away, other people or maybe even at yourself for “not doing more” to stop the loss.
● Bargaining: This might look like struggling to understand what happened, and thinking “If I could go back, I’d change things.
● Depression: You may withdraw from social interactions, feel numb, or experience overwhelming sadness about your life without the person you lost.
● Acceptance: You start to accept the loss, realise that life can move forward, and start taking steps to heal
As you can see from this post, these stages are not linear, and can be experienced in a different order.
In conclusion, therapy can be a great tool to explore what your unique grief looks like, while also supporting you in normalising how to grieve and validating your feelings.
Ps: Here’s a few prompts that might give you an insight of your feelings around the debate on how to grieve:
– How does knowing that grief isn’t a linear path make you feel?
– Have you ever felt stuck in your ability to process your grief? How did that feel?
– How does knowing that you can grieve at your own pace make you feel?
And if you feel you need support, or you would like a space to talk about your experience, why not get in touch?
Disclaimer: It is important to note that the context of the stage theories is embedded by a predominantly white and western culture and it is necessary to keep in mind that this is not a universal framework of grief and grief’s responses. Not all cultural groups believe that talking about loss has therapeutic value, and sometimes it’s actually considered socially inappropriate. This is why, at Livewell, we first and foremost tailor our approach to you, your personal experience and your specific needs.
