Grief Counselling

Clients I work with in Counselling will typically always have some grief to work with.  Some clients come to specifically work on grief e.g. dealing with the death of a loved one.  Through the person centred support I am able to offer in the sessions clients are able to go through a grieving process to be able to ultimately move on and let go.  The work of Kubler Ross on grief can be helpful to identify the different stages you may be working with if you are going through grief of some sort.

 

Even if the main issue identified isn't grief there is usually grief involved in various other concerns.  For example we may grieve over a relationship that has ended or in working with an abusive past we may grieve as we realise things weren't as happy as we once thought. 

 

As painful as it can be to go through it's important to remember there is light at the end of the tunnel.  The feeling of 'I just want it all to end' is very common and it can be important just to allow ourselves to be in our grief and just accept the emotions as they keep coming up.  The mentality of 'soldier on' is very common in England and New Zealand cultures.  This is not a mentality which gets us through grief or any other mental health concerns. 

 

Through keeping balanced and just letting the emotions come and being supported there will eventually come a time when you will be able to move on more constructively. 

Fighting for your happiness

As part of my ongoing professional development I was reading a book written about abusive relationships.  Lisa E Scott has wrote two books.  One of which is about women overcoming the narcissistic male and another for men overcoming the narcissistic female.  There was a part which really stuck with me.  It said about the feeling of anger and using that constructively.   Anger can be misconstrued as being negative but provided it doesn't cross a barrier into abuse it is an empowering emotion which often clients are helped to access and feel in my therapy sessions.  Accessing anger can be great to enable people to recognise their own boundaries and where they end and where someone else begins and can learn to feel responsible for their own emotions rather than looking after the emotions of others.

In recovery from an abusive relationship people often have all kind of messy emotions but anger can be quite a common central one.  Anger over feeling they were used, not treated how they deserved, somehow used as a doormat.  Often it can be particularly difficult if there isn't a closure too.  When the partner or people around us simply were not the people we thought they were there is a gap created where we have an instinct where we want to get closure from the person and to understand why they treated us that way.   Often the truth is simply that the person never was the person we thought originally which can be a difficult thing to deal with.

This anger left over can become our fighting instinct as the book said to 'fight for our happiness'.  All this energy which went into trying to make the relationship work can now go into us.  We can recognise that we can put ourselves first (a revelation for many in therapy).  The grief of what was can be processed and this anger can go into our pursuits;  our new gym classes, building new relationships, our new business ventures, our active meditation practice.  Channelling anger into these things can be very empowering and knowing it is your energy now to use for you. 

Often people want revenge but this is typically fruitless as a goal and is again another acting out of the victim role rather than a pushing through into our authentic selves.  When feeling the need for revenge I find a healthy model of revenge can just be to feel your own happiness. Whatever happened in the past and whatever this person or people did, it didn't beat you.  You came through it and look at you now.

Grief and finding closure

Kubler Ross first developed the notion of the five stages of grief in her work around patients who were terminally ill in 1969.  These stages can be used in dealing with any type of ending and are seen in my work with clients.  The following is a link to discuss Kubler Ross' stages with particular application to the end of a relationship.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/inside-out/201309/the-5-stages-grieving-the-end-relationship

It is important to remember that the stages are not linear and people will typically move up and down the stages before ideally coming to a state of acceptance.

I find key things that often come up with clients moving through this process is an issue of closure and the appropriate management of anger.

Closure is quite closely linked with the stage of being in denial where we may not fully believe what has happened.  In addition to this though it can become more problematic whereas we are grieving for a lost relationship such as the death of a loved one or even a disappearance of someone whereas a conversation cannot take place to find a closure to be able to move on.

Here letter writing can be a particularly therapeutic experience.  This is not to ever be sent to the person (should they be around) but as a cathartic exercise to get out everything you want to say and to connect with any kind of anger inside also to be able to let it go and to be able to move on.  Sometimes clients practice this whereas they write 3 letters in total with one being very cathartic, the second being calmer and a third one become a more casual normal engagement almost.  Sometimes I talk with clients about the letters or sometimes the third one can even be some start point for future engagement with the person they have lost romantically should it be that type of relationship.

It is important that anger is used as a constructive force and does not seep into abuse which is always a danger.  We can view this as anger being on one side of a hill and being totally fine and building up with a potential slippery slope which falls into abuse which is always wrong.  The key here is to intervene before slipping down the slope.  See my blog post about 'fighting for your happiness' which is about using our anger constructively to help us to keep moving on.

If you have been in a relationship with an abuser then some sort of therapeutic support could be helpful to aid your working through.  There can be additional issues here of working with this process whereas the person was simply not who you thought.  In the therapeutic process I have found it powerful to work with clients in the letter writing process to actually write a letter as if it is coming back from the person who has caused the pain and giving some closure.  It may sound silly but this can support healing and allow a letting go to take place on a deeper level.

Keeping a regular routine around eating, sleep and exercise and also a daily connection such as meditation or morning pages can be helpful to support people through.  Mindfulness is also something which is gaining popularity.