Why bother doing therapy for grief? It won’t bring back the person or people you loved, and may make you think more of them than you would like. Maybe you are getting up every day, showering, going to school or work, or maybe you are able to care for those you love just fine.
Well, the first question to ask is how are you really doing with all of those activities? Sometimes we are holding everything together, just so, able to maintain an approximation of balance. Sometimes we think we are doing just fine with all our activities and tasks only to learn later that people were afraid to tell us that we really weren’t, fearing that a cascade of sadness and depression may follow such news. Perhaps an even better question is how you are doing when you complete all of your tasks, the hustle and bustle slows, and you sit down to relax. Can you relax? Or do you fill the hours with tasks that keep your feet moving so that the crash is ever a short distance away? Sometimes, this is very adaptive, and other times less so. If sadness and pain wash over you when you become still, maybe it is time to engage in therapy. Conversely, perhaps most tasks are overwhelming and exhausting to manage, leaving you wanting to remain in bed with the covers over your head. This is also an excellent time to start therapy.
Grief is an experience that is not easily quantified. There are not right and wrong ways to experience and express grief. However, people can get “stuck” in the process of grieving where they find no new avenues to healing. As such, there are ways to assist you in the process, giving you a place to share all of the thoughts and emotions that you fear others don’t want or need to hear, and begin to engage in activities and relationships that make your life worth living.
There exist numerous therapies that are built to assist you with the difficulties that arise when you have done all the healing you know how to do. One such therapy is Complicated Grief Treatment or Prolonged Grief Disorder Therapy. This treatment teaches about grief and helps you to get unstuck, mourn your loss, and continue your relationship and connection with the deceased. Prolonged grief therapy allows you to grieve and imagine a future of happiness.
Another treatment that can be used is Interpersonal Therapy for Depression, or IPT. This therapy takes a relational approach to healing, with the idea that grief and depression can impact relationships, and that relationships can also impact mood and depression. First, you inventory the important relationships in your life, those that fuel you and those that perhaps empty the tank after only a few miles. You may spend therapy time talking about the things you loved about the person you lost, and maybe even talk about those annoying little habits or the difficult parts of the relationship. You may talk about how they died, and even better, how they lived. You may then look at some of the existing relationships in your life and take stock of how the grief may have affected them. After examination, planning, and practice, you may embark on a path of engagement with people and activities that once made you happy, or may start new things with support, assistance, and built-in troubleshooting. In this therapy, there exist theories, research, and manuals undergirding the work that you do, but each week your previous triumphs and struggles drive the process. This puts you in the driver’s seat while still having all of the safety features of manualized treatment.
With either of the options mentioned above, you are given the space to grieve how you need to, while also taking stock of where you exist in this world, possibly finding new spaces for fulfillment in the days and weeks ahead.
1 Katherine P. Supiano, PhD, Marilyn Luptak, PhD, Complicated Grief in Older Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Complicated Grief Group Therapy, The Gerontologist, Volume 54, Issue 5, October 2014, Pages 840–856, https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnt076
2 Katherine P. Supiano, Lara Burns Haynes & Vicki Pond (2017) The transformation of the meaning of death in complicated grief group therapy for survivors of suicide: A treatment process analysis using the meaning of loss codebook, Death Studies, 41:9, 553-561, DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2017.1320339
