grief work and traumatic loss treatment

What is grief work?

Grief work is the process of learning how to live with a loss. Grief is an emotional state characterized by missing, yearning, sadness, emotional pain, anger, anxiety, and other emotions. Grieving is an ongoing, evolving process.

Have your processed your grief? What does that even mean?

Friends, family, or even other therapists might ask if you feel like you’ve “grieved” your person. You might find yourself thinking: What does that even mean? How would I know if I had? Am I ever supposed to be finished? Not knowing the answers to those questions is completely normal. We all know grief is part of life, but that doesn’t mean the process of grieving feels natural or clear.

There aren’t fixed stages to complete and there is no finish line. Grief looks different for everyone because every relationship and every loss is different. One thing that tends to matter, though, is allowing space for the grief to exist. Grief is painful, so it makes sense to want to push it away. But when we try to avoid or get rid of it entirely, the suffering often grows.

Grief work simply means making room for the grief, whatever that looks like for you. That might be feeling the emotions when they come up, learning how to manage intense dysregulation, talking about the person you lost, establishing a different kind of bond in the a post-loss world, or slowly figuring out how to carry your loss forward while still engaging in meaningful action in the post-loss world.

Seeing a therapist for grief work can help because grieving is hard and often nebulous, not because grief is a disorder. When a loss is traumatic, therapy can also help you process the shock and pain of what happened so that, over time, it feels more possible to make space for your grief.

What is traumatic loss?

Traumatic loss is when someone dies in a way that is sudden, unexpected, out of order, violent, or involves significant physical or emotional suffering. Losses like these can be especially hard for the mind and body to process.

When a loss is traumatic, grieving often also involves working through the shock and distress of what happened. In other words, grief work can also include trauma work.

Because both grief and trauma are present, the experience of grief after a traumatic loss is often more intense and longer lasting. This is a normal response to an abnormal and deeply painful event.

Suicide loss and suicide loss survivorship

Suicide loss is a form of traumatic loss that I have particular experience working with. People who lose someone to suicide are more likely to meet criteria for Prolonged Grief Disorder or PTSD compared to people who experience many other kinds of loss. In my view, this reflects the uniquely complex and painful nature of suicide loss more than it reflects anything about the person who is grieving. Therapy in this context focuses on easing trauma symptoms while honoring and supporting the very human process of grief.

The term suicide loss survivor is often used to describe someone who has lost a person close to them to suicide. Suicide loss carries challenges that can be different from other kinds of grief, including other traumatic losses. The language people use for their experience is personal, and this term may or may not resonate with you. Either way is completely okay.

What many people share after a suicide loss is that the impact can be long lasting. Support can be helpful in the early days of grief, as well as years or even decades later. Traditional grief therapy does not always address the specific mix of grief, trauma, questions, and complicated emotions that can follow a suicide. Many of my clients who have experienced a suicide loss value working with someone who understands these layers and approaches the nuance of their grief.

WHAT IS DISENFRANCHISED GRIEF?

Disenfranchised grief is when your grief isn’t fully recognized, understood, or supported by the people or culture around you. It can happen when the loss you experienced doesn’t fit society’s expectations about what “counts” as a significant loss or how long someone is supposed to grieve.

This kind of grief is common after losses like suicide, the death of a close friend, losing a sibling, infertility or miscarriage, estrangement from living loved ones, or the death of a pet. In many ways, though, a lot of grief becomes disenfranchised over time. Our culture often allows only a short window for people to grieve before expecting them to move on.

When a loss is not socially validated, people are often left carrying not only the grief itself but also the pain of feeling unseen or unsupported in it.

Grief work can happen weeks, months, years, or even decades after a loss. It is normal for grief to shift and change over time. Therapy can help create a space where your grief is allowed to exist honestly and authentically, without pressure to meet someone else’s expectations about how it should look or how long it should last.

WHAT TYPE OF THERAPY DO YOU USE FOR GRIEF?

That depends on you as an individual but typically some combination of:

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR)
Self-regulatory or somatic strategies

Contact me to get start making space today.