Living With Loss

LIVING WITH LOSS

While intense grieving can and often does last a lifetime, either in moments or at difficult times of the year, it is generally possible for people to find a way to live life with purpose, fulfillment, and meaning after experiencing a difficult loss. With supportive friends and family, people can generally learn to live with a loss.
However, even with caring friends and family, guidance from a professional with expertise in working with grief can ease this burden in ways that support from others cannot.

GRIEF THERAPY

It is not easy to learn to live with loss, and grief does not end once and for all. Every loss of someone close is painful, unwanted, and can be enormously challenging. While grief itself is not a disorder, there are times when bereaved people can benefit from grief support and psychotherapy, especially if they have other conditions, such as depression or anxiety, or are struggling with other life complications that make it extra difficult to live with a loss.

PROLONGED GRIEF TREATMENT

Prolonged grief disorder is a form of grief that prevents a bereaved person from living with the loss and interferes with their daily life to such an extent that it becomes debilitating. People with PGD often say that they feel “stuck” in their grief, as if the death just happened, and their pain is so exacerbated with reminders of the loss in their everyday life that they feel unable to live with the loss. Further, they have enormous difficulty imagining a future without their loved one in it. The treatment we offer for this is highly structured, time-limited, and includes in-between session work in order to provide relief as soon as possible.

HELP FOR OTHER TYPES OF LOSS

There are other types of losses that people experience where grief has not resulted from a death, or where our culture does not provide typical grief acknowledgement and support (such as the loss of a pet.) Grief and loss are part of being human and we gradually learn to deal with loss from the time we are children. However, some losses during our adult lives can be so unwanted, destabilizing, or unexpected such that we are ill-equipped to cope with them without additional support and expert guidance. Losing a job, a home, a close friendship, a marriage, loss of physical abilities, or even the anticipation of losing someone close due to a gradual onset of illness. All of these variants of loss can occur in ways that are overwhelming or otherwise turn our lives upside down. The principles and procedures that we utilize in our evidence-based grief treatment can be beneficial in these and other cases to help you to find ways to live with these unwanted losses.

WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU LIVE WITH LOSS

We can help in any of these grief and loss situations. Utilizing the principles and procedures from evidence-based treatment, we offer compassionate and sensitive guidance while suggesting strategies and a framework to help bereaved people understand and live with their own unique grief reactions, learn to manage the overwhelming and often unfamiliar and disorienting emotions that can arise in grief, and ultimately to find ways to live their life with loss, while keeping their loved one with them forever, and otherwise looking forward to the future.