Grief is an emotion that individuals experience when losing something or someone of value. The loss of a loved one is without a doubt one of the greatest challenges to overcome. It is inevitable in life that individuals will someday experience such a loss. How one copes with this loss may become a barrier to one’s overall well-being. Similarly, but oftentimes not as intense, is when there is a loss of something of individual importance such as a job, a pet, a personal dream or even material things that represent a significant part of one’s life.
Grief Counseling is a type of therapy designed to help individuals cope with the emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical effects of loss. It provides support, guidance, and coping strategies to help people process their grief, adapt to life without the person or thing they lost, and find ways to move forward while honoring their feelings. It involves examining the depth of these different relationships and their personal meanings and then implementing ways to continue to thrive in life through developing healthy coping tools, hope and acceptance.
Some symptoms of grief can be a pervasive sense of sadness, depression, and withdrawal from friends, family, and normal activities. Those grieving can feel guilty about actions taken or not taken towards the deceased loved one. They can have anger at self or others, developing physical symptoms such as tightness in the chest or throat, becoming highly sensitive to noise, a lack of energy, difficulty maintaining sleep, and loss of appetite.
There are stages of grief that are properly worked through in a clinical setting, although there are times that one can vacillate between stages when triggered by memories or unfulfilled dreams. These stages tend to progress in a specific order and are defined as; shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and bargaining, depression and reflection, reconstruction and working through grief, and finally acceptance and hope.
Cairo Counseling & Associates are here to assist a grieving client navigate through this challenging time and assist in reestablishing life in a positive direction.