How Therapy Can Help With Grief and Loss
Grief is a natural response to losing someone or something that mattered to you. It can show up as sadness, and also as anger, numbness, guilt, exhaustion, or a hard-to-name sense that the world has shifted. There’s no correct way to grieve, and there’s no deadline for feeling better.
For a lot of people, support from friends, family, and community helps them carry a loss over time. Therapy can be another source of support, whether your loss is recent or happened years ago.
Grief Comes in Many Forms
When people think of grief, they often think of the death of a loved one. That’s one of the hardest losses a person can face, and it’s a common reason people come to therapy.
Grief can also follow other kinds of loss, including:
The end of a marriage or relationship
The death of a pet
A serious diagnosis, for you or someone close to you
A job, a home, or a community you’ve left behind
A relationship with someone who is still alive but has changed, such as a parent living with dementia or an estranged family member
These losses don’t always get the same recognition from others, which can make them feel lonely. If your loss isn’t on this list, it still counts.
How Therapy Can Help
Therapy gives you a dedicated space to talk about your loss, at your own pace, with someone whose focus is on you. You don’t have to worry about burdening them or saying the wrong thing.
Depending on what you need, therapy can help you:
Talk about the person or thing you lost, including memories that are painful or complicated
Make room for feelings that may seem confusing, like relief, guilt, or anger
Adjust to changes in your routines, relationships, and sense of who you are
Find ways to stay connected to what you lost while continuing to build your life
Some people come to therapy for a few sessions after a loss. Others find it helpful over a longer stretch, especially when grief overlaps with other challenges like anxiety, depression, or family stress.
When Extra Support May Help
For many people, the intensity of grief softens over time, even though the loss is still felt. For others, grief stays intense or starts to get in the way of daily life.
Research reflects this. A large review of 61 studies found that grief therapy had the clearest benefits for people who were having significant difficulty adapting to a loss. For those clients, outcomes were comparable to therapy for other concerns (Currier, Neimeyer, & Berman, 2008).
Some signs that extra support may help:
Your grief feels as intense as it did early on, months after the loss
It’s hard to keep up with daily responsibilities like work, meals, or sleep
You feel cut off from other people, or it’s hard to imagine a future
You’re avoiding reminders of the loss to the point that it limits your life
You’re relying more on alcohol or other substances to cope
You don’t need to wait until any of these apply. If you’d like support with a loss, that’s reason enough to reach out.
If you’re having thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day.
What to Expect
Grief therapy at Greenwood goes at your pace. There’s no pressure to “move on” or to reach a certain point by a certain time. Your clinician will start by getting to know you, your loss, and what feels hardest right now.
From there, you’ll work together on an approach that fits. That might include talking through memories, learning ways to manage waves of intense emotion, or exploring what the loss means for your life going forward. When a loss was sudden or traumatic, approaches like EMDR can also help.
You’re always welcome to tell your clinician what is and isn’t helping. Therapy is a collaboration, and it can change as your needs change.
Support When You’re Ready
Several of our clinicians specialize in grief and loss. We see clients at our offices in Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh, Pittsboro, and Hillsborough, and through telehealth anywhere in North Carolina.
If you’d like to talk with someone, you can browse our clinicians or reach out, and we’ll help you find a good fit.
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Source
Currier, J. M., Neimeyer, R. A., & Berman, J. S. (2008). The effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions for bereaved persons: A comprehensive quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin, 134(5), 648–661.
