Grief and loss
Grief is not a problem to be solved or a sequence to be completed on schedule. It is what happens when a life that was organized around someone or something has to reorganize without it. Psychotherapy for grief in Vero Beach and by video anywhere in Florida.
Grief reorganizes a whole system.
The popular picture of grief is a sequence: denial, then anger, then bargaining, and so on toward acceptance. It is a tidy picture, and many people who are grieving find that it describes very little of what they are living through. They worry that they are doing it wrong because they are not moving through the stages in order, or because they seem to be going backward.
I find it more accurate to think of grief as the reorganization of a whole system. The person or thing you lost was woven into your routines, your roles, your relationships and your body. Who made the coffee. Who you called on the drive home. Who you were in relation to them. When that thread is pulled out, everything it was holding has to find a new arrangement, and that takes the time it takes.
This is the same systems view that runs through how I work generally. It does not make grief smaller. It does make it more understandable.
The body grieves too.
Grief is often felt before it is thought. Exhaustion that sleep does not touch. Appetite that disappears or will not switch off. A tightness in the chest, a heaviness in the limbs, a startle when the phone rings at the hour they used to call. Some people feel almost nothing for weeks and then are overtaken in a grocery aisle by a song.
None of these are signs that something has gone wrong. They are the system registering that the conditions it was organized around have changed. Part of the work in therapy is simply making room for that: noticing what the body is doing without trying to hurry it, which is the heart of somatic work as I practice it.
Grief is not only for the bereaved.
Many of the losses that cause the deepest grief do not come with a funeral. A marriage that ended. A diagnosis that changed what your body can do. A career that closed. A home or a town you had to leave. A child who is estranged. A version of the future you had been counting on.
Because these losses are not always recognized as losses, people often feel they have no right to grieve them. They are told to look on the bright side, or that at least nobody died. The grief goes underground and shows up as irritability, flatness, or a sense of being stuck. Naming it as grief is sometimes the first thing that helps. There is more about these turning points on the life transitions page.
There is no correct amount of time.
People are often told, directly or indirectly, that they should be further along by now. Six months, a year, the second Christmas. I do not work to any timeline. Grief tends to soften and change shape as a life reorganizes around the absence, but that process is uneven and personal. Anniversaries, holidays and ordinary Tuesdays can all bring it back.
What therapy can offer is company inside that process, and attention to whether the reorganization is happening or whether something is holding it in place. Sometimes grief is stuck because it is tangled with something else.
When the loss was also a shock.
A sudden death, a violent one, a death you witnessed, or one that followed a long and frightening illness can leave more than grief behind. There may be images that return uninvited, a body that stays on alert, or an inability to think about the person without landing on the worst moment. In those cases grief and trauma overlap, and the trauma can block the grieving.
When that is the picture, we often work with the traumatic part first, carefully and at a manageable pace, so that the grief has room to move. The trauma and PTSD page describes that work. Where the loss sits inside a longer history of difficult relationships, the complex trauma page may also be relevant.
Sessions are in person in Vero Beach or by video from anywhere in Florida. Grief work is usually individual therapy, though when a family is grieving together, family therapy can help people who are each grieving differently understand one another.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is it too soon to start therapy after a death?
- There is no rule. Some people want support in the first weeks; others come a year or more later. Both are reasonable.
- Is it too late if the loss was years ago?
- No. Grief that was postponed or never acknowledged can be worked with at any point, and it often surfaces when life becomes quieter.
- Do you work with grief over things other than death?
- Yes. Divorce, illness, loss of work, relocation and estrangement can all bring real grief, and they are taken just as seriously here.
Therapy outcomes vary from person to person. No result is promised or guaranteed.