Bereavement Counselling -
Loss of Family and Friends
The world as you know it has shattered. So begins the days and nights of your silent screams.
Whether the loss is sudden or prolonged, it takes courage and strength to feel you way forward.
Tumultuous feelings like confusion, anxiety, guilt, anger, and deep sorrow continually throws you off balance. Learning about the normal expressions of grief and how to bring stability to your days is the first area to focus. There is no right or wrong way to grieve.
It takes time to adjust to your world without this person. New routines, new demands, new ways to live all are jarring and a constant reminder of your missing person. Navigating that first year of holidays and special days is challenging. Just going to the supermarket is upsetting! I can suggest a menu of strategies and practices that can help you travel through these times.
Loss of Spouse
Grief has been likened to love with no place to go. One of the first ways to help yourself is to learn about the many expressions of grief: loss of appetite, sleeping difficulties, exhaustion both mentally and physically, forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, irritable and restless, panic and anxiety.
Navigating the first year is often very difficult because of the ongoing emotional intensity of your expression of grief. Individual and group sessions may be helpful to help you normalize grief. If there is more than one loss in a short period of time, assistance may also be very important to a return to healthy living.
Loss of Mother or Father
Although it is the natural order of life to expect your parents to die before you, many people are surprised by the complexity and depth of their grief when it happens. The death of a parent is a milestone in your life just as marriage, birth of children, or retirement. With the death of a parent, there is a fundamental change in family structure.
Adults expect that losing a husband, wife or partner is considered a major bereavement. However, the grief you feel as an adult when your parent dies is very real and also a major loss. Your parents are your own personal link with your past and with your childhood and this is what makes this loss very unique.
Child Loss
The untimeliness of the death of a child, regardless of the age is beyond overwhelming for parents. The common expectation is the parents will die first, not their child. Parental grief is intense, long lasting, and complex.
As Jeanne Webster Blank states in her book The Death of an Adult Child, “ No matter how many years have gone by since they were in our daily care, we are still operating under the assumption that our duty as a parent is to protect them from harm. Feeling like we have failed as parents if our child dies, is a barrier to our healing and must be dealt with. That barrier has a name: GUILT.”
Variety of Approaches to help stabilize then help you move along your grief journey
Your superpower to stronger mental health is always to design and follow a self care routine.
Multiple areas of our lives lead to our mental health, so I focus holistically, where I work with your biological, psychological, social, and spiritual needs.
Trauma-informed care - Through various modalities, including psycho-education, I work with individuals to understand trauma and their nervous system. The aim is always to learn many ways to self-regulate.
Narrative Therapy is based on the premise that you have the greatest impact on the story of your life and grief is a significant event to examine and add or delete new elements to the next chapter of your life
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), teaches you to learn how your thoughts influence your emotions, and further, how our emotions influence our actions.
Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), where I focus more on mindfulness, grounding strategies, and radical acceptance.