Grief: What to expect.
Determining when it is normal and when you need guidance, support, counseling.
Unresolved grief can lead to clinical depression and suicidality
Loss response:
Mind: Shock, disbelief, overwhelm, sense of unreality
Heart: Sadness, anger, irritability, fear, guilt,
Somatic response: crying, breathing difficulties, sleep disturbance, digestive upset, flu-like symptoms, loss of appetite
Spirit: Loss of meaning, loss of faith, sense of isolation and profound aloneness
Continued response:
Mind: forgetfulness, loss of concentration, over thinking
Heart: Sadness, depression, despair, anger, anguish, emptiness
Somatic: exhaustion, continued sleep disturbance, decreased immunity to illness, loss of appetite, or excessive eating
Healing Toward Integration:
Mind: Meaning-making, Acceptance, clarity of one’s own process, Understanding, new view
Heart: compassion, Love, reconnection, heart broken open, increased desire to engage in relationship
Somatic: increased energy, improved sleep, appetite returns
Few general points on Loss/Grief:
Grieving is normal, all of the symptoms are normal. We tend to want to fix the process, over medicate, diagnose. Very important to normalize the process, so we can move through it with less fear and more compassion, and not put band-aides on broken hearts, that will only resurface in the future wider and deeper.
There is no such thing as completion or resolution. Grieving is a continued evolution of relating to loss, of integrating that loss into meaningful perspectives that allows the pain to point us toward greater contact with the world. Our task is to create a new relationship with our lost loved one, and to carry forward the wisdom gained.
There are phases to grieving, but not linear steps.
There is a bio-chemical reaction in grief. In other words, a biological response that creates the mind’s confusion, the body fatigue, and the limited ability to function and cope. It helps to understand this biology so as to not judge our situation as a measure of our worth, or to push ourselves out of the process. It is an exhausting process that requires we move between curling up and movement, to allow the integration to continue.
Modalities to offer healing beyond trauma, loss, catastrophic illness:
mind body impact: emotions inform the body system, working with the body regulates emotions
spiritual transformation: through engaging a multidimensional (body,mind,heart,spirit) aspect of healing, concepts of Self, expand beyond the personal
Community/contact
Mindfulness: reducing suffering, recognizing our “true self”, you are beyond or, more than, whatever limited emotions you may be experiencing
Movement: engaging the body and emotions
Wilderness/nature: grounding, resourcing, restoring biorhythms, finding resilience
Psychotherapeutic techniques: EMDR, Body Psychotherapy (learning from sensation, unlocking the nervous system, balancing the nervous system, create new neural pathways, completing actions, cognitive behavioral approaches, transpersonal)
Breathwork: reinforming the nervous system, unlocking, unwinding, reconnecting
Visual imagery: creating new neural pathways
Art
Groups
Writing
Adventure/challenge
Ritual
Spiritual practice
Speaking/witnessing, recognition, marking
Meaning making
To raise awareness:
mind, body, spirit, heart
to turn toward the pain
what does this crisis, this event, offer you, what is the gateway leading you toward.
Deeper understanding of self, of others, reconnection
transpersonal perspectives
larger capacity to stay, without reacting or withdrawing
decreasing tendency toward self aggression, or other aggression
no projection
no layers of addiction, bad relationships, over eating, loneliness, hiding.
Instilling meaning, purpose
expansion rather than contraction
creating warriors: who feel the fear, relate to it, learn from it, and let it break us open, to relate more fully to life.
2007 present centered psychotherapyTM, L.L.C.
www.dianerenzcounseling.com 720 317 5170