Grief Therapy in Dallas, TX & Philadelphia, PA

When our biggest emotions come knocking — anger, sadness, grief, fear — it can be difficult to let them in. It may feel easier to ignore them, reject them, avoid them, or numb them than to face them, welcome them, and address them. But why is that? Why is it so difficult to accept difficult feelings? What happens to us when we come face to face with so much discomfort?

​​​​​​It is disorienting. You lose something, possibly something or somebody important, but the grief is not what you expect it to look like. It’s abbreviated. Truncated. Maybe you return to feeling “normal” relatively quickly. It feels like you should still be mourning. What’s going on?

Sometimes, the people closest to us cause the most pain and lose the right to be part of our lives. In these cases, ending a relationship, be it an unhappy marriage, a one-sided friendship, or a toxic family relationship is the healthiest choice. But the decision to end a relationship and the process of extricating ourselves can bring up all kinds of difficult feelings.

It feels like grief comes with rules. There are rules about who can grieve which losses, how long grieving can take place, and what losses deserve to be grieved. These rules, silent but present, can make it harder to move through the already present pain and add feelings of guilt, confusion, and shame, and loneliness. These rules deserve to be dismantled.

In a family hit with a crisis—a terminal illness, a death, or other significant loss—family members may feel overwhelmed not only with the gravity of the loss but also the responsibility to support each other in their pain. And while it is normal and healthy to turn to family members for support and comfort, often those individuals closest to the loss are put in the role of comforter to others.

Grief shows up in families in different ways—including conflict, discomfort, and frustration. The various iterations of grief experienced by a family can lead to feelings of frustration at different styles of grieving, fears that they are not “doing grief” correctly, and feeling overwhelmed at the sheer amount of emotional need.

While life’s losses provoke a grief response, many will find themselves also counterintuitively experiencing a sense of loss during moments of joy and growth. When people experience growth and transition, moments that garner pride, excitement, and a sense of accomplishment, a sense of loss can creep in. I call these moments the “grief of growth.”

The word grief has come to be understood solely as a reaction to a death. But that narrow understanding fails to encompass the range of human experiences that create and trigger grief. Read more to learn about the four types of grief that we experience which have nothing to do with death.