Going to grief therapy feels like being on a life raft headed back to shore after leaving a sinking ship.
You desire a path towards mental and emotional recovery, but you don’t have the steps or tools to find your way ashore. Another sign you have incomplete grief occurs when you obsess about situations, such as replaying the scenario over and over again of how the person died and hoping that there was a different outcome. You don’t understand the reasons behind why the person died, how the person died, or what the devastating effects were on everyone left behind, including yourself.
Trusting your fragile emotional state to a therapist is definitely a big step towards healing. Making your first appointment and keeping it means that you’re acknowledging you can’t resolve your loss or the many conflicting feelings alone. You need to sit down and discuss what happened, identify the problems with moving through the stages of grief, learn new coping skills, increase your social supports, and start rebuilding your life. You also want to build new practices for dealing with difficult situations, including loss, so you won’t explode or hurt others around you who care about you and your well-being. With professional support, you can also calm the fears and anxieties you have, which might include worrying about other people who are still alive and fearing they will be hurt or lost.
Therapy can help you adjust to life again and develop healthier perspectives on relationships. Give yourself a chance to accept what happened, realize that you can’t change the outcome, and you aren’t to blame, and it’s possible to create new relationships that will give you that emotional connection that you had with the deceased. Every day is a new chance to be happy!