Grief
Common symptoms:
Somatic: irritable bowel, stomachaches, vomiting, headaches, difficulty breathing, and panic attacks
Executive Functioning: lacking motivation to complete tasks, remembering to complete tasks, staying on task, following directions, planning, coordination, misplacing items, making simple errors and struggling with fine motor skills, like handwriting
Emotional Regulation: difficulty controlling and managing fears/worries, tearfulness, feeling “numb,” irritability and anger, depression and internalization or externalization, and suicidal thoughts/plans
Developmental Considerations: depending on the personal meaning and significance of the loss, it is likely that the individual will continue to “re-grieve” throughout life, experiencing the loss differently at different points
Considerations:
Losses early in life can serve to function as a template for handling many important life experiences, involving death, endings, losses, spiritual beliefs and attachment to other people. Different losses may come to represent one another, and it is possible to grieve multiple losses at once
Parents often serve as a model for coping with grief and loss. Unfortunately this often occurs during times when parents are most in need of their own self-care and healing. Processing grief often brings up feelings regarding your parents’ behaviors, in addition to your own experiences and feelings
Individuals who are in the process of losing someone to illness often elect to come to treatment before, during and after the loss, in order to cope with the many different experiences that arise throughout the process
Death of others often makes us more acutely aware of our own death, at times leading to more suicidal thoughts than typical. While this can be distressing, it is not necessarily cause for immediate alarm. When thoughts shift to active plans, it is important to tell someone, be it a trusted authority figure or calling the police
Treatment:
Diagnosis: there is no right way to grieve, and as such it is important to identify the nature of the individual’s grief as well as the meaning behind the loss
Referrals: common referrals include support groups following at least six weeks of individual therapy, to ensure that the individual is prepared to cope with the many unique experiences of grief in a group setting
Psychotherapy: existential therapy is an evidenced based treatment for exploration of grief. It involves understanding the unique meanings behind the individual’s loss and offers a reparative relationship by a therapist who can hold your thoughts and feelings, because they are not part of your immediate world. This allows for a space in which you can process authentically
