Grief / Bereavement
Losing someone can be both depressing and disorienting; the disorientation is often the part people are least prepared. Grief interferes with sleep, concentration, appetite, as well as our experience of time itself. Weeks compress. Ordinary tasks take twice as long. None of this means it’s going badly; this is a normal part of grieving.
Grief counseling is not about moving through stages on a schedule. The various “Stage Models of Grief” were never meant as a linear timetable. Misunderstanding such models tends to make people feel they are grieving incorrectly or unhealthfully. Grief counseling can be reassuring, clarifying, and support a sense of direction when someone feels aimless, out of control, or lacking purpose.
Grief Counseling in Los Angeles
Losses that are not deaths
Grief also follows divorce, estrangement, a medical or psychiatric diagnosis, the loss of a career or an identity, a pet, or a version of the future you had meticulously constructed over the years. These losses may go unacknowledged by everyone around you, or cease to be welcome topics among loved ones, which can make you feel lonelier, the grief suddenly feeling bigger rather than smaller.
Anticipatory grief — mourning someone still living, during a terminal illness or dementia — carries its own set of challenges. Some people feel guilt about such ambiguous grief, and is therefore a common reason to start therapy.
What therapy offers
A place where the person(s), career, phase of life, or health status can keep being talked about openly. Therapy may be practical: help with the parts of grief that are logistical and exhausting. Therapy may provide necessary attention to complicated or chronic grief, perhaps due to relationship difficulties and the feelings do not resolve into anything so simple as ‘missing someone’. (This is especially true if grief sustains its intensity for well beyond a year from the death or diagnosis, for example.) And therapy may enable you to better support the people around you, since couples and families often grieve at different speeds. If you grieve more slowly, others may seem cold or insensitive, and if you grieve more quickly others may mention that you must be heartless or callous.
Getting started
Consultations are free and run 15 to 40 minutes. Call (310) 927-1755, email michael@michaelneetherapy.com, or use the contact page. The office is at 13101 W. Washington Boulevard, Suite 454, Los Angeles, CA 90066, in Mar Vista near the Culver City, Marina Del Rey and Venice; telehealth is available anywhere in California.