Grief Counseling Chicago Information
By: Deb Klecha
The death of a loved one is never easy to deal with. This is particularly true if your loss involves a life partner, family member or close friend. Chances are that if you are reading the information appearing here, you are looking for information about grief counseling in Chicago. If so, it is only natural to want to know what to know what comes next.
Some of the most common questions our clients’ ask relates to the loss process. Like them, you may want to know – What now? What comes next and what are the stages of grief?
Perhaps the biggest movers and shakers in the field of bereavement is Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who authored the ground breaking book, On Death and Dying. She suggests that in general, people typically transition through five unique stages of grief.
The keyword here is transition, meaning a person can pass through the different stages back and forth – and then back again. It is a common misnomer that if you hit one stage, you won’t revisit that stage again.
The 5 stages of grief include:
1 Denial: “Did this really happen?”
2 Anger: “Why is this happening to me?”
3 Bargaining: “I promise I’ll change if you give me one more chance!”
4 Depression: “I can’t stand the pain of this loss!”
5 Acceptance: “This really happened.”
Different Types of Grief
Because each of us handles loss differently, there really is no “average” time period that people spend grieving. As human beings, we experience loss differently and in complex ways.
Additionally, there are cultural, financial and familial components that need to be infused into each person’s grieving process.
Grief can be experienced on an individual scale, such as the death of someone close to us, like a partner or on a mass scale, such as the passing of a public figure.
Should tragedy strike involving many people, the mass grief can take place. Examples include an air disaster, a terrorism attack or a tornado that wipes out an entire town.
Depending upon the nature of the loss we are experiencing, previous traumas can be activated, which cause old wounds to once again cause pain.
Again, grief is a complex thing and there is no cookie-cutter approach to working through. To believe otherwise is to perpetuate many of the myths about grief.
If you are looking for a resource to help you work through a period of emotional pain related to loss, I would like to recommend the book, Understanding Your Grief by Alan Wolfelt.
Inside, you will find page after page of helpful insight designed to help you process some of what you are feeling. More importantly, there is a message of hope in this book that can help you reach a place of healing.
Grief Counseling has been shown to be a helpful tool in assisting people work through the grief process. By working with a counselor trained in loss and depression, you can help yourself integrate the death of someone close to you into your new reality. Counseling is also helpful when you lose a family pet, such as a cat or a dog.
If you are interested in learning more about how grief counseling may help you with your unique situation, please give us a call at 773-528-1777 or send us a confidential note using our online contact form.
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