While grief is a normal part of life, it can be challenging to move through. If your grief is overwhelmingly painful or interferes with your day-to-day functioning, therapy can help. Our clinicians provide grief therapy for children, adolescents, and adults.
What You May Experience:
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- Intense emotional pain
- Difficulty accepting the loss
- Yearning and widespread longing for who or what has been lost
- Feeling numb, or like you have no emotions
- Feeling angry
- Struggling with guilt
- Loneliness
- Difficulty concentrating
- Changes in eating and sleeping patterns
- Changes in activity level, either feeling lethargic or restless and agitated, like you can’t relax
- Increase in or dependence on substance use (e.g. alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, etc.)
- Increase in risk taking behaviors and/or feeling like you don’t care what happens to you
- Changes in your relationships (feeling either more distant or insecure)
- Avoidance of places, people, or situations that remind you of the loss
- Feeling like you have lost part of yourself
- Feeling like the world has changed and you don’t know what to do with it
- Loss of hope about your future
Additional Signs of Grieving in Children:
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- New or worsening behavioral problems such as:
- Tantrums
- School refusal
- Withdrawal
- Regression (e.g. bedwetting, thumb sucking, seeking old security items such as stuffed animals or blankets)
- Sleep difficulties
- Aggression
- New or increasing anxiety
- Clinginess, insecurity, or reassurance seeking behaviors
- Fearfulness
- Guilt
- Difficulty with changes in structure or when expectations are not met
- Physical symptoms such as stomachaches and headaches
- Changes in eating patterns
- Changes in academic performance
How Grief Therapy Helps:
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- Provides a supportive, nonjudgmental space to experience difficult emotions.
- Allows you to explore thoughts and beliefs about your loss, and challenge thinking patterns that may be unhelpful.
- Provides the opportunity to learn new coping skills for grief-related symptoms such as avoidance, over-thinking, difficulties sleeping, and many more.
- Helps you begin to chart a path forward for yourself.
Our clinicians are also trained to recognize and treat disorders that can co-occur with grief, such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and PTSD.