Are You Grieving Life’s Losses?

By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist, Counselor, and Certified Life Coach.

Some losses seem unbearable.

When we talked about grief and loss, the first thing that comes to most people’s minds is the death of their loved ones. Losses of partners, parents, or children are certainly extremely painful and difficult to bear.

But some other losses are life-altering. Your relationship starts out with great hopes, but it ends up in failure. You start a business only to have it fail. You go to school but don’t graduate or even worse, you get that degree but never get the professional job with the good salary you expected. All these disappointments are also losses that need to be grieved.

Life is a mixture of happiness and sadness.

Eventually, we all experience grief and loss. Some lives consist largely of happiness, punctuated by sadness, and other lives are large doses of grief and sadness that make it hard to enjoy the happiness.

I don’t want you to think that you shouldn’t feel happy. True happiness doesn’t jinx you and doom you to sadness. Don’t be afraid to laugh and smile because of your fear that you will have to cry and grieve. I wouldn’t want you to think that grief was a punishment for enjoying the good times.

How do most people experience grief?

In my training as a therapist, I was taught several different models of how people grieve. I don’t know that any one model is a Universal truth. We each experience Grief and loss in our own individual way. Most models of grief describe stages that people move through. When I went through episodes of grieving in my life, I didn’t move through discreet stages.

One formulation that I found useful was the one in Genevieve Davis Ginsburg’s book Widow to Widow. Using that insight, I have developed another way of looking at grieving from a variety of life’s painful experiences.

It’s common to think of grieving as a process of discrete steps that someone needs to move through. That model worked fairly well when it was applied to the person who was dying. Their process of grieving ended in death.

An alternative model looks at the process of grieving in a different way.

Initially, there is the experience that Ginsburg describes as a ton of bricks falling on you. I understand this more as a terrible storm that comes through, wreaking havoc. You may experience any combination of emotions or all of them at once.

The emotions most often cited in cases of grief are shock, denial, confusion, emotional release, anger, guilt, depression, and isolation, followed by some form of recovery.

After that, is a natural experience of emotional overload, sometimes followed by a brief period of numbness when you’re in the eye of the storm, which takes however long it takes for that storm to pass.

Following that initial experience of grief, there is a period of rebuilding and putting your life back together. For some people, they build it back as good as it ever was, and other people continue to live in the rubble, unable or unwilling to move on.

Eventually, the person typically establishes an identity as a separate individual person.

If you’d like to look at this book, the link is:

Grief and loss.

Widow to Widow. Genevieve Davis Ginsburg.

Kindle edition.            https://amzn.to/4t6G5RV                  Paperback. https://amzn.to/4biZfxsThe full list of books I recommend can be found at: Recommended Mental Health Books

David Miller at counselorssoapbox.com is an Amazon Affiliate and may receive a small Commission if you purchase a book or product using the link on this page. Using the link will not increase the cost to you.

Does David Joel Miller see clients for counseling and coaching?

Yes, I do. I can see private pay clients if they live in California, where I am licensed. If you’re interested in information about that, please email me or use the contact me form.

Recently, I began working with a telehealth company called Grow Therapy. If you’d like to make an appointment to work with me, contact them, and they can do the required paperwork and show you my available appointments. The link for making an appointment to talk with me is: David Joel Miller, LMFT, LPCC 

Life coaching clients must be working toward a specific problem-solving goal. Coaching is not appropriate if you have a diagnosable mental health problem. Also, life coaching is not covered by insurance. If you think life coaching for creativity or other life goals might be right for you, contact me directly.

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