Our therapists offer grief & loss counseling in Cary, NC

My preferred approach to grief & loss counseling is dialectical behavioral therapy. DBT is a good fit for these issues as it builds on skills related to mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. In particular, skills related to radical acceptance can be vital to managing our grief in healthy ways.

I teach the following tools in grief & loss counseling:

• Mindfulness - How do we learn to exist in the moment we are in when that moment hurts?
• Distress tolerance - Learning how to co-exist with our pain without intensifying it and without shoving it aside.
• Radical acceptance - How do we learn to accept the unacceptable?
• Emotion regulation - Learning to be responsive to our pain, feeling it was just the first step.
• Interpersonal effectiveness - Learning how to re-invest in our lives following loss.
• Grounding skills - For when you are feeling flooded by thoughts or feelings.

The biggest turning points, in my opinion, related to grief and loss counseling are when clients experience catharsis and, sometime after that, when they begin to re-engage with their lives in growth-oriented ways. Catharsis comes with any big or deep expression of emotion, most typically being anger and/or sadness when working with grief. I typically describe the experience of grief like an amputation. Just as people who undergo amputations experience phantom pain in those lost limbs, we also experience pain when connecting to the thoughts or memories of those we can no longer reach. We have to learn to live life without them, sometimes for the first time in our lives.

In your time outside of counseling sessions, you can further your progress by choosing kindness. Allow your feelings and practice responding to them in supportive ways. At first, it may seem unfair that the world has kept spinning after a major loss, but you may find that this also provides a respite in the sense that the general public doesn't know what you're going through and won't treat you differently. As a result, this can be a comfort for those of you who want to exist in a world briefly that isn't dominated by grief. Please note that depending on your form of grief, you may also be more likely to encounter triggers in public, so proceed mindful of this.

To prepare for your first grief and loss counseling session, know that catharsis is healthy, and if you're worried about being emotional during your session, you needn't worry. Besides, having an abundance of tissues in the office, I want to emphasize to you that no one does this alone and no one expects you to do so. You and your grief are welcome.