Quote:
Originally Posted by treehouse
I also really liked that he validated your feelings about your grief being "atypical". The thing I hate the most (by FAR) in therapy is when T doesn't understand where I'm at - and when he DOES get it, it's the best feeling in the world. No matter how horrible I'm feeling, if T really GETS how horrible I'm feeling, and I can feel that he gets it, it's like a weight lifted off of my shoulders.
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Yes, it did feel good to have him say that, and not to push it away with comments like you're just sad, a parent is dying, it's understandable, etc. Because I do feel abnormally sad, and I actually used that word "abnormal" when I talked to T, not "atypical" as I did in my post. After he said what he thought might be going on that I was having this strong reaction to my father's end of life time, I told him that it made me feel better to hear him say that my grief was abnormal and that he could help with that. He immediately said "I didn't say
abnormal," and said that was black and white thinking. I tried to reassure him and said it was OK, I was just not choosing my words carefully and to me it was not a negative thing at all (to have my grief be
abnormal). It felt reassuring in fact to have him also perceive my difficulty as unusual.
Quote:
Originally Posted by treehouse
Once, my T and I were talking about the different lengths of time that things took in therapy, and he said that grief work was the shortest...that people were almost always done with it in 7 weeks. We didn't talk much more about it (actually, thinking back, I think that it might have come up in relation to my own father's death), but something about that made it feel really "doable" to me.
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7 weeks? Interesting it has a time attached to it. Such a short time does sound "doable."
What is grief work? I found this on the Internet:
In Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy... William J. Worden, Ph.D., makes a distinction between grief counseling and grief therapy. He believes counseling involves helping people facilitate uncomplicated, or normal, grief to a healthy completion of the tasks of grieving within a reasonable time frame. Grief therapy, on the other hand, utilizes specialized techniques that help people with abnormal or complicated grief reactions and helps them resolve the conflicts of separation. He believes grief therapy is most appropriate in situations that fall into three categories: (1) The complicated grief reaction is manifested as prolonged grief; (2) the grief reaction manifests itself through some masked somatic or behavioral symptom; or (3) the reaction is manifested by an exaggerated grief response.
I wonder what the specialized techniques are?At the same site it says this:
Anticipatory grief is the phenomenon encompassing the process of mourning, coping, interaction, planning, and psychosocial reorganization that are stimulated and begun in part in response to the awareness of the impending loss of a loved one and the recognition of associated losses in the past, present, and future. It is seldom explicitly recognized, but the truly therapeutic experience of anticipatory grief mandates a delicate balance among the mutually conflicting demands of simultaneously holding onto, letting go of, and drawing closer to the dying patient.
I guess that is what I am feeling (
anticipatory grief). I am glad it has a name and I am not the only one to start grieving before the loss occurs. The part I underlined sounds very similar to what T hinted we would do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by treehouse
My guess is that getting to the bottom of what's going on and really letting yourself feel what you're feeling will give you a sense of peace.
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That sounds good to me.
Want to give credit to the site I quoted from:
http://www.deathreference.com/Gi-Ho/...d-Therapy.html