The first session after your therapist's spouse died suddenly

I have that on Tuesday.

Wondering if anyone here has been through the same (or any similar major life event), and how it went? I'm not so much asking about how I should behave--I plan to be my usual self, possibly with a little less snark--but how the therapist was.

(Yes, they want to be there and they should be professional and keep it separate, and all that--I know. I just want to know how they seemed and how the session went.)

I have no personal experience with this and a therapist -but I know I found work quite useful - just being able to focus on something that was not grief was a relief. I did read about a therapist whose plea was just to let him do his work. If I find the article, I will post a link - it was a guy whose wife died.

I haven't been in the situation, either. But I know that if I had an enormous loss and opted to be at work I would want to work. I would want to invest my time and energy in being productive, useful, and needed.

My t has experienced a couple significant deaths while I've been seeing her. It came up in conversation or story. In sessions she was herself. Finding out about one of the events made retrospective sense to me because she had seemed a little more reserved than usual, but still herself and our sessions were pretty usual.


I wonder if for Info it might be sort of a relief to return to her routine. Get some sort of normalcy back.

I was in this situation with ex-MC--well, I guess I didn't know for the first session after his wife died, but I know for the second one after that. For the session when I did know, he was very...open. Answering various questions I had, sharing much more than I'd have expected him to share about his wife's health history, etc.

The session right after she died--it was only a few days afterward, I later learned--he got slightly teary-eyed the receptionist retiring, when I'd never seen him do (but she'd been there a long time, and I was sad about her leaving, too, so I didn't think much of it). But otherwise, he seemed generally normal. Maybe joking less than usual. (The only reason I guessed something was up was that he abruptly canceled our next session, and when I mentioned it to ex-T, she got very teary-eyed and sad he absolutely had to take the time off, which led me to Google.) I imagine most of his clients wouldn't have guessed that anything was amiss.

It's also been a little time since her husband passed, right? Like a month maybe? So I imagine Info would generally be her usual self. I hope it goes well.

Not exactly that situation but with T her Ex husband had last year in February. Maybe because they are ex-es but I didn't notice anything amiss and she only told me about it way afterward.

I would imagine it would depend a lot on the intersection of your issues with hers. If there's no imaginable connection, I'd expect her to behave pretty normally. It might also depend on how you handle it; if you inquire how she's doing vs pretending nothing has happened, for instance.

When former T came back to work after heart surgery, he was pretty pro-active about prodding me to talk about it. We had a fairly deep conversation about death and fears about dying; he was extremely open, perhaps to encourage me to be equally open. At that point, he'd already decided to wind down his private practice in order to reduce his workload. I don't know if he handled it the same with other clients because I don't think he had a lot of long-term clients then.

I'm not sure this is the sort of session one can plan for.

This is a tangent in one way, but similar in another. My T just had a baby, and didnt give me much warning because I have been processing losing a baby in therapy. He then sent me the birth announcement meant for friends and family that disclosed a landslide if personal stuff like his wife's name and even intimate details about the way she "birthed" the baby. It has been really, really challenging to be face to face, and conflicting between wanting to be socially appropriate and congratulating and happy for him, while also resenting his stuff intruding so dramatically into each therapy session. I would have a very hard time not taking care of my therapist if her husband died.

OMG that is awful. I can understand why that would be difficult for you. Have you talked to him about thr announcement and how it is effecting you.

Why tf is he sending you a birth announcement?

And you do not have to congratulate him or be happy for him or socially appropriate. You are not the therapist, he is.