Grief Counseling in Scottsdale, AZ

In our society, we have grossly unrealistic ideals of what grief should look like. We often expect the experience of grief to be brief, simplistic and follow a step by step pattern or emotion. Additionally, our society feels very uncomfortable with grief and often withdraws from individuals going through this experience. Grief counseling helps individuals identify what healthy grief looks like and gives them tools to process through this complicated experience.

Grief counseling seeks to help individuals who have experienced loss find a healthy way to process feelings of sadness, despair, anger, hopelessness, and other complicated emotions that surround grief. It also seeks to normalize the experience as many who are experiencing healthy grief feel as though they are “doing it wrong.”

Every person can have a different experience of grief and there is no one “right way” to grieve. Circumstances surrounding grief can make the experience look different for each person. Below are a few examples:

• Anticipatory grief. Progressive diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease can lead to anticipatory grief that begins as that person slowly loses abilities and core parts of the personality are changed.
• Off time loss. Death at a young age can bring a grief that is due to an “off time loss”. While losing a loved one at an older age is also difficult, death at an age that is deemed “too young” can bring complex emotions.
• Infertility grief. Infertility grief can come from a grief of what did not occur and may include feelings of shame, regret and self-blame.

Many confuse grief and depression symptoms. And while both conditions usually include feelings of sadness, these two conditions are very different.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously stated that people experiencing grief go through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

In our experience, people do not necessarily feel these feelings in isolated stages, but instead experience all of these complex emotions at once. This is what makes grief so disorienting, confusing, and complicated. Often coming in waves, people can feel absolute hopelessness, relief that the suffering is over, anger for what has taken place, and anxiety about how to live with the future. Then in an hour or a week, the wave of emotion may pass, coming and going, coming and going.

It is worth knowing that Kübler-Ross developed the five stages by observing people facing their own deaths rather than people who had been bereaved, and that grief researchers since have found it is not experienced as an orderly sequence. People move between states, revisit ones they thought were finished, and skip others entirely. If your grief does not resemble the stages, nothing has gone wrong.

Intense sadness, changes in motivation, sleep, and appetite are just a few of the overlapping symptoms between grief and depression. For individuals experiencing these symptoms for the first time, it can be pretty disconcerting to observe these changes in mood after the loss of a loved one. Clients will ask us if they are depressed when, in fact, they are experiencing very normal symptoms of grief.

The short version: grief comes in waves and stays connected to the person you lost, while depression tends to be flatter, more constant and more global. In grief, moments of warmth and even humor usually remain accessible between the waves, and self-worth generally stays intact. In depression, the low mood is more continuous, pleasure is harder to reach in any area, and self-criticism is often severe. The two also coexist, and grief can develop into depression, which is worth attention rather than alarm. If what you are experiencing looks more like the second description, depression counseling covers that work.

Treatment for grief can be a bit different than treatment for other distress. It is important to remember that grief is a healthy reaction to the loss of someone that we love. While the sadness, tears, frustration, anger, and confusion may feel very uncomfortable and may not be emotions that one is used to, it still is very normal. In therapy, a therapist will help each individual process through the loss in a way that feels supportive, healthy, and grounded.

Grief therapy may focus on what has been lost and how the needs that a person has met can be found in another way. It may focus on processing through complicated parts of the relationship that will never have the opportunity to heal or change now that the loved one is gone. Or, it may focus on how to honor the life of the loved one and how to find new meaning in life that allows that person to live on in us or the world around us.

Where the grief has become stuck, meaning it is not shifting at all over a long period or is dominating daily functioning, more structured approaches help: cognitive behavioral work on the beliefs grief can leave behind, particularly guilt and self-blame, and EMDR where the death itself was traumatic or the memory of it intrudes. Group support suits some people and not others.

Approaches to grief therapy will be as individualized as there is no “right” way to grieve. Grief will not last forever, and it’s important to know that you do not have to grieve alone.

There is no right or wrong time to start grief counseling, and a grief counselor can help people wherever they are in the process. Our society tends to think that grief is a short-term experience, usually resolved within a few months. In reality, grief is often a process that can take years to work through. Many people find that the intensity of their emotions varies for a long time, often measured in years rather than months.

The circumstances surrounding the loss can make the experience more brief or more complex. While grief is a normal reaction to loss, grief counseling can be very helpful throughout the process. Many people choose a grief counselor shortly after the diagnosis, news or loss, while others seek support in the months after when the support and care from others may begin to decrease.

Our grief counselors do not shy away from grief or feel uncomfortable talking about this complex experience. While our society often feels a great sense of awkwardness for individuals grieving, our grief counselors feel honored to help people walk through their grief experience.

In counseling our therapists will help people normalize their experience and find adaptive tools to help them process through the complex, painful experiences of grief.

Our office is in Phoenix at 6245 N 24th Parkway, near 24th Street and Camelback beside Biltmore Fashion Park, about 20 minutes from Old Town Scottsdale on Camelback Road. We have served the Scottsdale area since 2012, and we also offer online sessions to any Arizona resident.

Yes. Online sessions are available to any Arizona resident. Grief makes ordinary logistics feel heavy, and on the weeks when leaving the house is more than you have in you, an online session is a session that still happens. You can move between online and in person as it suits you. Call (480) 999-7070 to arrange it.

Biltmore Psychology & Counseling is an out-of-network provider and does not bill insurance directly. If your plan includes out-of-network mental health benefits, we provide a receipt you can submit to your insurer for reimbursement, and many clients are reimbursed for a portion of each session.

Fees vary by clinician and by the type of session, so call (480) 999-7070 and we will give you the current rate before you book anything.