Complex Grief

You may be months or years out and still feel stopped in place. You go to work. You answer messages. But some part of you has not been able to set anything down.

Sometimes the loss itself was traumatic, or sudden, or happened while you were absorbing three other things at once. Sometimes the funeral came and went before you had felt anything at all, and the feeling arrived later, on a Tuesday, with nobody around to notice.

In our work we slow this down. Not to analyze your grief into submission, but to give it the room it never got.

Grief is far more complicated when the relationship was. If the person who died also hurt you, or dismissed you, or never became someone you could rely on, you are grieving two things: the person, and the version of them you kept hoping for.

People around you may not understand why you are struggling, especially if they knew what the relationship cost you. Others may expect you to speak only warmly, which leaves you holding the truth in private.

There is room here for all of it. Love and resentment can occupy the same afternoon without either one being false.

Somewhere along the way you absorbed the idea that there is a correct pace for this, and that you are behind it. That sense of being late tends to add a second layer of pain on top of the first.

I use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which means we spend less time trying to argue you out of what you feel and more time making the feeling survivable, so it takes up less of your energy to carry.

Alongside that, we look at what you want your life to hold now, and take small steps toward it while the grief is still present. Not after it lifts. While it is here.