What is Grief Counseling?
Grief counseling is a form of therapy which may be used for an individual or in groups, that focuses on someone’s intense feelings of loss. Grief counseling may be undertaken after a loved one dies, or also after other grief-provoking situations, such as the break up of a marriage, the loss of a job, the diagnosis of a fatal illness, or a myriad of other reasons. In all cases, grief counseling attempts to deal with a person’s intense feelings after a loss.
Grief is a universal human experience, yet it remains an extraordinarily complex and difficult-to-define topic. There is no universally accepted definition for grief, but it can be described as the mental, emotion, spiritual and physical process experienced after a loss. It is more common to describe grief in terms of the symptoms or stages. In her book, “On Death and Dying,” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross sets out the most often cited stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
