Traumatic Grief Counseling: When the Sadness Won’t Go Away

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Are you personally familiar with traumatic grief?

When something tragic or unexpected happens, two experiences can converge into shock and pain. It is understandably difficult to manage without help.

Sometimes trauma and grief combine for immeasurable sadness. Mental or emotional pain and loss may continue to affect your life in ways you never anticipated. Maybe you can’t help but replay painful events because memories intrude and recur. Perhaps your reactions may feel uncontrolled and unpredictable.

Traumatic grief has a way of just continuing as your mind thinks and rethinks the event. It is as though the worst moments of your life are happening again and again.  Moreover, healing and hope may feel out of reach.

Why is this happening? Why is this so hard? How can you move forward?

Trauma can be difficult. It complicates healthy grieving through loss, acceptance, and resolution. You don’t need to do this alone. Seeking traumatic grief counseling may be the first step to help you obtain the support you need to move forward.  Wouldn’t you say it’s time?

Traumatic Grief Counseling can make a difference and provide relief.

Are you unsure whether traumatic grief counseling is necessary? 

Have you been experiencing these symptoms for more than a couple of months?

  • Frequent attempts to avoid any reminder of the traumatic experience

  • Feeling that moving on would be forgetting your special person

  • Feeling emotionally numb or detached

  • Difficulty accepting the loss or a person’s death

  • A sense that life is without purpose or meaning

  • Inability to imagine returning to a rewarding life

  • Feeling as though part of you died too

  • A disrupted sense of security, trust, or control

  • Anger, irritability, hostility, or bitterness

  • Connecting with damaging behaviors linked to the deceased person

  • Impaired social, occupational, or other crucial functioning

Do you recognize these traumatic grief symptoms? Do you get the sense they are not improving? Are you feeling exhausted or hopeless because the emotional pain is too difficult to bear?

If so, please reach out to a counselor, who can help you address these difficulties. A qualified counselor will offer caring and support and employ effective strategies for first addressing the trauma. Then, together you can move through the grief process.

Traumatic grief counseling addresses trauma’s impact to your nervous system. 

It is important that you know that there are ways to calm and sooth the effects of the trauma you endured. Your therapist can help you deal with feelings of sadness, grief or guilt through a variety of therapeutic techniques.

These tools are meant to help you acknowledge and recognize negative emotions, pay attention to recurrent triggers, and prepare for difficult moments as they arise. Together, you might practice strategies for stress relief that encourage more productive processing and sharing.

In the end you will recover. You will be OK.  In fact, beyond talk therapies, another method, Rapid Response Therapy (RRT), may be a more healing solution.

How Rapid Response Therapy supports traumatic grief counseling

Current grief research reveals that people experience loss biologically, somatically (in the body), psychologically, and emotionally. Our bodies release a myriad of hormones and chemicals when normal internal grief responses are aroused. A traumatic loss can be even more intense. Your brain is the driving force behind all of it.

Thus, it makes sense that a therapy that allows your mind to “reset” and “clear” proves invaluable. RRT’s ability to foster mental clarity and release from re-experiencing traumatic events effectively eases the burden of continually living in distress. In as few as 2 to 6 sessions, RRT will employ stories, symbolic imagery, and metaphors to assist in trauma recovery and heal the emotional wounds.

Your psychological responses to trauma takes a lot of energy.  Wouldn’t it be nice to heal and use that energy towards something you love?

Traumatic grief counseling provides much-needed support

Today may be the day that you decide that a helping hand is what you need. You don’t have to do this alone. I can help.

I invite you to set up a free 30 minute consult.

PH: 303.949.3654