Fresh From the Therapy Room

Supporting Someone Who Is Grieving 💙

I was supporting a client who was expressing sadness and discomfort around supporting a loved one who had had a profound and unexpected loss. As we spoke, I encouraged my client to sit with the discomfort of not being able to stop someone else's pain from impacting them. Not being able to take the pain from someone they love so deeply can be such a deeply helpless place.

While you can know that your loved one is struggling, there is a powerlessness in having to watch them hurt and have to keep living their lives. They still have to go to work, they still have to get groceries… and yes, it's so unfair that they have to do those things because we really should honour people's emotional pain more in our society. There should be more room for us to grieve and take time to be with our sadness and our loss. It should be completely normalized to be away from work during these times.

And yet, many of us are pulled into going on even when we aren't sure if we are ready to.

This feels a lot of like when you smash a Terry Orange, you know it's ready to fall apart on the inside at any moment, and that can be hard to hold… but only the person who experiences the loss gets to decide when they unwrap the chocolate and let the pieces open into the palm of their hands.