Grief Counseling

Grief counseling is a form of psychotherapy that helps people cope with the physical, emotional, social, spiritual and cognitive responses to loss, commonly a loved person's death but also any significant life-altering loss such as divorce, home foreclosure or job loss. Grief counselors hold that everyone experiences and expresses grief in personally unique ways shaped by family background, culture, life experience, personal values and belief, so a wide range of emotion and behavior, from withdrawal and anger to laughter, regret or an absence of tears, can all be appropriate expressions of grief, and that support from others generally benefits the grieving person across places and cultures. Where such support is lacking, counseling may provide an avenue for healthy resolution; grief can also be interrupted when the bereaved must simultaneously manage practical survival matters or hold a family together, in which case it may remain unresolved and resurface later as an issue requiring counseling.