Often when the word "grief" is heard, people think of death, but perhaps you have suffered a great loss. Maybe you experienced a move, a friendship dissolved, or you lost a loved one. You might have experienced a job loss, relocated, or experienced the ending of a relationship. Various types of losses happen all the time, yet we don’t often take the time to honor the ways in which those losses impact our daily living.
In the wake of these losses, you may experience sadness, hopelessness, despair, anxiety, etc. Perhaps you wonder if your life will ever be the same. While life after loss will never be the same as it was before, we believe the work is to grow through integration of it through your story. While death related losses impact us all at some point, other types of loss permeate our lives in many ways. In each transition, there is loss. While there are common losses that are easy to recognize the grief, such as divorce or losing a job, there are also losses in each good experience we have. For example, as we graduate from school there is accomplishment and success...but there is often a loss of the known and existing relationships. In marriage there is a gaining of a life partner, but there is a loss of identity of being a single person and freedoms that may have been available before. There are also layers of loss in each of these. In an experience of a divorce, there is the loss of the relationship, but there may be loss of friends connected to that relationship, loss of a home, loss of financial stability, loss of identity as a married person and so on. Many of these layers of losses are not given the validation and attention that are needed, and since grief is the natural response and experience that comes after the loss, people may feel a sense that something is "wrong" with them, that there is something that needs to be fixed. In the medical model of psychology, diagnoses are applied to capture depression and anxiety to describe how people may be feeling, but looking at these reactions in this way pathologizes grief, and GRIEF IS NOT TO BE PATHOLOGIZED (the majority of the time).
At Blooming Life Institute, we want to help you explore your thoughts and emotions around your loss experiences and grief reactions to help you establish new and healthy ways of living life with the losses. We hope to see you get to a space where you can honor your losses AND find happiness, joy, and hope in your future selves. Integration to new versions of yourself is possible. We believe in the power of connection and communication and use this to remind everyone that we all deal with grief and loss and we all handle it differently. We hope that you will take the time to acknowledge how you are feeling, think about the loss(es) you have experienced, what you have learned about yourself through these experiences.