Grief and Loss

Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is not a disorder. It does not move in tidy stages, and it does not run on anyone’s schedule but your own. Most of what you have been told about “getting over it” is wrong.

What grief is, most of the time, is a reorganization — of your day, of your relationships, of the version of the future you had been quietly expecting. That reorganization takes time. It takes far longer than the culture around you is going to permit. And it is exhausting work that rarely looks like work from the outside.

Therapy for grief is not about accelerating any of this. It is about having a place where you do not have to perform being okay.

What we see people come in for

Some of it is the losses that sound like losses: a spouse, a parent, a child, a sibling, a pregnancy, a pet. Some of it doesn’t sound that way on paper but carries the same weight: a diagnosis that ends a career, a divorce, estrangement from an adult child, a move that separated you from the only community you’d ever had, watching someone you love live with dementia for years before they die.

Disenfranchised grief — grief that the people around you don’t treat as real — is common. So is anticipatory grief, where the person is still here but the version of them you knew is already gone. Both of those are reasons to come in, not reasons to wait.

When grief gets stuck

Most grief softens over time without any professional help. It doesn’t disappear, but it integrates. You carry it differently.

Sometimes it doesn’t. A minority of grieving people develop what’s clinically called prolonged grief disorder — grief that stays acute for more than a year, with intense longing, an inability to accept the loss, and a sense that your own life has stopped. Traumatic losses (suicide, sudden death, violence) make this more likely, and so does having no one around you who will let you talk about it.

If you are more than a year out and still feel as if no time has passed, that is a clinical picture with clinical treatments. It isn’t weakness, and it isn’t “you grieving wrong.”

How we work

Most of our grief work is therapy, not medication. The therapist’s job is not to move you along. It is to sit with you while you tell the story as many times as you need to, in whatever order it comes.

Some specific things that come up:

• Ambivalence about feeling better. Many people feel, consciously or not, that moving forward is a betrayal. We talk about that directly. It is one of the most common things keeping people stuck.
• Guilt. “I should have known,” “I wasn’t there,” “I was relieved when it ended.” None of these disqualify you from grief. All of them are worth putting into words.
• Rituals, anniversaries, and belongings. Practical questions — whether to clean out the closet, how to mark a first birthday without them — often carry more emotional weight than they look like they should.
• Parallel grief in the household. If a family is grieving together, people almost never grieve on the same schedule, and that mismatch becomes its own problem. We can work with couples and families, not just individuals.

For prolonged or complicated grief — grief that has stayed acute for more than a year and is keeping you from living your life — there are specific structured approaches that help. When trauma is part of the loss (sudden, violent, or ambiguous death), trauma-focused therapies can be woven in.

Medication isn’t typically part of grief care. Your clinician may recommend it if grief has triggered or exposed a clinical depression, if sleep has completely collapsed, or if anxiety or panic have become their own problem on top of the loss.

When to come in

You don’t need to be in crisis. People come in for grief support weeks after a loss, years after a loss, and in anticipation of a loss that hasn’t happened yet. You also don’t need to have been close to the person who died for your grief to count.

Come in sooner if:

• You are having thoughts of wanting to die or of not being able to live without them
• You are using alcohol or other substances to get through evenings or nights
• You cannot work, eat, or sleep, and it has been weeks, not days
• The loss was sudden, violent, or by suicide or overdose

For immediate crisis support, the footer of this page has 988 and Colorado Crisis Services. If you are not in crisis but you are not okay, book an appointment or call 720-443-1691. You don’t have to have the right words for it first.