Grief Support
Nobody warns you that grief is this disorganized. That it comes in waves instead of stages, that it can skip a month and then flatten you on a Tuesday for no reason you can name. That you can be fine at 2pm and undone at 2:15 by something small and stupid.
Or that it's rarely just sadness. There's usually anger in there, and guilt, and sometimes relief, and then more guilt about that. None of it means you loved them less or that you're doing this wrong.
Grief doesn't run on anyone else's schedule. It especially doesn't run on the one where you're supposed to be better by now.
Grief is bigger than most people are allowed to say
Death is the version everyone recognizes. But grief shows up for a lot of losses that never get a funeral or a card:
A relationship ending, including ones that needed to end.
Estrangement, where the person is still alive and that somehow makes it heavier.
A pet, and the particular loneliness of people not understanding why it hit this hard.
Ambiguous loss, like a parent with dementia. Grieving someone who's still in the room.
Anticipatory grief, the kind that starts before the loss does, while you're still doing the caretaking.
A version of your life that isn't happening. Infertility, a diagnosis, a career, a future you'd already planned in your head.
The family you needed and didn't get. That one's real grief too, even without a death.
If your loss doesn't get acknowledged by the people around you, there's a name for it: disenfranchised grief. Grieving alone is a particular kind of hard, and it's normal to need some support.
What grief actually does
You may have heard the five stages thing. It was never meant to describe how the everyone moves through loss, and it has made a lot of people feel like they're doing this wrong.
What actually happens is messier. Grief comes in waves, out of order, sometimes months apart, often triggered by something that makes no sense. It lives in your body: exhaustion, appetite changes, heaviness in your chest for no reason, brain fog. It shows up as anger, or numbness, or relief, or guilt about the relief. It can coexist with a perfectly good day.
None of that means you're grieving wrong. There isn't a right way.
How we work with grief
We're not here to move you along. Grief isn't a problem to solve and we're not going to try to get you to a place where you're over it, because that place isn't real and you probably don't want it anyway.
What we do:
Make room for the whole thing. The love, the rage, the guilt, the things you can't say out loud to the people who knew them. There's nothing you can bring into the therapy room that's too much or too ugly.
Take the pressure off the timeline. No shoulds. Not about how long, not about how much, not about whether you're doing it the way other people did.
Work with the complicated ones. When the relationship was hard, or unfinished, or the person hurt you, grief gets tangled with everything else. That's not a failure of love. It's just harder, and it deserves more care.
Help when it's stuck. Sometimes a loss gets frozen, especially when it was traumatic or when you couldn't fall apart because someone needed you. EMDR can help your brain finish processing what it couldn't handle at the time, so remembering them doesn't put you right back in the worst moment.
Help you carry it. The goal isn't to let go or move on. It's to find a way to hold this that has room for the rest of your life too.
What starts to shift
The waves get further apart, and you have a little more warning when they're coming
You can think about them without bracing yourself for impact
The good memories become available again, not just the last ones
You can be functional and grieving at the same time without feeling like a fraud
Guilt loosens, especially the kind about laughing or having a decent day
You stop performing being okay for other people's comfort
They stay with you. That part doesn't change and shouldn't. It just stops taking everything you've got to carry.
Are we a good fit?
We offer online grief counseling to adults across North Carolina. Sessions are virtual and HIPAA compliant, which matters more than usual with grief, because you can fall apart in your own house and not have to pull yourself together for a drive home.
Come whenever. Three weeks out or fifteen years out. A lot of people arrive long after the loss, when something finally cracked it open, and that's a completely normal way to end up in grief counseling.
If you're in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
Let's start with a conversation
You've been carrying this by yourself, probably while reassuring everyone else that you're fine.
Schedule a free 15 minute consult today. We are here to listen.
Stephanie Lewis-Myers, LCSW
Grief Counseling and EMDR in NC, FL, and IN
Leah Stephens, LCSW, LCAS
Grief Counseling in NC
Angela Lewis-Myers, LCSW
Grief Counseling in NC