How Family Grief Counseling Can Help You Heal Together

How Family Grief Counseling Can Help You Heal Together

Grief is difficult enough to cope with when we’re alone, but when we’re also trying to support our family, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. We might try to turn for help, but how do we know where to look? Counseling, after all, is usually seen as an individual activity.

But there are different kinds of therapy, and family grief counseling is one of them. It aims to help families through periods of grief by working and healing together. It’s effective in a few different ways.

Communicate Better

Healing requires communication, especially when trying to heal as a family. Communication within a family can break down at any time, especially when we’re all grieving. But that’s okay. That’s one thing family grief counseling can help with. It can help us relearn how to communicate as a family.

And if we used to understand each other well without talking, that’s okay too. We can learn it all for the first time. The better we communicate with each other, the better we’ll be able to support each other through our grief. And that, in turn, will help us heal.

Work as a Unit

Grief changes things. Where we once might’ve been able to work well as a unit, now we’re a little more fractured. After all, why wouldn’t grief make us, as a family, feel off-balance? It impacts every aspect of our lives, so why wouldn’t it also affect our interactions with our loved ones?

But family grief counseling can help us regain that unity we once had. It can help us come together in our grief when our first instinct might be to isolate ourselves. Facing anything is easier when we have support. And grief will be more bearable if we’re bearing it as a united front, as a family.

Resolve Conflicts

We all react differently to grief. Some of us hide in our work or can hardly get out of bed, while others feel angry. There’s nothing wrong with that. Anger is a normal part of grief. But that doesn’t make it any easier to experience.

Grief can cause some of us to act out. It can create conflict within our family. And if we don’t know how to deal with that conflict, we’ll just hurt each other instead of bringing our family closer.

That’s what grief counseling therapy can help with. It can help us approach conflicts in a different, more productive way that will truly bring us together.

Coping with Grief

The purpose of counseling is to help us cope and to help us feel better. The purpose of family grief counseling is to help us and our family deal with grief.

Grief affects us deeply. It impacts our everyday life. But just because we’re all experiencing grief doesn’t mean we all experience it the same way. And it doesn’t mean the same methods will help all of us.

But that’s what the counselor is for. They help us deal with our grief taking all our individual needs into account but never neglecting our status as a family.

Healing Together

Family grief counseling works differently in every case. After all, no family is ever the same as another. But healing together is possible, and it’s worth it. It might be difficult, especially when we want to help our loved ones but aren’t sure how. But it’s worth it, in the end.

We don’t need to have all the answers. We just need to be able to look for the right help. And if we want to be able to heal together, then family grief therapy might be our best option. Fox Child and Family Therapy is here to help. Contact us today at 913-229-5691 and let’s schedule a time to talk.