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Thursday's Therapy
"If It Isn't Meant to 'Cure' Grief,
What Good is Therapy?"
via Huffington Post,
~Megan Devine,
Grief Advocate/
Counselor
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If It Isn't Meant to "Cure" Grief,
~by Megan Devine, Grief Advocate/Counselor
There's a lot of sketchy stuff going on in the world under the guise of "grief therapy." Sixty-day cures, 30-minute solutions. Diagnostic labels that show how "unwell" you are, and medications to fix that for you.
Therapeutic approaches to grief run the gamut of wise and beautiful stewardship to diagnostic medical lecturing.
I'm a therapist.
I've been a therapist for well over 10 years and was in related social and education services for the decade before that.
In my work as a clinician, I had to give people diagnoses. That is the way that therapists and other professionals get paid: We give a diagnosis that the insurance companies have decided they will reimburse for care.
Choosing a diagnosis, at its root, is a checklist and a process of elimination or inclusion. If I give you a diagnosis, it tells any other people you might be working with that you share at least some of the same challenges that other people with the same diagnosis do.
At its best, a diagnosis gives your team relevant information without you having to go through the same questions over and over again.
"At its best," however, is rarely how it's used or seen.
Even before I became widowed, I never was much for pathology: that medical-izing of normal human experience. I gave my clients the least stigmatizing diagnosis I could while still accurately conveying their struggles.
I couldn't see someone as being deeply flawed just because they were in pain. I refused to treat anyone as though what they were feeling was inherently wrong.
After becoming widowed, I found myself way too many times on the receiving end of that medical view, being told that who I was, and how I was, was wrong.
As though my intense, deep grief were pathological and corrupt: a sign of an unwell mind.
I didn't just get it from the people around me -- the friends, family members, and casual acquaintances. Some of the most corrective and judgmental people were other therapists. Some had even been my colleagues. One I had even looked to as a decent teacher in his field.
The overwhelming response from both the pros and the casual observer was that since I was in pain, I was clearly doing it wrong.
Seeing a therapist is tricky business -- so many (even some good ones) subscribe to that over-arching belief that grief needs to be corrected somehow, that it needs to be pushed through.
If you're on this grief path, no doubt you have heard a zillion and one suggestions about how you can do your grief better. You've been encouraged to get out of it fast, to go back to "normal" life.
But there is a different way to approach grief.
Many, many years ago, in what seems like an entirely different life, I was studying herbal medicine. The subject for one class was herbs for immune disorders. What the instructor taught that day has stuck with me now for over 20 years.
She said that many clinicians approach an immune disorder with herbs to stimulate and push the immune system, trying to get it to work harder and faster. That approach is misguided, she said. When you have a condition like this, your immune system is already working as hard as it possibly can.
Trying to make it work harder is only going to fail.
The herbalist taught that what was needed in this situation were herbs to come in underneath the immune system, herbs to walk up beside it and support it. The most useful medicines are the ones that don't push, but give the system roots. Nourish it. Help it continue to do what it is trying to do.
The system isn't working wrong, it's working as hard as it can.
Grief has your heart working as hard as it can.
When you are in pain, you don't need to be fixed. You don't need to be labeled as broken, your feelings shoved into codified lists. You don't need to be pushed to get better fast.
What you need are those things -- those people, those places, those words -- that come up underneath you and give you roots. You need those things that nourish you, that help you do the work your heart already knows how to do. The work it is already doing.
A good therapist is a wonderful thing: They know that there is nothing about you that's wrong. They know their role is to listen and validate, to come up alongside you and provide support.
They bolster your roots; they lend you stability.
Good therapy isn't a cure for what's wrong. And that makes all the difference in the world.
How about you? Have you found a therapist who truly listens and supports you in your grief?
Megan Devine is writer, grief advocate, and clinical counselor. She is the author of the audio program When Everything is Not Okay: Practical Tools to Help You Stay in Your Heart & Not Lose Your Mind. You can find this and other resources on her website, www.refugeingrief.com.
Thank you to Huffington Post, and to Megan Devine for use of her article.
Thank you to the artists, Moussin Irjan and David Agenjo, for the use of their amazing paintings here on my blog post.
Thank you to the artists, Moussin Irjan and David Agenjo, for the use of their amazing paintings here on my blog post.
Grief Therapy Post, from Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/megan-devine/grief-therapy_b_5077196.html
Grief Pictures:
1st: via Visual Poetry Kansas Wright on Pinterest - Saatchi Online Artist: Moussin Irjan; Oil, 2012, Painting "What warms the soul?"
2nd: via Artistic Appeals Kelli Kayy - Saatchi Online Artist: David Agenjo; Acrylic, 2012, Painting "Bejin"
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