Our therapists offer grief & loss counseling in Austin, TX

I find that understanding the process of grief assists clients with accepting their emotions and working through them. My work with clients involves helping them develop a perspective of grief as a growth process, create strategies for working through emotions, identify self-soothing activities, and create a plan to move forward with the new normal. Once this important set of skills is developed, the client is empowered with skills for future losses that may occur, and increased confidence in their resilience.

The tools I use in grief and loss therapy are:

• Education about the grief process
• Exploration of the client’s emotions about the loss, impacts the loss has had on daily life, and tangential losses that stem from the primary experience of loss
• Exploration of strategies to assist with processing grief emotions
• Development of an individualized strategy for self-soothing, emotional healing, and moving forward to accept the new state of things and experience growth.

• Mindfulness meditation or mindful activity, which involves learning to notice when the mind drifts; let go of thinking; and return focus to a predetermined word, phrase, image action, or sensory experience.
• Cognitive strategies for managing automatic negative thoughts, reducing self-judgment, and increasing positive self-talk.
• Strategies for increasing self-acceptance.
• Cognitive reframing, which is used to explore alternative perspectives.
• Cognitive challenging, which helps clients question their thoughts and beliefs in order to uncover patterns of thinking that are no longer helpful.
• Cognitive distraction, which gives clients the ability to move away from intrusive and unwanted thoughts.
• Sensation labeling, which is a mindfulness technique that assists with disrupting unwanted thinking by focusing on sensory input.

I check in with clients about their progress with their goals and the improvements they are seeing in their symptoms every session. Meaningful progress is evident as the list of progress and successes gets longer and the list of challenges gets shorter.

Clients' efforts to implement the skills they are learning and the goals that they set between sessions are essential to making progress in therapy.

Clients can prepare for therapy by thinking about what they want to achieve, in addition to what it is they want to move away from.