Grief & Loss Counseling in Orange County
The grieving process can be complex and unique for everyone, sometimes looking different from what we expect it to. It doesn’t always happen on schedule or resolve neatly with time, potentially contributing to a host of other mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and more.
A Better Life Recovery in San Juan Capistrano provides grief counseling as part of our whole-person approach to treatment. This is because grief and loss can be a major part of why someone starts using substances, why they can’t stop, or why their mental health has been impacted. Processing grief in a supportive setting, with the right therapeutic support, can be a game-changer for your recovery.
Loss takes on many forms, and we can help. Losing someone close to you, having a relationship end, losing a job, or a version of yourself you thought you’d have all deserve to be taken seriously and handled with care. Our Joint Commission-accredited facility in Southern California gives you the space and the attention to heal, integrated side by side with addiction and co-occurring mental health conditions support to get you on the road to healing.
Understanding Grief & Loss
Grief is a natural human response to many types of loss – but “natural” doesn’t mean easy. There’s no right way to grieve and no inherent timeline that applies to everyone.1 Some losses come in waves, others can become a new normal for years without ever fully surfacing.
When grief goes unattended, it usually finds other outlets. Depression, anxiety, withdrawal, and substance use are all common responses to pain that hasn’t had anywhere to go, which is why grief and addiction are so closely linked. Alcohol and drugs can sometimes feel like the best, fastest way to stop feeling so bad, but using substances can also bring new consequences.
Grief and loss therapy exists because this kind of pain responds very well to professional support. You don’t have to go it alone, and you don’t have to try to keep managing things with whatever coping strategies have also been hurting you.
Types of Loss We Help You Process
Loss can be a big word, but everyone’s experience is so unique. It can cover an astonishing range of human pain, with the resulting grief not always matching up with what others might expect. Divorce, career changes, life circumstances, and losing your sense of purpose can all be just as impactful as death.
Some forms of loss are especially complex, making you feel angry, guilty, shameful, and stigmatized alongside the grief. Other losses might feel more ambiguous and lack clarity, while some experiences can echo for years and years.
A Better Life Recovery helps people throughout California to work through many different issues with grief and loss, including:2
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- The death of a loved one or a significant person in your life
- Losing someone to addiction, which can bring about many complicated feelings
- Losing someone to suicide
- Relationship loss via divorce, separation, or estrangement from your loved ones
- The loss of your health from chronic illness, disability, or the inherent losses that accompany the aging process
- Career and identity loss
- Addiction-related issues from active substance use
- Traumatic losses that involved violence or unexpected death
- Ambiguous loss without opportunities for closure
The Connection Between Grief & Addiction
As stated previously, loss is a common trigger for substance use.3 The relationship between grief and addiction runs in both directions, and understanding this complexity is part of what makes treatment different at ABLR.
The pain that stems from grief can feel unbearable, and alcohol and drugs can sometimes feel like tools that create distance and numbness to get through the night – or the week, or the year. However, substances both delay the natural grieving process and actively interfere with your brain’s ability to function and process the loss.
Many people come to treatment carrying years of unresolved grief they’ve never even connected to their drug and alcohol use. Addressing it alongside all other dual diagnosis or co-occurring issues is central to the recovery process, along with the lifestyle and relationships built around active use.
Signs You May Need Grief Counseling
On the whole, grief becomes a clinical concern when time passes, but the pain doesn’t change, or when you’ve found ways of managing it that are causing their own issues and damage. Some of the signs that grief counseling might be helpful can include:
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- Intense, all-encompassing sadness that doesn’t get better with the passage of time, or seems to deepen as the months and years go on
- Using drugs or alcohol to cope with loss
- Doing your best at all times to avoid any reminders of the loss, such as the people/places/things/activities that tend to bring it too close to home
- Having difficulty functioning at work, at home, within your relationships, and elsewhere, that wasn’t the case before your loss
- Feeling disconnected from other people or from your own life, going through the motions without ever feeling truly present in the moment
- Unexplained physical symptoms, including disrupted sleep, changes in appetite (eating too much or too little), feeling fatigued, and other unexplained physical issues
- All-consuming thoughts of wishing to die to be back with your loved one
Our Grief Counseling Approach
No single method of treatment works for every kind of loss, or for every person experiencing it. Effective grief therapy requires flexibility and customization. It needs to meet you where you are emotionally, working at a progressive pace that doesn’t overwhelm you. And it should draw upon clinical tools that match up with what your grief looks and feels like.
Grief doesn’t exist in isolation from your other holistic needs. For this reason, at A Better Life Recovery, loss counseling is integrated into our broader treatment approach to address co-occurring addiction and mental health challenges. The following is an outline of what our approach typically involves:
Individual Grief Therapy
One-on-one sessions with a licensed therapist give you a confidential, private space to explore the full impact of your loss. This means you can process all the emotions – anger, relief, confusion, shame, numbness – that often accompany it.
There’s never any pressure to reach acceptance on a schedule, because your therapist always works at your pace. They follow what’s present and real to help you feel more comfortable and explore what healing means for you and your circumstances.
Evidence-Based Therapies
Different types of loss respond well to different treatment approaches, just like other mental health issues. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) focuses on learning to carry loss without being defined by it, while cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) examines thought patterns associated with grief.
Trauma-related modalities like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy (EMDR) work to help you integrate and reduce the impact of difficult memories. And narrative therapy explores new ways to honor the relationship and integrate the loss into your story to find a better way of carrying it forward.
Group Support
Grief is inherently isolating, so group therapy work focuses on connecting you with others who are also going through similar experiences to share and learn new ways of coping. Hearing how others have navigated their pain can create a sense of community that truly heals, building a bridge toward extended and lasting recovery.
Psychiatric Support
When grief has deepened into clinical depression or anxiety, medication can be helpful to stabilize and lessen its impact. Our board-certified psychiatrist evaluates each of our clients individually to make medication decisions that complement their ongoing work in therapy and wellness activities.
Grief in Recovery
The recovery process from drug and alcohol use often involves facing everything that substances were holding at bay, including losses that happened during or as a result of active addiction.
The substance that’s being given up serves a function in your life, regardless of how destructive it ended up being. It may provide comfort, escape, predictability, and a social world built entirely around its consumption. The friendships tied to this, the rituals, and the identity of being someone who drinks or uses drugs all need to be grieved as part of the process toward building something new.
What’s more, time lost to addiction, relationships harmed by active use, and opportunities missed can all weigh heavily on the recovery process and quickly become overwhelming. The early periods of the healing process are incredibly vulnerable, which makes it one of the most important times to have the proper support lined up.
Grief in recovery at ABLR is always treated as a legitimate, necessary part of your healing process that deserves its own unique space and attention. We’ll help you process what needs to be grieved so that the life you’re building can be placed on top of a solid foundation for the future.
Our Treatment Team
A Better Life Recovery employs clinicians who understand the ins and outs of the grieving process and its relationship to addiction and mental health. This includes licensed therapists – LCSWs, LMFTs, and LPCs – who all bring extensive experience in grief and loss therapy alongside many treatment modalities and presenting problems. We also employ severa addiction counselors who know how unresolved losses can both drive and sustain substance use.
A board-certified psychiatrist is also available for ongoing medication evaluations when grief has developed into other mental health concerns that require additional support, alongside nursing staff onsite all day and night for ongoing support. Finally, ABLR maintains a small staff-to-client ratio for personalized care so that you always feel heard and supported in the recovery process.
Insurance & Admissions
Grief counseling is a central component of the treatment process at A Better Life Recovery, built into the ways in which we seek to treat the whole person. We accept most major insurance providers and can verify your coverage benefits for free when you call.
ABLR serves adults throughout Orange County and California at large, so if you’re ready to make a change, contact our admissions team. We will walk you through everything you need to do and all your treatment options to get started.
Get Mental Health Help Today
Break free from mental health struggles today. Your journey to a healthier, more fulfilling life starts here. Contact us online or through our 24/7 admissions helpline at (866) 710-9128 to arrange a free, confidential consultation.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you’re considering grief counseling, you may have some questions about what the process looks like. To help, we’ve provided the following answers to FAQs we receive from our clients.
How Is Grief Counseling Different From Regular Therapy?
Grief counseling keeps its focus on the emotions, experiences, thoughts, and challenges that follow a major loss in life. General therapy covers a wide range of concerns and topics, while grief-based therapy draws on approaches to bereavement to help you work through what you’re feeling in a healthy way.
It’s Been Years Since My Loss. Is It Too Late for Grief Counseling?
Absolutely not, it’s never too late to heal. Unprocessed grief does not have a set expiration date and can impact your mental health in ways that aren’t always obvious at first glance. Many people in treatment for other concerns don’t even realize how grief from years ago has never been properly addressed, and your concerns are always valid and worth exploring.
I Lost Someone to an Overdose. Can You Help Me With That Specific Type of Grief?
Overdose loss support can be so important. Losing someone to addiction can bring such a unique kind of pain, along with feelings of guilt, shame, stigma, anger, and relentless “what-ifs.”
The ABLR team knows addiction inside and out, which means we can also help you process your grief without any judgment or minimizing how complicated things truly are.
My Grief Isn’t About a Death. Is That Still Valid?
Every grief is absolutely valid and can come about from any major kind of loss. For instance, divorce, estrangement, a health diagnosis, job loss, or relationships and years lost to addiction and mental health issues. Not experiencing grief from a death doesn’t make what you’re going through any less real or deserving of the proper support.
Will I Have to Talk About My Loss if I’m Not Ready?
Your therapist will always follow your lead and collaborate on your treatment plan, with nothing ever forced on you. Grief counseling is all about creating the conditions in which these conversations feel more possible when you’re ready for them. Comfort can then build up over time, and your assigned clinicians will help you get there at a pace that feels sustainable.
References
- Rosenstein, D. (2022, April 6). Grief: An experience we share that’s different for everyone | UNC Health Talk. Healthtalk.unchealthcare.org. https://healthtalk.unchealthcare.org/grief-an-experience-we-share-thats-different-for-everyone/
- Cleveland Clinic. (2023, February 22). What is Grief? Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24787-grief
- Caparrós, B., & Masferrer, L. (2021). Coping Strategies and Complicated Grief in a Substance Use Disorder Sample. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.624065
CONTACT NOW
info@abetterliferecovery.com
Address
30310 Rancho Viejo Rd.
San Juan Capistrano, CA, 92675
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