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Death My best friend died

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Taking a nap. Connecting with someone. Stay in the moment. Taking a shamanic journey.
Sudden mood shifts freak me out. I feel so raw. Therapist said I have low fluxes and high fluxes. Yeah he’s right. Something triggered me I just don’t know what. I was so stable yesterday. Missing my friend I guess.

@scout86 just reaching out to me helps. It really does. It brings me back into my body.
 
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Death can and will have a profound effect on us. Time and therapy helps. Be kind to yourself right now, and take things slow. Fond memories of what you two shared will also help!!!!
 
It is like my soul leaving my body and gathering it back in n I can feel gravity pull me down and ground me. But my soul retrieval was only about three months ago and I’m learning to manage it. For my whole life it was floating outside my body in fragments and it’s taken a long time to stitch it together. This is the work I do with my Shaman. I just remembered I have a book on soul retrieval. I’ll have to dig it out and see what I can do to not let it slip out
 
Today I decided to get a new therapist. First I’m going to take a break from therapy and interview a couple of therapists. I really like my therapist but his office is so smelly. He’s convenient. I guess all I really want is to take a break from trying to express and identify my feelings about my friends death. He kind of downplayed it. Didn’t have any advice. This was a huge loss for me. I just want to be alone with my dog and my thoughts. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Everybody is tiptoeing around me. That’s not my fault, they just want to ignore me and they push me away.
 
Today I decided to get a new therapist. First I’m going to take a break from therapy and intervie...
Grief Therapy is its own specialization, just like Trauma Therapy or Early Childhood Intervention. Years of specialized training purely in the field of death & dying.

You might consider not trying to find a jack of all trades (happens, but it’s rare, IME) to do both PTSD & Grief, but look into either adding a grief therapist, or working with one for a short time specifically on this issue.

Since grief is an everyone-issue, they’re usually a lot easier to find than a trauma therapist.

While there are tons of group counseling sessions & seminars for grief, esp through local hospitals, (your chemical sensitivities probably makes that a no-go) BUT the therapist who runs the group nearly always is doing so on the side of their regular practice, and the themes of the groups/seminars vary hugely. So it’s a shortcut to look up interesting sounding groups, and then look up the therapist who runs the ones that pique your interest.
 
@KwanYingirl I think that when a person can’t overcome the grief then grief counseling or a group is the best way to go. As this is new, and raw, and upsetting, I would think that if you have a therapist that he or she would be able to help you.

EVERYONE in the world faces loss at one time or another. We all know the pain that one goes thru with the loss of a loved one. Compassion kind of comes with the territory with loss.

Therapy will help you process the loss. I hope that one day you can smile when you think of your friend and not feel despair. She certainly wouldn’t want you to feel that way, she would want you to celebrate her life!!!!
 
I think that when a person can’t overcome the grief then grief counseling or a group is the best way to go.

Grief is a lot like trauma, in some ways, in that it’s usually better to get the jump on it. If someone has progressed past normal grief into prolonged/profound grief? That’s an entirely different set of issues, and a helluva lot harder to deal with. Generally looking at years of specialized therapy, instead of a few months of bereavement. Similar to how If trauma therapists can get to people right in the wake of a disaster they can often times help prevent people from developing PTSD, if grief therapists can get to people at the beginning of a bereavement they can often times help prevent years of unnecessary hardship. Not always. Some people truly want to punish themselves for someone’s death, and destroying their own life is the only way they feel rises to the occasion, but that’s very much different than the work they normally do, helping people with raw grief in the wake of recent loss. It’s a very small subset of the population.

One of my best friends is a licensed clinical social worker specializing in death and dying... they actually try to get to people in advance as much as possible (whilst their loved one is still going through cancer treatment or in hospice or before the still birth or etc.), before the death actually happens, because starting the process early helps to prevent so many suicides, lost jobs, & ruined lives due to prolonged and profound grief.

Grief counseling isn’t about not grieving, nor putting it behind one / to bed, it’s an entirely different paradigm than trauma... it’s really... pretty. Profoundly beautiful might even be better/closer description. Not quite sure how to conceptualize it. Honoring both people. Those passed and those still here.

I’ve spent a lot of time -professionally- around trauma therapists, and a lot of time -professionally & socially- around grief therapists. Two toooooootally different groups of people. They hand off clients between each other an awful lot, because neither tends to be any good at what the other group does so well.
 
Grief counseling huh? On top of this, I’ve overused my meds and I will be out of them today and the drugstore said they can’t fill it til the 16th. I’ll go into withdrawal. Today is a blizzard here in Maine. My docs not in the office, nor my PCP. I was honest with my shrink that I basically kept myself asleep the 3 days after Karen died. I hope he’ll approve it being filled earlier. What a mess I am.
 
So @She Cat and @Friday correct me if I’m wrong. My behavior is self defeating, yes? And in this sea of sorrow, I’m shutting out my therapist, when I should be getting grief counseling either from him or get a referral for a grief specialist. Do I have that right?
So what is my motivation? What is so f*cked up in my head that I clean out all my support and then wonder why I’m suffering. WTF?
 
So what is my motivation? What is so f*cked up in my head that I clean out all my support and then wonder why I’m suffering. WTF?

Turn that one around, hon.

What’s RIGHT is the self confidence that you can handle any crisis that comes at you, all by yourself, AND that you’ve recognized that this time? You don’t have to. Lessons do the past that you need to no longer apply, and you can in fact lean on others, this time :)
 
My behavior is self defeating, yes?
Nope.

You're keeping yourself alive.
You're even so much keeping yourself alive you go through the proper channels for it (the doctors, prescription meds, considering dosages).
You're reading up on therapies to help you get through it.
You're reaching out to people in a time that's darnedest difficult to do it in.
And you're considering who to talk to in a way you don't lash out on anyone (let's shut THIS one off for now, look for something later, come back to that, this much is too much).

None of which sounding irraational & self sabotaging to me.

Besides: Still aware the support is there and can be reached. Both good. Both a 'not too far gone' land.
 
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