We have a new location! 329 West Main Street, Barrington, IL
Group Therapy - Grief and Loss Group
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Anna's Embrace is a bereavement group created to assist women experiencing emotional pain during grief and loss. The group's inspiration comes from the loss of a women - a mother, daughter, sister, cousin and friend to so many - her name is Anna. Her loss, emotionally crippled members of her family and left them powerless. Watching her suffering during her final months led to years of painful reflective memories overshadowing the bright remembrances of her life. The women of her family have choose to emerge from the ruins her loss created. Not only through the death of Anna, but being alongside her during her battle to survive, created experiences for her family that once left them breathless, feeling powerless and crippled in bed to a wellspring of strength. This was no easy measure, this took years... Years to stand firm above their grief. Years to make sense of her death and not to hate the deity above (God our creator) who took her so prematurely. Years to understand why her and not me. Years to believe in humanity again. Years to care about others' grief and their aloneness. The power of these painful experiences lies in the value of the fight she fought. Anna taught us, the women in her family that are here while she is not, to embrace the lives we have, utilize and offer our strengths, love those we have, and cherish the days we have to live. This involvement, as gut-wrenching as it was, affords us an assortment of enlightenments. Even the worst experiences of our lives, can eventually provide absolution.
The goal of Anna's Embrace is to bring forth the universality of pain and to support women affected by the loss of a loved one. When we meet as a group, we will experience grief, identify it, deal with it, and place it on a shelf within each of our lives. Since no pain is any greater or more profound than any other, what a woman feels can give her the ability to help bring about the recovery of individuals whose hurts are both similar to and vastly different from her own. All members within the group will have their own voice and own unique meaning. Anna's family has chosen to channel their experiences of pain into compassionate service to aid other women to successful recovery. This offering to help other women, is the best and strongest way to declare that their pain did not defeat them, but in fact helped them heal.
Group therapy as a whole allows group participants an opportunity to heal naturally with those women who are ready to disassociate themselves from their identity as sufferers. Readiness of an individual woman is key. In fact, the simple decision to put aside the pain carried is what grants a woman the strength to redeem that pain through giving, and helping others. Group is about helping yourself and others. Individual pain, as personal and alone as this feels, gives a woman a unique insight into the minds of others who have experienced similar heartache and loss. For many, finding a group that has others with a similar type of loss can be critical to their healing process.
Participation Requirements for Grief and Loss Group Therapy
- Participants will have experienced the loss of a child, parent, spouse, partner, sibling, grandparent, or any significant love one in their lives.
- Participants are women (ages 18 years and older).
- Tuesday evenings 6:00-7:30 pm, every other week.
- Enrollment commitment: 12 weeks.
- Self-pay cost per session: $50
- Complete Group Questionnaire and Informed Consent for Group Therapy.
- Closed group, meaning we are NOT an open meeting where we do not allow random drop-in of participants.
- Emotional support animals are available during Grief and Loss Group Therapy.
- Participants have a willingness to participate in group facilitated psychotherapy and agree to the boundaries of group confidentiality.
About the Five Stages of Grief
Five Stages of Grief is a coping model first proposed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book "On Death and Dying". While not a definitive guide, the five stages can help individuals recognize and process their emotions during grief.
As our mind tries to cope with the emotional pain and psychological trauma of losing someone we love we tend to go through loss and grief in similar coping and adaptive stages.
The model involves five stages that do not necessarily occur in any particular order:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
DENIAL
Denial is the first of the five stages of grief. It helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. Denial and shock help us to make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief and allows for nature to help how much change and despair a body can handle. Healing considerations are entertained. Not to the surface yet, but you are becoming somewhat stronger.
ANGER
Anger is a necessary stage as we attempt to heal. The willingness to feel anger, even though it may seem endless allows for internal emotions of hurt to process. Anger can eventually act as bridge to open a connection between emotions, specifically hurt and pain. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is another indication of the intensity of your love for the loved one that has passed.
BARGAINING
Before a loss and after a loss, we will do and say anything to spare us the loss and pain of a loved on passing. “Please God, I will do anything... ” We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…IF ONLY, IF ONLY, IF ONLY... Guilt can surface here as well, often bargaining’s companion. "If I could have done this..." We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We can remain in the past, trying to compromise our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. Because emotions are so unique to each one of us, we do not enter and leave each individual stage in a straight forward pattern.
DEPRESSION
After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a heavier level, more profoundly than we imagined. Depressive stages feel as though the stage will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss. Being in a fog of intense sadness, loneliness and wonderings leads to compulsive negative thoughts. Withdrawing from life can even occur. The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. Grieving is a process of healing, and depression is its aftermath.
ACCEPTANCE
"I'am alright" or "I'am OK" is confused with the notion of acceptance. This is typically not the case. Most people never feel resolve about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that there is a new reality. We will never want to accept this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with the absence of our loved one. A new normal with which we must learn to experience and live with. We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. Life has been been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize our lives, re-assign tasks, ask others or take them on ourselves. Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we grow, we evolve, we help others. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time.
