Grief & Loss

Helping a School Community Heal after Suicide

As youth suicide rates continue to increase, more school counselors need to be prepared for suicide postvention.

The benefits and challenges of grieving online

As technology continues to change the way people grieve, counselors need to be prepared to help clients navigate how they express their grief online in safe and healthy ways.

Coping with the loss of a supervisee to suicide

One counselor shares his painful story of losing a supervisee to suicide and offers advice on how to cope after traumatic loss.

Why, when and how to talk with grieving clients about sex

Grief is an experience that everyone navigates at different points in their lives. For the past three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted peoples’ lives in myriad ways and left many experiencing significant grief.

Perspectives on grief and loss

The experience of grief and loss is universal; the circumstances surrounding it and the way people understand and process it are anything but.

A firsthand experience of grieving pet loss

A counselor turns to Worden’s tasks of mourning as he tries to navigate the nonlinear and sometimes unpredictable course of his own personal grief.

Untangling trauma and grief after loss

Experiencing a sudden and unexpected loss can send people into a steep decline as they wrestle, often unknowingly, with elements of both trauma and grief.

Gone but not missed: When grief is complex

Clients still need to process the death of a person with whom they had a rocky, toxic or strained relationship, even if they don’t express feelings of sadness or recognize the death as a true loss.

Lessons Learned From a Community Crisis

Counselors in the quiet university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, noticed that some of their clients were anxious about their safety. In spring 2017, demonstrations & counter protests at local Civil War monuments had become heated and confrontational.

The invisibility of infertility grief

Although infertility is fairly common, the losses associated with it are less likely to be recognized, acknowledged, validated and supported, which often leaves women and couples to navigate the experience on their own.

Relieving the heavy burden of survivor guilt

Rather than feeling lucky to be alive, those left behind after large-scale traumatic events or the unexpected death of a loved one are often burdened with questions about what they could have done differently or why they survived while others perishe

Doing the Groundwork After a Large-Scale Traumatic Event

Finding and helping people suffering from survivor guilt, PTSD and complicated grief can be challenging after large-scale catastrophic events, which are becoming more common.

The High Cost of Human-Made Disasters

The stories of the aftereffects of human-made disaster have become all too familiar: a refugee forced to make a dangerous journey to find a new home; the soldier deployed thousands of miles from home for months at a time...