Do You Need a Grief Coach?

I want to offer my services to the suffering as a grief coach.  I come to this offer based on

• my own experiences of loss in the last two years
• my intensive study of positive psychology in general and the psychology of hope in particular
• my personal wish in hindsight that I would have had such a coach
• my personal gratitude in hindsight that I did not engage in grief counseling as such
• my professional experience consisting of thirty years of grief support as a pastor, and
• my conversations with others in grief along with me.

I find that grief isn’t about stages or phases or checklists.  It is about a series of interlocking themes.  These themes can’t be parsed out into a to-do list.  They can, however, be identified with enough clarity that we can do good work together.  The goal of grief coaching begins with recovering, but it doesn’t end there.  There can be new life, new growth, and (most of all) new hope during this process.  I don’t say that the outcomes are at the end, because grieving is the project of a lifetime.

Those interlocking themes include

• Identity
• Help
• Optimism
• Paths to the Future, and
• Ends and Purposes that matter.

If you have followed my work, you can see the familiar acronym: I-HOPE.

A significant loss forces us to renegotiate aspects of our identity.  I needed to figure out how to be a man without Anne, how to be a “single” parent and pastor, how to make decisions by myself, and a dozen other things.  For a while the world asked, “Who are you?”  And for a while I answered, “Who do you want me to be?”  That wasn’t a good place to be.  I can help you get clear about your identity.

A significant loss forces us to seek help in ways we never before considered.  One of the ways to feel better, however, is to also give help.  I can help you identify the places where you need help to move forward.  I can also encourage you to re-engage life and joy by helping someone else.

Our explanatory and attributional styles make a big difference in our responses to loss.  Together we can examine your levels of optimism and pessimism.  We can design exercises and homework to move you toward the optimistic end of your emotional spectrum.  We can free up energy, happiness and focus so that you can live again.

A major loss shuts down our thinking for a while.  It is hard to see any real path to the future.  One of the large elements of hopeful living is the capacity to envision a variety of alternative pathways forward.  We will use several techniques to discover those alternative pathways and then pick the ones that feel right for you.

Grief can causes us to wonder if life is worth living at all.  We grieve within the larger frameworks of meaning and purpose.  Together we can wrestle with what this loss means in your life.  Together we can discern the larger purposes and lessons for you as you take this journey of grief.

If you are among the ten or fifteen percent of the bereaved who suffer long-term grief (regular, ongoing and debilitating effects of grief after twelve months), then please seek out a professional counselor or therapist as soon as possible.  If you are in that category, then grief coaching is not for you at this point. 

If you are suffering from real depression, then please seek out a professional counselor or therapist as soon as possible.  You can take a simple inventory to give you some insight in this matter if you wish.  That inventory is at http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Tests/SameAnswers_t.aspx?id=762.  This isn’t a substitute for a real, professional and clinical diagnosis.  But sometimes we don’t even know that we might be depressed.

If you think that grief coaching is for you, please contact me at lrhennigs1@hotmail.com.  I can work effectively by phone or videoconference if you are at a distance.  If you are in the Omaha metro and surrounding areas, we can work out face to face meetings.  This is a fee-for-services arrangement, but those fees are negotiable.  

I want you to feel better.