27/12/2024
UNRESOLVED GRIEF AND A LOVING GOODBYE
Gender: Male
Age: 40-45
Presenting problem: Help for Unresolved Grief
Treatment modality: BWRT
Number of sessions: 1
P is in the habit of putting off the things he wants to do and comes to me for help in sorting out his life.
He hasn’t always been like this, he says, although these days he procrastinates about everything. He tells me that he’s unhappy and wants to get on with trying new things but feels stuck, so doesn’t do anything.
When he was younger, P says his mother persuaded him not to follow his dream career. He has always regretted his lack of courage in standing up to her back then and is angry that she convinced him to take a safe but boring job. Their relationship was often fraught, he adds, but because she was his only family he’d found a way to muddle through.
When his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, her rapid mental and physical decline meant that P had to find a residential home to care for her. He’d visited every week for four years, until she finally succumbed to the complications of her illness three years before.
He is visibly upset as he talks about his mother and how, eventually, she was no longer able to recognise him. He says that when she died he felt an enormous surge of sadness and regret that he hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye properly, or tell her how he really felt, neither then or when she’d first been diagnosed – which, for P, was the first time the mother he knew died.
Gently, I suggest that his state of feeling stuck in is rooted in his grief. He agrees to let me guide him through a process of creating the most loving goodbye to his mother, enabling him to privately work through all the things he wished he could have said.
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If you would like help to work through your grief please do get in touch: claire@benefittherapy.co.uk
Presenting problem: Unresolved Grief I ask him how he is and he replies that he feels like a great shift has taken place - a tangible change inside his physical body...
