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Sonya Lott on Complicated Grief
If you’ve lost a loved one and feel like you can’t get on with your life, this episode of Woman Worriers is for you. Host Elizabeth Cush and her guest, Sonya Lott, talk about “complicated” or prolonged grief, integrating your feelings of loss and finding your way to joy.
“We’re more likely to experience complicated grief if we feel like the death didn’t have to happen.”
Show Notes:
How long is too long to grieve? Are you supposed to go through stages? Can you ever feel whole after the loss of a loved one? If time has passed and your loss seems to have taken over your life, you may be experiencing complicated, or prolonged, grief. In this week’s episode of the Woman Worriers podcast, host Elizabeth Cush, LCPC, a licensed professional therapist and founder of Progression Counseling in Annapolis, Md., welcomes Sonya Lott, Ph.D., a licensed counseling psychologist based in Pennsylvania, whose credentials include advanced training in Complicated Grief Therapy. They talk about grief and getting stuck in grief, and how a debunked theory of grief may be doing more harm than good. They also discuss why grief may be more complicated for those who lose loved ones to COVID-19 and outline an evidence-based process that has been shown to help people process and integrate their grief and get back to a place where they can find joy in life.
Listen and learn:
The roots of a popular theory of grief and what it does not tell us
Why believing an invalid theories may be causing more harm than good
What grief experts are looking at instead of stages
What acute grief is
What the “dual-processing” theory of grief is and how it works
Misconceptions about grief and how they can keep us stuck
Why current approaches to grief focus on tasks
Why grief can be more than missing the lost loved one
How experts define complicated, or prolonged, grief
Why complicated relationships can lead to complicated grief
What prolonged grief disorder looks like and where you may be stuck
How society can make it hard to process your grief
Why it can be so hard to get support for grief, especially prolonged grief
How grief over the death of a loved one is different from other experiences of loss
The importance of finding a therapist who is present with you as you process your grief
How complicated grief therapy works to help you get unblocked and integrate your grief more effectively than other types of therapy
What is disenfranchised grief and why we are experiencing it during the pandemic
Why the death of loved ones during the pandemic increases the likelihood that you will experience complicated or prolonged grief
Where to find easy-to-understand information on complicated grief, grief and the pandemic, suicide and grief, finding a therapist and other topics
Learn More:
> Dr. Sonya Lott’s website
> Dr. Sonya Lott on Facebook
> The Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia University
> “The Six Needs of Mourning” by Alan Wolfelt, Ph.D.
> Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning
> Grief Is a Journey by Kenneth J. Doka, Ph.D.
> Dr. Kenneth Doka’s website
> Woman Worriers on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook & Twitter
Other episodes you might enjoy
> Episode 105: Gail Carruthers on Grief, Loss and Horses—Getting in Touch With Your Grief
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