“Life has changed without my permission.”

by Tonya Ratliff, LPC, NCC, ACS

Tonya Ratliff is the Owner and Director of Counseling Services for Trinity Family Counseling Center. In addition to her individual, couple, and family clients, Tonya is also the lead facilitator of the Walk With Me® Grief Support Group, an aftercare program sponsored by Wm. Sullivan and Son Funeral Home in Utica, MI.

My journey to the field of professional counseling–more specifically grief counseling – began with this profound realization. My own mother died when I was a young mother myself, and as a result of her death, I suddenly realized how little control I had over anything at all. A few years later, as I began my graduate studies in the counseling field, I was immediately drawn to grief work.

Those who are grieving the loss of someone they love are truly suffering through no fault of their own. The emotional, spiritual, psychological, and physical assault of loss is profoundly overwhelming and life-changing.

The ability to successfully navigate your grief work involves tolerating [rather than avoiding] the emotional pain, and recognizing that your unique and very personal grief experience will be a very lonely place for an undetermined period of time.  These insights, forced upon us in our darkest  moments, can help us reconcile the fact that life has indeed, changed forever, without our permission.

Our task, when working through our grief, becomes figuring out how to take this experience–as part of what now defines us–and move forward in our own life.