Grief Treatment in San Diego

While everyone’s experiences are unique to them, the symptoms of grief typically decrease over time. However, difficulties with prolonged grief can lead to intense emotional pain that impedes your ability to resume your life. Feeling overwhelmed by your grief can impair your ability to function at work and school or participate in activities and connect with your loved ones. The difficulties of grief can be particularly distressing when you have responsibilities and obligations that you still need to maintain.

At Sober Life, we know how difficult it can be to reach out for support. It can feel distressing and even infuriating when the world keeps spinning, even when you feel like you are stuck standing still. Therefore, we believe in providing flexible and customizable grief treatment plans to help you live your best life.

Addressing the Challenges of Grief

Grief comes with a range of emotions and physical symptoms that can change as you go through the grieving process. As Saba Mughal et al. note in “Grief Reaction”, the symptoms of acute grief are a part of the process as you naturally transition from acute to integrated grief eventually. Some common symptoms of acute grief include:

• Numbness
• Sadness
• Denial
• Anger and hostility
• Guilt
• Helplessness
• Difficulty concentrating
• Fatigue
• Nausea and dizziness
• Sleeping issues
• Loss of appetite
• Chest tightness

Everyone processes and copes with grief in different ways. However, as the National Institute of Health (NIH) states, prolonged or complicated grief is a condition that happens when you have difficulty adapting to the loss. Some of the challenges of complicated grief include:

• Avoiding reminders of the loss
• Feeling detached from others
• Difficulty reintegrating into life
  • Planning for the future
  • Pursuing interests and goals
  • Engaging with family and friends
• Emotional numbness
• Disbelief

It can feel discouraging to experience complicated grief, especially when it feels like everyone else is moving on. You may even feel guilty about your grief and the stress it has put on other areas of your life. However, your distress is not something you should feel guilty about. You deserve grief treatment support that addresses the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that have prevented you from adapting to this change in your life.

Finding Grief Treatment at Sober Life

Some people have this mindset that mourning is the same as recovering from an injury. There is this idea that once you go through all the steps of grieving, your grief should be gone. However, grieving and even physical injuries do not disappear with time. Your grief is the realization that this loss is forever, that your life has been irreversibly changed.

Similarly, a physical injury even after it has healed leaves an impact on your body and mind. Physical and emotional injuries change the way you move through the world and that is not something you just get over. As Mughal et al. note, grief is not a state of being, but rather a process, a journey that you should take at your own pace and in your own way. Therefore, seeking support with grief treatment can be an important tool toward finding the path to grieving and adaption that makes sense for you.

As a Joint Commission-accredited addiction and mental health rehab, Sober Life is committed to providing flexible and comprehensive grief treatment plans that match your life and needs. With our HealthyU program, you can find psychological and addiction support that meets you where you are on your journey.

Discovering Your Path to Healing

As the American Psychiatric Association (APA) notes, prolonged grief can happen to anyone, but occurs more often with sudden and unexpected loss. A sudden loss is jarring as your life drastically changes in a moment, which can impede your ability to process and adapt. Moreover, prolonged grief also often co-occurs with other mental health disorders, which can increase difficulties with coping in healthy ways. Therefore, knowing why you are feeling more intense distress after your loss can help you understand how to build healthy coping tools to process your grief.

You deserve flexible and customizable support to understand the roots of your complicated grief. At Sober Life, we are committed to providing holistic care for mental health and substance use services to support whole-person healing.

Mental Health Recovery Approach

Complicated grief often co-occurs with mental health disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. Moreover, while you may feel guilt about your grief or even experience judgment, prolonged grief is in fact a disorder itself. The impact of prolonged grief can increase feelings of longing for the person or thing you have lost or persistent preoccupation with deep emotional pain. Difficulty managing your thoughts and feelings can impair personal, family, social, academic, and work functioning. Listed below are some of the treatment options we offer to support your healing:

• Intensive outpatient program (IOP)
• Hybrid IOP
  • Virtual group IOP
• Partial hospitalization program (PHP)
• Veteran IOP
• Holistic activities
  • Yoga

Through our HealthyU program, we are dedicated to providing holistic and resilience-focused coping skills to address your distressing thoughts and feelings.

Addiction Recovery Approach

At Sober Life, we know difficulties with substance use often stem from unaddressed psychological distress and mental health disorders. Substance use disorder and mental health disorders like depression and anxiety disorders often co-occur. Moreover, complicated grief can increase your risk of developing SUD. The mental and emotional distress you experience with grief and other mental health disorders may lead you to self-medicate with substances to alleviate your distress.

Therefore, we believe it is important to offer individualized paths to healing that address your specific needs to live your best life. Some of our addiction services available to support long-term healing include:

• Outpatient Detoxification
• PHP
• IOP
• Virtual IOP
• Adolescent IOP
• Veteran IOP

Through our holistic approach to care, we are committed to providing a liferehab where whole-person care is at the core of long-term healing.

Benefits of Grief Treatment in a Healing Space

Despite your grief, you still have important work, school, or family obligations to maintain. Thus, it can feel impossible to make time for your health and well-being when the world keeps spinning. At Sober Life, we know life even in grief keeps going, so we have built a recovery space, where compassion, connection, and community are at the heart of our work. Here in Downtown San Diego, we have committed ourselves to service-oriented and resilience-focused care to support long-term healing.

Through a casual and community-driven environment, here in the Little Italy district, you can find a supportive community where lived experiences are shared as tools of understanding and guidance for each other on our respective recovery journeys.

Addressing the Importance of Grief Treatment

Despite being something everyone will experience in some way in their life, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions about grief. One of the biggest misconceptions about grief is that everyone grieves in the same way or follows the same well-known stages of grief. In reality, how you experience the pain of loss is distinctive to you and what you need to process this difficult moment in your life. However, many of these myths about grief have led people to judge the way they or other people grieve.

The sense of internal or external judgment can make reaching out for support more difficult. It can be easy to convince yourself that you are being selfish or should just get over it. However, leaving complicated grief unaddressed can be detrimental to the quality of your life. When every moment of your day is consumed by grief, it increases your risk for physical and psychological health issues:

• Heart attack
• Depression
• Insomnia
• Substance misuse
• Withdraw from life

Therefore, seeking grief treatment can be an important tool in finding life beyond loss. It may feel daunting, but you deserve the opportunity for things to get better and live a full and meaningful life.