Podcast: Embracing Loss and Grief

This week our guest is Dr. Maria Agorastou,  a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist certified in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Internal Family Systems (IFS Informed). With Dr. Agorastou we talk about loss and grief, how to approach it and how to better deal with it.

According to Dr. Maria Agorastou, loss is the separation, the disconnection from someone or something that was important to us. This could be not only the loss of a person, but also of an experience, a job, a home, or a breakup. As Dr. Agorastou further explains, all people experience grief following a loss – it would be pathologically problematic not to. Yet, loss is a particularly complex process and is not simply sadness, because most people believe that loss is sadness, but it is a spectrum of emotions, feelings, thoughts, behaviors, as well as the body’s response to it. Grief can take many forms, it is a very dynamic, adaptive process, there is not an end point but there is a process of adapting to a context where a person or experience or any attachment does not exist any more.