Lisa Zoll is a licensed clinical social worker and owner of Grief Relief in Harrisburg. Grief Relief specializes in grief and trauma therapy for adults and first responders within Pennsylvania. Grief is described as the loss of something significant loss and trauma is an event that causes some significant level of distress and anguish for someone.

Asia Tabb, host of The Spark asked Lisa how grief and trauma intertwine following a tragic event.

“There is a term, traumatic grief, which is basically what this event has caused for many people because there was the trauma of the event that happened and dealing with that aspect of it. And then there's the grief of the losses that are now taking place.”

Grief can form out of the loss of anything that ranges from a person, pet, place, or even a career. Zoll called it disenfranchised grief which is any death or less that may not be acknowledged by people or by society as a whole.

“Those are losses that are sort of unsupported, unacknowledged, invalidated. So, when we think about it, yeah, we usually think about grief as the death of somebody. but there's a spectrum of losses across our lifespan that we can experience, including leaving home or leaving a job that we really loved. There's so many things, leaving a career, there's so many things that include loss and that we grieve, but maybe not very openly, and we may not even realize that we're grieving it or that it's a grief process that we're engaging in.”

There are a few misconceptions when it comes to grief. One misconception is the myth of closure.

“So, we think about we've lost somebody, we've lost something, and we're looking for closure. We wanna shut that door and we don't wanna look back at it. We're moving on from it. And that really is a myth. Like there's not really an end to grief.”

Listen to the podcast to hear the entire conversation.

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