Doing things online has become a way of life for most people today who use Internet connectivity. People shop online for almost everything. When someone has a medical question, they often check their symptoms online before consulting their doctor. Whatever you need, there is some company, organization or individual that is probably offering it online.

In many ways, this has made our lives easier, but is the Internet the best solution for everything? There are certainly situations where human contact on a face-to-face basis is far more valuable. While you might be able to locate medical information online, having an actual diagnosis and treatment plan set in place while meeting with your physician in his or her office usually leads to better outcomes. There are a variety of questions that will pop to your mind that you might fail to ask if you had to type them into your computer. It’s also very powerful to have someone present to hold your hand and walk you through every detail.

This is also the case if you are taking grief recovery action to deal with an emotional loss. Grief is, by definition, an emotion. There is grief support online but there is no real comparison between having someone physically present with you versus communicating through typed messages. That person sitting next to you can see and hear the impact of your emotional pain by the expression on your face and the sound of your voice. These are things that cannot be effectively communicated in what you write at your keyboard or even through a Skype communication.

The lack of physical presence with each other can sometimes lead to miscommunications! A simple example of this, to which you might relate, is in how our daughters often communicate. They frequently reach out to each other via texting. On occasion, since they cannot physically see or hear each other, they will read things into the other’s texts that were not intended. There have been times that comments were misinterpreted and they ended up at odds with each other. This is particularly easy to happen when they are dealing with an emotionally charged situation.

When you are dealing with an emotionally painful event that has left you overwhelmed with grief, the last thing you need is misdirection brought on by a miscommunication. It can be very difficult to express everything you need to say in a typed message. People with broken hearts often have a reduced sense of concentration, which makes this even more difficult. No matter how well trained the bereavement counselor might be, in an online counseling session they can only work with what they see on the screen in front of them. Those written words cannot tell the whole story. Our non-verbal communications, which cannot be seen in what we write, often tells far more information than our words alone.

The Grief Recovery Method is based on face-to-face contact. Grief Recovery Specialists are trained to focus on both the verbal and non-verbal communications. Our goal is to walk with you, hand in hand, through the necessary actions to actually “recover” from your grieving experience. We define recovery as your ability to be able to enjoy your fond memories, without being overwhelmed by those thing you wish might have been different, better or more in that lost or damaged relationship that was causing you emotional pain.

As we stated earlier, grief is an emotion. As such, it must be dealt with emotionally, rather than intellectually. As soon as you try to communicate your feelings in typed words, especially at the outset, you have a tendency to start dealing with things on an intellectual basis. You tend to type what you think you need to say, rather than what your heart is telling you. This encourages you to focus on your head, rather than your heart. Grievers have broken hearts, not broken heads.

The Internet is a wonderful resource for many things. When it comes to working with a grief therapist, however, it's less than ideal.  Online grief support is not the best answer.  We encourage you to look for a Grief Recovery Specialist in your area to help your through this process during a grief support group or in 1-1 sessions, or to seek support through one of our two day Personal Workshops. If you truly want to help other grievers through this journey to recovery, consider becoming a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist with our educational training and certification program.

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