Taking care of your mental health is crucial, especially after losing an important person in your life. In this episode, I talk with clinical mental health counselor Jessica Zoeller about navigating grief and trauma while looking after your well-being. Jessica shares her experiences with loss and the importance of finding the right therapist for your mental health journey. We dive into the different approaches to therapy, the mind-body connection in grief, and how parents should guide children through the grieving process. Tune in to learn how to prioritize your mental well-being and find the help you deserve. I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others. Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: Psychology Today Suicide Hotlines and Prevention Resources Around the World — Watch the episode here   Listen to the podcast here   Mental Health Amidst Grief And Recovery With Jessica Zoeller Jessica, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I want to tell the widowhood community that this is a four-part conversation. I’ll leave it at that. You’re going to have to invest to check out the other three parts to see what else is going on. Let me tell you, this is my first four-part conversation and it’s going to be worth your time. It’s unique. Understanding Clinical Mental Health Counseling  It’s worth your time and all of that. I saw you on TikTok and you were sharing about the mental health professional. What space do you operate in mental health? I got my degree in clinical mental health counseling. After two different exams and a bunch of time being observed, I’m a clinical mental health counselor. I work with kids in a school-based therapy setting for one of the children’s hospitals in the nearby area. That was a lot in one sentence so I’m going to circle that back. You are a mental health counselor. For someone who has no concept, what do those terms mean and why would I want to connect with you? With clinical mental health counseling, we take a holistic approach. There’s nothing wrong with any of the different branches of mental health, but psychology is very clinical. It is all about the diagnosis while I’m going to be working with what’s going on in your life and how that is impacting you. I’ll be talking to kids about the whole family unit, generational trauma, and things like that that come up and how that’s impacting them on the daily. Versus looking at a diagnosis, what a kid’s going through, and giving them medication, it’s more about understanding them through the counseling process and talk therapy. Thank you. A popular term is talk therapy. What is talk therapy in comparison to what you do? I’m a cognitive behavioral therapist. When I’m explaining that to people, it’s the things that we think and the things that we feel impact our overall decision-making. Talk therapy is different for everyone because there are different theories of counseling. You might have somebody who goes for more like psychoanalysis, which is the old Freudian stuff. There’s DBT. There are a lot of different ways of doing counseling. CBT is evidence-based. It’s why I went with that. I also have a person-centered approach. It really is about trying to figure out the dynamics of it and how a person functions on a daily basis through their thoughts and feelings and also being able to help them alter that. I don’t know if I explained that 100%.     Different Types Of Mental Health Professionals I know the term talk therapy is very popular. You ended with that statement but I wanted to branch out on that a little bit more. The reason is there are a lot of different ways that you can be helped with your grief. Sometimes, people hear therapists and put that in a broad sense bucket where there are a lot of different avenues for people that have different fields of specialties to be able to operate, like a therapist versus a psychiatrist or a psychologist. A lot of times, people are grieving, hearing terms that they’re unfamiliar with, and not searching for what professional they need to work with. As we’re having this conversation, those different types of mental health professionals, from your perspective, what are the different titles or categories that people make themselves more familiar with as they’re trying to go, “Do I need somebody to help me? I’ve been able to do everything else by myself but now, a long time has passed and I don’t feel like I’m any better. People told me, “Time will pass. You’ll be fine. People told me, “You don’t have to talk about this all the time to everybody,” and yet I feel stuck. I hear this conversation about mental health. Where do I want to start and what type of mental health person do I even want to talk to?” That is a really good point to bring up. I’ll break down what you said before. In psychiatry, you’re probably most likely going to talk to them for fifteen minutes. You’re going to get medications prescribed to you. They’re going to do check-ins with you every month, 2 months, 3 months, or whatever they’re giving you as far as medication. Psychology is more medical-based. They’re going to understand you through your diagnosis versus you as a person, and then your diagnosis, which is where counseling comes in. We look at your whole life and how your diagnosis is being impacted and how it has impacted you. When it comes to grief, the hospice offered free counseling to me. I engaged in that as quickly as possible after losing my husband. He died in October and I started in November. I immediately started with this person