CASE STUDY - Mark

Mark was in his early forties when he lost his mother to a very aggressive terminal illness. At first, Mark had not made the connection between his unhappiness and the death of his mother.  When he first lost his mother, Mark took the four days of bereavement leave offered to him by his workplace, and after returning to work for one day, decided to take a further week off, using his annual leave. He returned to work after this time and, over the following months, performed well as he took on large, involving cases and committed himself to new projects. At home, Mark’s partner had begun to comment on how he didn’t seem himself, how he was always tired after increasingly long work days, and that he seemed to ‘switch off’ whenever she asked him why he barely contacted his siblings or father nowadays. Almost a year after his mother’s death, and upon suggestion by his partner, Mark decided it was time to see a psychologist for help.

In his work with a psychologist, Mark described “hitting a wall”, struggling to “feel much of anything at all” in a while. He managed to trace the beginnings of this change to the weeks immediately following his mother’s death. In therapy, Mark began to make links between his experience of losing his mother, and his current unhappiness. After a short number of sessions, he ended therapy feeling confident in how he would manage his grief in ways that did not exhaust him so much or so negatively affect his relationships with his family and partner.

 

 

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