Grief & Loss Counselling
Grief arrives out of order. It takes over your thoughts, your concentration and your sleep, and it can even show up as physical pain. And it goes on considerably longer than anyone around you seems to expect.
There are no stages
This is the most useful thing I can tell you, because the stages idea has caused an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering.
The five stages came from work with people facing their own terminal diagnosis. They were observations, they were never a sequence, and they were never intended as a map for bereavement. They got adopted as one anyway, so people now arrive believing they ought to be somewhere by now.
Grief moves in loops. You can be functioning well in March and flattened in June. You can feel something like acceptance one week and be furious the next, and neither one cancels out the other. Nothing has gone wrong when that happens.
When everybody else moves on
The meals stop. The messages thin out. People stop mentioning them, often because they don't want to remind you, which is its own kind of strange given you hadn't forgotten.
Meanwhile a lot of people find months three to six are the hardest, once the shock wears off and the permanence of it properly lands.
So the support falls away at almost exactly the point the need goes up. If you feel more alone in this now than you did at the start, that's perhaps the reason.
Losses that don't get counted
Grief covers a good deal more than death, and plenty of people carrying it feel they haven't earned the word.
A pet. A miscarriage, or a pregnancy nobody else knew about. A parent with dementia who is present and gone at the same time. A sibling you're estranged from, alive somewhere and unreachable. Your health, your fertility, a career, the life you had assumed you were going to get.
All of that is grief, and all of it is worth bringing in.
When the relationship was complicated
This comes up far more than people expect, and almost nobody talks about it.
If the person who died was difficult, or absent, or hurt you, the grief gets tangled. You might feel relief and then feel monstrous for feeling it. You might find yourself grieving the parent you needed, who was never the one you actually had. You might be furious with somebody you're supposed to be mourning.
There's nothing wrong with you. You're grieving something more complicated than a person, and it takes longer to sort out.
On getting over it
You might not, and it's the wrong target anyway.
What happens for most people is that the grief stays roughly the size it always was, and life grows out around it. In the first year it takes up nearly everything. Over time there's more life around it, so it occupies proportionally less, and you start getting whole days and then whole weeks where it sits in the background.
It still comes back at full size sometimes, usually when you are triggered by a date or a song, or even something like a smell. That's how it works.
How I work with grief
Mostly I listen, particularly at first. A lot of people arrive having had nowhere to put any of it, because everyone around them is grieving too, or has moved on, or gets upset when the subject comes up.
Then we work on whatever is stuck. Guilt about something you said or didn't say. The conversation you never got to have. Anger with nowhere to go. The fear about your own mortality that arrived alongside it.
Where a death was sudden or violent, where you found them, or where you were there for something you can't stop replaying, there's often trauma sitting inside the grief. The replaying is a trauma response and it answers to different treatment, so I can use EMDR therapy for that part.
Worth getting help if
Months have passed and you still can't function at work or at home
You can't say their name, or go near their things, at all
Images of how they died keep replaying
You're drinking (or using other numbing techniques) more than you want to be
You've started to question what’s the point of it all
Starting
There's no right amount of time to wait before getting help with this. Some people come a fortnight after. Some come eleven years after and apologise for leaving it so long, which they never need to do.
I've been doing this for twenty years, in person in Joondalup and by video anywhere in Australia. With a mental health treatment plan from your GP, Medicare rebates part of each session.
Call me on 0410 461 588 or contact me online to book an appointment.