Bereavement & grief counselling

Grief is most often associated with bereavement, losing someone to death. But loss takes many other shapes: the end of a relationship, a friendship that drifted away, a job that defined you, a diagnosis that changed everything, or the loss of what life was supposed to look like. Sometimes people feel grief about things they never had: the parent who was not there, the childhood they deserved but did not get.

All of these losses can be real and significant, even when the world around you does not fully recognise them as grief.

There is a lot of cultural pressure around grief. You are expected to be sad for a certain amount of time, then to move on. You may be told to look for the silver lining, to be grateful for what you had, or that they would want you to be happy. These things may be true, but grief does not follow a timetable, and well-meaning words can sometimes make it harder to say how you actually feel.

Grief can:

• Come in waves, lifting and returning without warning
• Feel like anger or numbness rather than sadness
• Show up months or years after the loss
• Get more painful around anniversaries, birthdays, or seasons
• Be complicated, relief, guilt, love, and rage can all be present at once

None of this is wrong. It is just grief.

Counselling does not try to resolve your grief or move you through it faster. It offers something simpler: a space where you can bring whatever is true for you, without editing yourself for someone else's comfort.

People often say that one of the hardest things about grief is not wanting to burden the people around them, not wanting to keep talking about someone who has died when those close to them are trying to move forward. In sessions, you can stay with it for as long as you need.

There is no fixed agenda. Sessions follow what you bring. But some of the things that often come up include:

• The circumstances of the loss, and what still feels unresolved
• Complicated feelings, guilt, relief, anger, longing, that are hard to say out loud elsewhere
• Who the person or relationship was to you, and what has changed
• How to carry the loss forward without feeling like you are leaving them behind
• Grief that has been set aside for years and is only now surfacing
• How the loss has changed your sense of who you are

Sessions are fifty minutes, weekly or fortnightly. There is no structure to follow and nothing you need to prepare. Sometimes talking about small, ordinary memories is exactly where the important things live. Alan listens carefully and follows your lead throughout.