Written by Joel Bild, BACP-Accredited therapist, MBACP (Accred), offering therapy for adults in Clapham, Tonbridge and online.
This page is general information, not a diagnosis or a substitute for urgent support.
Understanding
Bereavement & Loss
Grief is the price of having loved something. When someone dies or when a marriage ends, a job disappears, health changes, a chapter of life closes, then a piece of your world goes with them, and grief is what it feels like to live in the world that's left.
It's universal, and yet when it's yours it can feel utterly isolating, as if nobody could possibly understand the particular shape of what you've lost. There is no correct way to grieve, no timetable, and no stage you're supposed to have reached by now. Whatever you're feeling or not feeling is your grief, and it deserves room.
Common grief responses
Grief rarely arrives as pure sadness. It can be numbness and disbelief; anger at the person, at circumstances, at people whose lives carried on; guilt over things said, unsaid or undone; relief, which then produces its own guilt; yearning; exhaustion; a fog that makes ordinary tasks strangely hard. It also comes in waves; reasonable days interrupted by an ambush from a song, a smell, an anniversary. All of this is normal. None of it means you're grieving wrongly.
When grief feels stuck
Most grief, given time and support, gradually changes form; it doesn't disappear, but life grows around it. Sometimes, though, grief gets stuck: months or years on, it's as raw as day one, or life has somehow stopped moving.
Avoided grief can also go underground and resurface as depression, anxiety or physical symptoms. If any of that sounds familiar, it doesn't mean you've failed at grieving. It usually means the loss needs a different kind of attention than time alone can give it.
Not just the death of loved one
We tend to reserve the word "grief" for death, but the end of a significant relationship, redundancy, retirement, children leaving home, moving from a long-held house, losing health or ability - all of these are losses, and they produce real grief. Because these griefs often go unrecognised by others, people carrying them can feel they have no right to struggle. You do.
Trauma and grief
When a loss is sudden, violent or premature, trauma and grief arrive tangled together; the shock of how it happened can block the ability to mourn that it happened. Untangling the two, gently and at your pace, is often the work that lets mourning finally begin.
How therapy can help
Grief needs witnesses. Friends and family matter enormously, but they're often grieving too, or anxious to see you "better," or simply run out of capacity before you've run out of grief. Therapy offers something different: a place where your loss can be spoken about for as long as it needs, without you managing anyone else's feelings about it.
Together we can work through the complexities of your particular grief; the unresolved conversations, the guilt, the anger, the question of who you are now, and find a way of carrying the loss that lets you live alongside it. I draw on traditional counselling, grief-specific approaches and mindfulness, shaped around you.
Bereavement counselling in Clapham, Tonbridge and online
I offer bereavement and loss counselling in person in Clapham (South London) and Tonbridge (Kent), and online via Zoom across the UK.
