Grief & Loss
Honouring the process of grief and loss with acceptance and peace. Understanding the stages of grief while providing a supportive place to begin healing.
What is Counselling for Grief & Loss?
Grief counselling, or bereavement counselling, is designed to help people cope with the death of a loved one, or other significant losses in their lives. A grief counsellor can help you to make sense of the painful, heavy, or confusing feelings that we often experience when we grieve. Together, you and your counsellor can develop a greater understanding of the grieving process and develop effective ways of coping with loss.
Understanding Grief and When Support May Help
You may have heard of the stages of grief, which can be challenging for anyone, but grief counseling is recommended especially for individuals whose grief:
- Interferes with daily activities
- Causes feelings of guilt or depression
- Makes it harder to carry on with their own lives
- Causes problems in existing relationships
Grief is a natural reaction to any form of loss, especially someone’s death. It goes beyond mere sadness and often evokes feelings of confusion, doubt, guilt, anger, and other complex emotions.
There’s no right way to grieve, everyone reacts to loss differently and grieves in their own way. There’s also no normal duration for grief; it may take months or years to accept the loss of a loved one. Nonetheless, most people can recover from loss with sufficient time, the help of a social support network, and effective ways of coping. Grief counselling provides the necessary support for those finding it hard to recover.
How Does Grief & Loss Counselling Help?
In addition to helping to cope with loss, grief counseling can assist with:
- Understanding and navigating trauma
- Understanding and expressing difficult emotions
- Building a strong support system to help you carry on
- Coming to terms with the reality of death and grief
Living with the pain of unresolved loss can feel unbearable at times and may lead to complicated grief – a more severe, long-lasting condition.
Grief counselling is not only for individuals struggling with the loss of a loved one. Grief counselling can also address feelings of loss after the death of a beloved pet, or after the loss of one’s job, home, marriage, or physical abilities, among the many other losses that we all experience.
