Grief and complicated grief counselling
Some losses don’t settle neatly.
Some losses change the structure of your life.
Before and after
Some losses divide a life into before and after.
The death, separation or event may be over. Its consequences are not.
There can be a version of your life before the loss and another one after it. Routines, roles, relationships, plans, beliefs and your understanding of who you are may all have changed.
The world can remain recognizable while no longer feeling like the same place.
Some losses are that disruptive. They do not simply become one difficult experience among many. They alter the structure of the life that has to continue around them.
Grieving and living
There is no clean line between them.
You can laugh, work, make dinner, answer emails and still be carrying something enormous.
You can have a good day and feel immense guilt afterward. You can miss someone and be angry with them. You can know a death was expected and still feel blindsided.
You can feel relief after a long illness or painful relationship and then feel ashamed of the relief.
What you may be grieving
Not every grief is attached to a funeral.
- The death of a partner, family member, friend or child
- A sudden, violent or traumatic death
- Suicide loss
- Pregnancy loss, infertility or an expected future
- The end of a relationship or family structure
- Estrangement from someone who is still alive
- A loved one changed by illness, injury, dementia or addiction
- The loss of health, ability, fertility, work or professional identity
- A home, community, culture or way of life
- A future you planned for and will not have
- Multiple losses with no time to absorb any one of them
- A loss that other people do not recognize or understand
Not every significant loss is publicly acknowledged. It does not need other people’s recognition to matter.
How grief changes
You may meet the same loss more than once.
Grief does not only belong to the period immediately after a loss. It changes shape as your life changes.
You may understand one part of the loss when it happens and another part much later. A new role, relationship, age or turning point can make the absence visible in a different way.
The loss has not happened again, but you are encountering it from somewhere you could not have stood before.
Complicated or prolonged grief
Time does not process grief on your behalf.
Grief returning or changing is not, by itself, evidence that something is wrong.
Sometimes, though, grief remains so intensely present that it begins to close down large parts of life.
You may feel caught in disbelief, longing, guilt, anger or relentless review of what happened. You may avoid reminders—or build your entire day around staying close to them.
Life may feel empty or unreal. You may understand that the loss occurred and still be unable to take in what it means—or know how to live inside what has changed.
Guilt and hindsight
Guilt rarely listens to reassurance.
After a loss, the mind can become a feral detective.
You may return repeatedly to the decision, conversation, warning sign, medical appointment or final interaction.
You may know what you could not have known then and still judge yourself as though you should have known it.
Other people may tell you there was nothing you could have done. They may be right. That does not mean the reassurance reaches the part of you still prosecuting the case.
Mixed relationships and mixed feelings
Death does not resolve ambivalence.
Not every relationship was simple before it was lost.
You may be grieving someone who also harmed, disappointed or failed you. The relationship may have contained love, fear, obligation, resentment, dependence and hope—all at once.
Estrangement does not erase attachment. Relief does not cancel grief.
There is room to say what was good, what was painful, what you miss and what you do not miss.
You do not have to turn the person or relationship into something simpler because it has ended.
When the rituals end
Grief does not end when the gathering does.
Funerals, wakes, memorials and other cultural or family practices can give grief somewhere to go. People gather. Stories are told. Food arrives. The loss is witnessed.
Then the gathering ends.
There can be an unspoken sense that the formal ending should also mark the end of the most visible grief. Other people return to work, stop checking in or become less able to sit with what has not changed for you.
But grief is often much longer than the period in which it is publicly held. It may need to be spoken about, returned to and witnessed more than once. It was never meant to be carried entirely in private.
Counselling can be somewhere you do not have to make your grief easier for anyone else to witness.
The work
The work is not to move on.
I am not going to ask you to detach from someone you love, locate a silver lining or convert the loss into personal growth.
We may work on surviving the periods when grief is most acute, understanding guilt or anger, and approaching what has become difficult to face.
We may look for ways to remain connected to what mattered while making room for a life that is not governed entirely by the loss.
The work may also involve identity, relationships, practical decisions and how to continue living without treating continued life as a betrayal.
The goal is not to make the loss less significant. It is to help grief become more possible to carry.
Traumatic loss
Grief and trauma can become tightly connected.
When a loss was sudden, violent, preventable or witnessed, you may be grieving the person while also reliving the circumstances of the death.
Images, unanswered questions, legal processes, media attention, investigations or other people’s decisions may keep the loss feeling actively present.
We may need to address the traumatic impact before you have much room to grieve the relationship itself.
We can work with both without assuming they are the same thing.
A place to begin
Come talk.
A free 20-minute fit check gives us a chance to talk about what is bringing you in, what you are looking for and whether I am the right counsellor for you. You do not have to explain the entire loss—or know exactly what you need—during that call.