Grief & Bereavement Counselling

Grief counselling can be incredibly important in helping a person cope with the loss of a loved one. Loss is one of the most difficult experiences for human beings to endure. Most of us harbour intense feelings of fear around the possible or eventual deaths of our loved ones. Once we have lost someone, we are often met with a profound sense of pain, a sense that we cannot cope and a fear that it will never end. While this might the typical response to death, the truth is that there is no one way or right way to respond. In our grief, it’s also not uncommon to experience feelings of anger & betrayal, relief, shock, numbness, resolve or even spiritual awakening.

No matter how you experience your grief, it is typically a process of facing what that death means to you, how you reflect upon that relationship and how you move forward to accept the reality of the loss and integrate it into your life. This path can be difficult to tread but it can also be one of the most life-changing experiences to be had in life.

In bereavement counselling, we help you move through the stages of grief in order to come to terms with your loss. By approaching your pain with compassion and non-judgment, we provide a safe space for you to speak openly about your loved one as well as your feelings around your loss. While there is no specific time frame that people grieve, allowing your emotions to simply be as they are with awareness and insight helps us to heal and recover.

The Five Stages of Grief

The famous physician, Elisabeth Kübler Ross, was the first person to methodically research and describe the process of dying and grieving. Her work demonstrated that most of us move through the Five Stages of Grief after losing someone we know. This model is generally used to understand what we will go through in order to heal.

1. Denial

   When we first learn of the death of someone we know it’s common to completely disbelieve the news. We may deny it altogether, experience confusion, believe a mistake has happened, go blank or even go numb. This happens because we are in a state of shock and denial actually helps us to survive the grief event.

2. Anger

   Once we can no longer deny our loss we tend to experience anger at our new reality. We may feel persecuted and ask - why me? why has this happened? In looking for answers we can often blame others for what has happened. Anger happens because we are trying our best to cope by trying to control and make sense of the situation.

3. Bargaining

   As anger subsides we start to make deals in order to avoid grief & secure false hope. We may plead with God to bring the person back in exchange for a lifestyle change or wish that we could give our own lives in place of our loved ones. This happens because we are desperately wishing that our lives can still return to normal or that we can fix things.

4. Depression

   As we come to accept the death of our loved one it’s natural to experience depression. We may feel terribly sad, hopeless, helpless, tearful or even suicidal. We may find it difficult to get out of bed, socialise or engage in things we used to love. Experiencing this sadness and pain is a normal part of making room for our new reality.

5. Acceptance

   Gradually, we begin to acclimatise to our loved one being gone. While the loss never leaves us, we grow larger than our pain and anguish and start to develop a new life without that person. Although we will still experience periodic times of grief and sadness we also develop a sense that we are okay in our new reality. We may even have a larger understanding of life as well as the meaning and purpose of our collective existence.