Bereavement Counselling in Brentwood & Shenfield (CM15)
Face-to-face bereavement and grief counselling in Shenfield, near Brentwood
Grief can be very different from what you expected.
You may be devastated from the beginning. You may also find that you cope surprisingly well at first. There is a funeral to arrange, people to tell, paperwork to deal with, family to look after and perhaps work to return to.
Then things become quieter.
Other people get back to their lives. The calls and messages become less frequent. Something happens and you instinctively think about telling the person who died. A birthday arrives. You realise that something you always did together will now happen without them.
Sometimes it is only then that the loss begins to feel different.
I offer bereavement counselling in Shenfield, close to Brentwood, for adults looking for face-to-face grief counselling and support. I spent several years providing bereavement counselling within a hospice service, and that experience has shaped how I think about grief.
I have become wary of telling people what grief should look like.
I was coping at first. Why am I struggling now?
This is something I have heard many times.
Someone tells me they managed everything after the death. They organised the funeral, supported everybody else, went back to work and seemed to be doing remarkably well.
Then several months later they are struggling more rather than less.
That can be frightening because there is an expectation that grief should gradually get easier.
I am more interested in what has changed.
Perhaps there was simply too much to do at first. Perhaps people were around you all the time and now they are not. Perhaps you are only gradually discovering what this person’s absence means in ordinary life.
Grief can move in and out of the foreground. There may be periods when it fills almost everything and others when your attention is somewhere completely different.
I do not see that movement as evidence that you are grieving badly.
I have written more about this in “I coped at first. Why is grief hitting me now?”
When you are the person everybody relies on
Some of the people I work with are very good at coping.
They are used to sorting things out, making decisions and looking after other people. After a death those abilities can be enormously useful.
They can also make it easy for your own experience to disappear from view.
You may find yourself reassuring everybody that you are fine. You may become upset and immediately apologise. You might start telling me something painful and then add that other people have had it much worse.
Those small moments interest me.
I might say:
“You looked upset just then, and almost immediately you started telling me why you shouldn’t be. What happened?”
That is often more useful than deciding in advance what you ought to be feeling.
Grief is not always sadness
You may miss somebody terribly and also be angry with them.
You might feel relief after a long illness and then feel guilty for being relieved.
You may love somebody and still recognise that the relationship was difficult.
Sometimes a death leaves things that can now never happen. A conversation you hoped to have. An apology that never came. Something you wish you had said. A relationship with a parent that you kept hoping might eventually become different.
I think this can be particularly difficult because other people often expect grief to produce a simpler story.
You do not have to do that with me.
We can be interested in the relationship you actually had.
Things left unfinished
I sometimes hear people say:
“I wish I’d told him.”
“I never got to ask her why.”
“I was still angry when he died.”
“I thought we would have more time.”
Those things can matter.
I am cautious about the idea of “closure”. Some relationships cannot now be completed in the way we might have wanted.
Counselling can give us somewhere to explore what remains unfinished and what it means to you now.
That may involve sadness, anger, guilt or regret. It may also involve recognising that something you wanted from that person is now never going to happen.
The aim, for me, is not to tidy that up. It is to understand it more fully.
My experience of bereavement counselling
Bereavement counselling formed an important part of my original counselling training.
I spent several years working within a hospice bereavement service, meeting people whose losses were very recent as well as people who had been bereaved much longer ago.
One thing that experience taught me is how little the amount of time since somebody died tells me about what their grief should look like.
Someone can be deeply upset after several years. Someone else can laugh during a session a few weeks after a death. A person can talk calmly about something devastating.
I try not to decide too quickly what any of those things mean.
What happens in bereavement counselling?
Of course I will want to understand what happened and who you have lost.
I am also interested in what happens while we are talking.
Perhaps you become very matter-of-fact when we get close to something painful. You smile while telling me something desperately sad. You become angry and immediately tell me that you know you should not be.
You might start talking about something you needed from the person who died and then spend the next few minutes explaining their behaviour.
I may draw your attention to that.
Not because I think I know what it means, but because something changed.
We can slow those moments down and become curious about them together.
Do I have to “move on”?
I am not particularly fond of that phrase.
People who die can remain part of our lives in all sorts of ways.
You might still talk to them in your head. Think about what they would have said. Keep something that belonged to them. Hear one of their expressions coming out of your own mouth.
That does not necessarily mean you are stuck.
At the same time, your life continues. There may be new relationships, holidays, work, grandchildren, ordinary enjoyable days and long periods when the person who died is not especially present in your thoughts.
Those things can exist alongside grief.
I am more interested in how this person and this loss can have a place in the life you are living now than in whether you have managed to move on from them.
Bereavement counselling near Brentwood
I offer face-to-face bereavement counselling from a private counselling room in Shenfield, close to Brentwood.
Sessions last 50 minutes and my fee is £70.
I also offer a free 20-minute introductory telephone call. You can tell me briefly what has brought you to counselling, ask anything you would like to know and decide whether you would like to arrange a first session.
Some questions people ask me about grief
Can grief become worse months after someone dies?
It can certainly feel that way.
People sometimes call this delayed grief.
I think the experience described by that phrase is very real. I am less convinced by the idea that grief has simply been stored away and suddenly released.
I would be interested in what is happening now.
Perhaps practical demands took all your attention at first. Perhaps other people have stopped checking in. Perhaps the reality of living without this person is becoming clearer.
We can start there.
Is it normal to feel angry after someone dies?
Anger can be part of grief, but I would want to know what you are angry about.
You may be angry that they died, about how they died, about what you have been left to deal with, or about something that happened between you.
You may even be angry with the person who died.
Rather than deciding that anger is really something else underneath, I would want to understand your anger first.
What if I feel guilty?
Again, I would want to know what the guilt is about.
People can feel guilty about things they said, things they did not say, decisions made during an illness, arguments, not visiting enough, feeling relieved or simply continuing to enjoy their own life.
Sometimes guilt tells us something important. Sometimes it asks somebody to take responsibility for far more than was actually theirs.
That distinction can take time to understand.
What if my relationship with the person who died was difficult?
Then I think it is particularly important that counselling has room for the whole relationship.
You might miss somebody who also hurt you. You may grieve a parent while also grieving the relationship with them that you never had. You may feel relief that a difficult relationship has ended and guilty for feeling relieved.
You do not have to turn the person who died into somebody different in order to grieve them.
What if they died years ago?
I would be more interested in why the loss feels important now than in how many years have passed.
Perhaps you have become a parent yourself. Retired. Lost somebody else. Reached the age they were when they died. Experienced something you desperately wish you could tell them about.
An old loss can acquire new meaning.
What if I don't know what to say?
If you are considering bereavement counselling, you can arrange a free 20-minute introductory call.
You can tell me a little about what has brought you here, ask anything you want to know about counselling and get a sense of whether you would like to meet.