Grief and loss counselling

There is no schedule, and the stages people quote at you were never meant to be one. Grief does not run in a line and it does not finish. What generally happens is that it changes shape: less constant, more like weather that arrives without warning on a Tuesday for no reason you can name. Nobody here is going to tell you that you should be over it by now.

Whenever you want to, including in the first week. There is no threshold to meet. It is particularly worth it if you are carrying it alone, if the people around you have moved on and you have not, if you are stuck in the moment of the death itself, or if you have kept functioning so well that nobody has noticed anything is wrong.

No. Grief follows any significant loss: a marriage, a miscarriage or stillbirth, a diagnosis, infertility, a career, a home, a country left behind, an estrangement, or a parent who is still alive but no longer recognises you. Losses that other people do not treat as losses are often the hardest, precisely because nobody offers you anything for them.

It is extremely common and it is not a character flaw. Relief after a long illness, anger at the person for dying, guilt about what was and was not said, and nothing at all for months are all ordinary parts of this. Grief after a difficult relationship is its own particular knot, because you are mourning the person and the relationship you never got to have.

Only as much as you want to. For some people the whole value is having one place where they can talk about the person without watching everyone else's face change. Others need to talk about the practical wreckage instead, or about how to get through Christmas. You set what the hour is for.

Children grieve in bursts and often show it through behaviour rather than words, which can look like they are unaffected one hour and falling apart the next. They can be seen in their own sessions, and Sophia works specifically with children and young people. Often what parents need most is help with what to say, and with how much to say, which can be done without the child attending at all.

Yes, and it is worth knowing about. StandBy Support After Suicide is a free national service for anyone bereaved or affected by suicide, on 1300 727 247. Counselling here runs alongside it perfectly well. Grief after a suicide carries things ordinary bereavement does not, particularly the questions that have no answers, and it deserves to be treated in its own right rather than folded into general grief work.

Yes, by secure video anywhere in Australia, which also means the appointment survives the weeks when you cannot face going anywhere. In-person sessions are available in Bankstown.