When does grief need more than time?

Everyone tells you that time heals. It is what people say at funerals, and they mean it kindly. But if you are reading this months or even years after losing someone, and it still ambushes you in a supermarket aisle or at three in the morning, you may have started to wonder whether something has gone wrong with you.

It hasn't. Grief does not work to a schedule, and the fact that yours is still here does not mean you are failing at it.

What follows is not a checklist to diagnose yourself with. It is simply what I notice, as a qualified bereavement counsellor, in the people who eventually decide to come and talk.

The two things people tell themselves

Almost everyone who contacts me about grief has spent a long time talking themselves out of it first. Usually with one of two arguments.

"It has been too long to still feel like this"

There is a widespread belief that grief should be largely finished within a year. I am not sure where it came from, but it causes a great deal of unnecessary shame.

People come to me five, ten, twenty years after a death. Sometimes the loss happened in childhood and was never really spoken about. Sometimes a second, smaller loss has pulled the first one back to the surface. None of that is abnormal, and none of it means you have left it too late.

"It is not bad enough to need counselling"

This one is more common still, and it often comes from people who are quietly struggling a great deal. There seems to be an idea that you have to be falling apart before you have earned the right to ask for support.

You do not. Counselling is not an emergency service that you qualify for once things get severe enough. Plenty of people come because something simply feels heavier than it should, and that is reason enough.

Signs it might help to talk to someone

These are not symptoms, and having several of them does not mean anything is wrong with you. They are just the patterns that tend to bring people to my door.

• You are working hard to avoid reminders. Certain roads, songs, photographs or conversations are off limits, and the effort of steering around them has become its own weight.
• You feel you have to perform being fine. People have stopped asking how you are, so you have stopped saying.
• The feelings arrive without warning. You are functioning well for days, then something small takes the legs out from under you.
• You are stuck on a particular moment. The phone call, the hospital, the thing you said or did not say. It replays and will not settle.
• Your relationship with the person was complicated, and so is your grief. You may be mourning someone who also hurt you, which is far more common than people admit.
• Guilt has taken up residence. About what you did, what you missed, or about the days when you feel almost normal.
• You have no one to say their name to. Sometimes the problem is not the depth of the grief but the absence of anywhere to put it.

What grief counselling is not

This is worth being clear about, because the misunderstanding stops people coming.

Counselling is not an attempt to get you over it, to help you let go, or to return you to who you were before. That person's absence is permanent and no amount of therapy changes that. I am not going to suggest you move on.

What tends to happen instead is that the grief stops being something you brace against and becomes something you can carry. People often describe it as the loss taking up a different amount of room, rather than less room.

It is also not a medical appointment. I am not assessing you, diagnosing you or recording you as unwell. It is a confidential conversation with someone whose only job, for fifty minutes, is to pay attention to you.

When grief tends to get more complicated

Some circumstances make bereavement notably harder to carry alone, and recognising yours in this list may be useful.

• A sudden or traumatic death, where there was no chance to prepare or say goodbye.
• A death by suicide, which often brings a particular kind of isolation along with questions that have no answer.
• A difficult or unresolved relationship with the person who died, where grief and anger sit uncomfortably together.
• Several losses close together, so that there was never space to feel one before the next arrived.
• Being the strong one, holding a family together and putting your own grief away for later, only to find later has arrived and you cannot open it.
• A loss nobody quite recognises, such as a former partner, a friend, a pregnancy, or someone whose place in your life was hard to explain to others.

How to take a first step without committing to anything

If some of this has landed, you do not have to decide anything today. The step I would suggest is deliberately small.

I offer a free twenty-minute consultation, by phone or video, with no obligation whatsoever. It is not a session and it is not an assessment. You can tell me as much or as little as you want, ask whatever you need to ask, and then go away and think about it. A reasonable number of people have that conversation and decide counselling is not for them right now, which is a perfectly good outcome.

I see people in person at a quiet practice room in Solihull, and online by secure video call for anyone who would rather not travel, or who finds it easier to talk from their own front room.

If you would like to know what a session actually involves before going any further, I have written about that too: what actually happens in a bereavement counselling session.

Jas Singh is a qualified bereavement counsellor and psychotherapist, and an accredited member of the National Counselling & Psychotherapy Society. He offers counselling in Solihull and online across the West Midlands.