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Bereavement Counselling Sheffield

Loss & Bereavement Counselling

Treatment: Counselling / Hypnotherapy / Psychotherapy

This is usually associated with the death of a loved one but we can feel bereft at less serious traumas than death the end of a relationship, the loss of a job or physical health, disability, enforced relocation, amongst others such as

This can produce a period of grieving which generally follows five stages:

  1. Denial, is a refusal to accept facts, reality, etc. Some people get stuck in this stage when dealing with a change that can be ignored. Death cannot be ignored easily but an illness can or an end of a relationship, for example.
  2. Anger, can manifest in different ways. People can be angry with themselves, and others. Knowing this helps us not to take personally a grieving person’s emotion nor to judge it.
  3. Bargaining, with impending death people tend to bargain with God, but for less traumatic circumstances such as a break-up people might say "Can we still be friends?"
  4. Depression, sometimes known as the pit, it is where the reality is felt and accepted.
  5. Acceptance, indicates that some objectivity has been reached with the acceptance that life has to go on.

Some people do not experience all the stages and some people keep revisiting one of them. Personally I think we go back and forth between random stages for a while until resolution is reached. The stages are not linear and they are not equal in their experience. Grief is very individual, and each person experiences their own journey until they reach the acceptance that enables them to cope.

We tend to focus on intermittent – denial, searching, preoccupation and identification with the lost person/object, idealisation, regression, crying, bodily symptoms, depression/helplessness, guilt, anger and shame – until we integrate these characteristics and return to physical and psychological well-being.

Grief can become complicated where there is a sudden loss, violence, involves a child, where there is lack of support, and, lastly, experience of loss or separation in childhood.

Family and friends can help by

  • Spending time with the person if this is what they would like.
  • Talk and listen to the bereaved person. It may be useful to admit that you don’t know what to say if that’s how you feel. It can feel awkward and you may be afraid of saying the wrong thing.
  • Be patient they probably want to go over things again and again, this is usual.
  • Talking about the loss or the dead person can be helpful;
  • Don’t take their anger or irritability personally, it’s part of the process.
  • Offer practical help.
  • Include them in social events.
  • Support the person in building new social contact and interests.
  • Don’t expect too much of the person initially even if they seem to cope.
  • Help to discourage the person from making any major decisions soon after the death.
  • If the person seems to be ‘stuck’ or not coping encourage them to seek help.