What I’ve learned from years of counselling people through grief

Working alongside grief - reflections from a Grief Counsellor

When I first began working with grief, like many counsellors, I leaned heavily on the theories. Models, stages, tasks – they offered structure and a sense of direction.

And they are useful. I still return to them often. But years of sitting with bereaved clients has taught me that grief rarely behaves in the tidy ways the textbooks suggest.

Grief doesn’t arrive in neat stages.

It doesn’t move forward in a straight line.

And it doesn’t respond well to being rushed, fixed, or neatly resolved.

What I’ve learned, slowly and through experience, is that grief is deeply personal.

Two people can experience a similar type of loss and yet grieve in entirely different ways.

One of the ongoing challenges in grief work is learning how to sit with what can’t be made better. Tolerating uncertainty. Allowing silence. Staying present when there are no answers to offer.

I’ve worked with clients whose grief has shown up as anger, numbness, relief, fear, anxiety, exhaustion, or confusion. Many question whether what they are experiencing is “normal”, or whether they should be further along than they are.

Over time, my confidence in grief work has grown through experience – learning when the right words or interventions are helpful, and when simply staying present matters more.

These lessons didn’t come from one book or one model. They’ve come from years of listening to clients and witnessing how grief unfolds in real lives.

Recently, I’ve been bringing this experience together while developing a short grief course for counsellors. It draws on theory, but is rooted in lived clinical work and the realities of sitting alongside grief in the therapy room. The course is currently in its final testing phase, and I’ll be releasing it in a few days.

If there’s one thing grief work has taught me, it’s this: you don’t need to have all the answers to work with grief. What matters far more is your willingness and ability to stay present and allow grief to move at its own pace.