What working with grief can bring up for counsellors

Reflections on sitting with grief in the therapy room.

When counsellors talk to me about feeling unsure in grief work, it can come from a few different places.

For some people, they haven’t had much grief training yet, so they’re still building the foundations. For others, they know the theory and have read the books, but when they’re sitting with real loss in the room, it still feels overwhelming — sometimes scary — often very raw. And a lot of the time it’s both: I want to understand grief better, and I also want to feel more confident about what to say and how to be with it.

Grief work has a way of getting close. It can stir up our own losses, our fears about the people we love, and our discomfort with things that can’t be put right. Even as trained professionals, sitting with that level of pain can leave you wondering if you’re doing enough, or saying the right thing.

In my own work — both in private practice and in specialist bereavement services — I’ve seen again and again that grief doesn’t follow neat stages or timelines. It comes in waves. It can sit in the body. It shifts and changes over time. And it’s often tangled up with trauma, guilt, anger, or a deep sense of unfairness.

Working with that asks something particular of us as counsellors. It asks us to slow down. To stay when there’s nothing to fix. To tolerate not having the perfect words. And to trust that being alongside someone in their pain can be enough, even when we wish we could take it away.

That’s the reason I created the grief course I’ve developed. It’s grounded in theory, but it’s also shaped by clinical experience — by what grief really looks like in the room, and the kinds of moments counsellors often get stuck on. I wanted it to be practical and human: building understanding, offering language that helps, and supporting counsellors to feel more grounded when grief shows up in their work.

If you’re a counsellor who sometimes doubts yourself in grief work — whether you’re newer to it or more experienced — you’re not alone. In my experience, it’s often a sign that you care, and that you’re taking the work seriously.

Essential skills for Grief Work is now available for £49.