Bereavement Counselling in Milton Keynes

Grief Does Not Come in Stages

You have probably met the five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. They come from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's On Death and Dying in 1969, and they were drawn from watching people who were dying, not people who had been bereaved. They were never well supported as a description of how grief actually moves, and the field has largely left them behind.

There is no timetable, and nothing to complete. Grief takes as long as it takes, and it needs to run its course. So do not add being behind schedule to everything else you are carrying. What helps in the meantime is smaller than people expect: keep doing the basics. Eat something. Get outside. Drink water. Sleep when you can.

I mention it because of what it does to people. They come in worried they are doing it wrong. They skipped anger. They got stuck in bargaining. They reached something like acceptance in the first month and have decided this makes them cold.

There is nothing to get wrong. It was never a schedule.

What the research describes instead is oscillation. Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut call it the dual process model: you move back and forth between facing the loss and getting on with the rest of your life, and both of those are necessary, and the swinging between them is not you losing your grip. It is how people adapt.

Anyone who has been bereaved recognises this straight away. You are fine in the supermarket and undone by a song in the car park.

What It Actually Feels Like

Some people call the second one a griefburst. You are not thinking about it, and then you are, entirely, in the middle of a Tuesday.

Others describe a weight that does not have clean edges. You cannot say where it starts.

Mind's bereavement guide describes feeling confused about who you are now, feeling that a part of you is missing, and feeling on edge, or flat, or tearful, or oddly detached. That last one catches people out. They expected to be sad and instead they feel nothing much, and they assume something is wrong with them.

It isn't. When you go through pain, your mind protects you by numbing out. It is a defence mechanism, not a flaw.

There is a physical side too, and nobody warns you about it. Sleep goes. Appetite goes strange. You lose words in the middle of sentences.

And there is something people rarely say out loud. What you are mourning is not only what you lost. It is what you expected life to be. The hardest losses are often the futures we had already imagined.

Most People Come Through This Without a Counsellor

I would rather tell you this than have you find out after paying me.

Joseph Currier, Robert Neimeyer and Jeffrey Berman pooled 61 controlled studies of bereavement interventions. Immediately afterwards there was a small effect. By follow-up there was no measurable benefit at all. The reason is not that counselling does nothing. It is that the people who did not get counselling were also getting better, because that is what usually happens. Henk Schut and Margaret Stroebe reached the same conclusion separately: support is not effective for bereaved people in general.

So most people do not need me. They need the people already around them, and time, and for someone to keep turning up after the fortnight when everybody else stops.

Now the other half of that same study, because it matters more. When the researchers looked only at people who were showing real difficulty adapting, counselling worked about as well as therapy works for anything else.

That is the whole picture. Grief is not a condition, and treating it like one helps nobody. Grief that has got stuck is a different thing, and it responds.

I want to be careful about one thing here. Almost everyone who eventually gets in touch spent a long time first telling themselves their problem was not bad enough, that other people have it worse, that they should be able to handle this. If you are already saying that to yourself, please do not take this section as agreement. I am not telling you that you are probably fine. I am telling you that the question is not how much it hurts.

So What Is the Question

Whether things have started moving.

Not whether you have stopped missing them. You will not stop missing them, and the field no longer thinks you are supposed to. Continuing to have a relationship with someone who has died is now understood as a normal part of adapting, not something to be talked out of.

What I would want to know is more like this. Months have gone by and you have not been able to go back to work, or you went back and cannot do it. You are avoiding a room in your own house. You are avoiding everyone who knew them, because they will ask. The searching has not eased off, the pulling out of the phone, the thinking you have seen them in a crowd. You are drinking to get to sleep. You cannot make ordinary decisions. Or the flatness has settled in and has not lifted at all.

That last one is worth separating out. Grief and depression overlap and they are not the same thing, and telling them apart changes what is worth doing about it.

Clinicians now have a name for the version that stays disabling. Prolonged grief disorder went into the ICD-11 and the DSM-5-TR, and the two use different minimum times, six months in one and twelve in the other. I would not treat those as a deadline, and I would not want anyone reading a number and deciding they are late. It only matters because it tells you that a small number of people do get properly stuck, that this is recognised rather than a personal failing, and that it is treatable.

If you read that list and none of it is you, you are grieving, and you are doing it correctly, and that is not a small thing to be told.

What Working with Me Is Like

I do not have a grief protocol. There is no worksheet.

Years ago the England karate squad I was in got a coach who wanted all of us to fight the same way. Same stance, same movement, same techniques. It did not work, and it could not have, because every one of us had built our game around our own strengths and weaknesses. To his credit he listened, and he changed how he ran it. I have never forgotten that, and it is how I work now. I do not try to fit each person into the same model.

In practice, most of the early work is just letting you say the parts you have been editing out for everyone else. People arrive apologising for still being upset. Or they arrive furious with the person who died, which they have not said out loud to anyone, because it sounds monstrous and is completely ordinary.

I have been in practice since 2013. I also tutor counselling and hypnotherapy students at RQF levels 3 to 6, which mostly means I have had to explain this material to people who are going to be assessed on it, and that keeps you honest.

Sessions are in person in Wolverton, or online if leaving the house is more than you can manage at the moment. Plenty of people start that way.

I will not tell you it gets better on a timetable. I do not know that, and neither does anyone else.