1. I wish I’d known more about what grief counselling was. I wish I’d known when my dad died suddenly when I was 23 and my grief became stuck, that it was a tool that could help me cope, be somewhere safe to talk about my feelings and would help ease my process.
2. I wish I’d known what exactly it could help with. Aside from just supporting me with the loss of suddenly losing a parent, it also could have been somewhere to tackle old trauma, air guilt, discover a support system and come to terms with my new normal.
3. Being made to attend wasn’t helpful for me. It’s one of the main reasons I wish I’d known a bit more about what it was and how it could have helped me. I did have some therapy when my dad died that I had to attend through the educational setting I was in, and it meant I didn’t want to be there, I begrudged the time, didn’t engage and didn’t get much from the experience at all.
4. I wish I knew then that living with the pain of unresolved loss, bottling things up, would lead me to a more complicated and longer lasting grief that was difficult and painful to unpick, even with the help of a professional years down the line.
5. That said, I wish I’d known that when years later my therapist would use grief counselling tools in our sessions it could and would be very effective for me and help me and my life enormously.
About Jo Love
Jo Love is a trainee psychotherapist, mental health advocate and artist. Jo’s debut book Therapy is…Magic was out on 4th November 2021 and is an essential guide to the ups, downs and life-changing experiences of talking therapy from the rarely heard from client’s chair.
Jo regularly speaks, writes, hosts events, workshops and talks on mental health. She shares her experience of mental illness including depression, anxiety and burnout alongside evidence-based strategies that helped her recover.
