By Dr John Wilson
1. Your grief is as unique. Nobody ever, has grieved in exactly the way you are doing, not even those close by, bereaved of the same loved one. Your need is yours alone. Recognise that in yourself and respect it in family and friends around you.
2. Grief doesn’t happen in neat stages. Grief is untidy. Our moods and emotions change moment by moment, and quite outside of our control. Positivity and optimism one day can be followed by anger and despair the next. One day at a time, go with the flow. It’s okay to be not okay.
3. Bereaved people who cope the best spend some time distracting themselves by carrying on with life and other times finding a space to dwell on the loss. Keeping busy can really help, but grieving time is important too.
4. We neither ‘get over’ our losses nor ‘let go and move on’. Grief resolution is about both learning to live in a world without our loved one, and about creating a loving bond with them to take into our future.
5 It’s never too late to begin bereavement counselling. I have worked with clients who have delayed their grief for 10, 20, or even 30 years. Because of their newfound readiness to change, clients who have delayed their grief for so long, usually achieve, with the help of their counsellor, seemingly miraculous changes to their lives very quickly.
About Dr John Wilson
John began his professional career as a primary school teacher and was later a senior lecturer in education at Leeds Metropolitan University. He qualified as a therapeutic counsellor in 1997. For 17 years he worked as a bereavement counsellor at Saint Catherine’s Hospice in Scarborough. He studied for a PhD researching the process of change in bereaved clients. He was awarded his PhD from the University of Leeds in 2017. In the same year, he was accepted as a visiting fellow at York St John University, where he is Director of Bereavement Services in the university’s Counselling and Mental Health Centre. In March 2020 John set up a mutual support group on social media, for those bereaved by Covid-19.
John is author of Supporting People Through Loss and Grief, published by Jessica Kingsley in 2013. John has also been a semi-professional musician for over 50 years and still plays drums in a rock band called Coil.
His bereavement counselling and research blog can be found at www.johnwilsononline.org
