Letting go and grieving well

We tend to think of grief and bereavement as something we experience only when someone close to us has died, but the bereavement process can happen with any deep and significant loss: the death of a person, the end of a relationship, significant loss of health, the loss of a limb, the end of a career, etc.

This article outlines what to expect in any grieving process. My aim is to show that difficult experiences are normal processes of adjustment to a new situation involving loss.

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Is counselling or psychotherapy for me?

For many people, the first question when reading this website will be, ‘Is counselling or psychotherapy for me? Will it help?’ The aim of this article is to address what therapy is like and what it can offer.

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Seeing what we expect to see: the magic lamp and the circle of trauma

Recently I’ve been doing some work on my house and much of my furniture has been moved to accommodate the changes. I walked into the darkness of one room and reached out to turn on a lamp in the place it used to be. It wasn’t there. But for a split second, as if by magic, I saw it in front of me. I then turned to reach for it in the place I knew it now was, and realised the importance of what had just happened: for those in trauma, reliving expectations is a key part of experience.

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