Grief Counselling in Cairns and Online
Grief doesn't follow a schedule. It doesn't wait until you feel ready, and it rarely looks the way you expect. This post covers what grief actually is, how it tends to show up in daily life, and how grief counselling can support you through it, whether you're in Cairns or anywhere in Australia.
What grief actually is
Grief is a response to loss. Most people think it only applies to death. It doesn't. Grief shows up after a relationship ends, after a health diagnosis changes everything, after a miscarriage, after losing a job or a role that shaped your sense of who you are. It also shows up after estrangement from family, after leaving a place you called home, and after losing a pet.
The word loss covers a lot of ground. So does grief. And how it affects a person varies enormously from one person to the next. There's no single correct way to grieve.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, psychological distress is one of the leading contributors to poor health outcomes in Australia, and grief and bereavement are recognised as significant drivers of that distress. That distress is real. It is not a sign of weakness, and it doesn't mean something has gone wrong with you.
What grief can look like
People picture grief as sadness. Sometimes it is. But grief also shows up as anger, guilt, relief, numbness, or a flatness where you can't really feel much at all. Some people feel it in waves. Others feel it all at once and then go quiet for a while before it comes back again.
It also has physical effects that are easy to overlook. Disrupted sleep. Changes in appetite. Difficulty concentrating. A heaviness in the body that's hard to put into words, and even harder to explain to the people around you.
One thing I notice in my work with clients is that people often feel uncertain about what they're allowed to grieve. They wonder whether what they lost is serious enough to warrant feeling this way. In my experience, that question doesn't matter. If it mattered to you, the loss is real. You don't have to justify it.
When is it worth talking to someone about grief
There's no rule about when grief should ease. But there are some signs that getting support might be worth considering.
If grief is making it hard to function over an extended period, that's worth paying attention to. If you're avoiding it by staying constantly busy, drinking more than usual, or pulling away from the people around you, that's also worth looking at. And if you're having thoughts of not wanting to be here, that's something to get support for sooner rather than later.
Grief that gets stuck, or that starts affecting your relationships, your work, or your physical health over time, doesn't have to be carried alone.
Does grief counselling actually help?
Yes, though not in the way people sometimes expect. The goal isn't to eliminate grief or to return you to who you were before the loss. It's to help you move through it rather than around it, and to find a way to hold the loss without it consuming everything. It won't make the pain disappear. But it can reduce the intensity of distress over time and help you function better day to day.
How grief counselling works
Grief counselling isn't about telling you how to feel or moving you through a fixed set of stages. The stages of grief model is widely known, but research has moved on considerably. Grief is far less linear than that model suggests. Most people shift between different states, sometimes within a single day.
What counselling offers is space. A place to say the things that feel too heavy to say to the people close to you, without having to manage their reaction at the same time as your own feelings.
It's also a place to look at what the loss means for your sense of who you are now. When something significant is lost, the story you had about your life changes too. Narrative therapy approaches are particularly useful here, because they help you look at that story and what happens to it after a loss. I draw on these alongside cognitive approaches when unhelpful patterns of thinking, like persistent guilt or self-blame, are making things harder.
What I have seen from working with people through grief
People often wait a long time before they reach out. Sometimes months, sometimes years after a loss. The most common thing I hear is that they didn't think what they were going through was serious enough, or that they felt they should be over it by now.
There's no timeline on grief. Still feeling it a year later, or several years later, doesn't mean anything has gone wrong. It usually means the loss was significant. That's all.
Grief counselling for men
Men often grieve differently, and often more quietly. There's pressure to hold it together, stay functional, and not show it. Grief in men tends to show up as irritability, withdrawal, or increased alcohol use rather than visible sadness, which means it often goes unaddressed for a long time. There's more on the specific barriers men face on the men's counselling page.
If any of that sounds familiar, it's something I work with regularly. You don't need to come in knowing how to talk about it. Most people start somewhere and we go from there.
NDIS and grief counselling
If you're an NDIS participant, grief counselling may be claimable depending on how your plan is managed and what goals it supports. I work with self-managed and plan-managed participants. If you're not sure whether your funding covers it, get in touch and I can help you work that out before you book. There's more detail on the NDIS counselling page.
In person in Cairns and online across Australia
I offer grief counselling in person in Cairns and via telehealth for people anywhere in Australia. Sessions are 50 minutes. There's no referral required, and you don't need to have your thoughts organised before you make contact.
If you're carrying something at the moment and want to talk to someone, you're welcome to reach out through the contact page on this website.
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Written by Allan Bunyan, CPCA counsellor at Strong Foundation Support, Cairns. Allan works with adults and young people aged 14 and over, in person in Cairns and via telehealth across Australia.
