Therapy for Bereavement & Loss in Edinburgh

What loss feels like

When someone dies, or when something important is lost, the world changes. Ordinary life carries on — people go to work, buy clothes, answer emails — but you’re living in a different version of it. The gap left by the person or thing that’s gone may be invisible to most people, but to the bereaved it alters everything.

Grief can be overwhelming, or it can be confusingly absent. Some people feel numb when they feel grief. Others feel guilt, anger, or sadness. Grief may come slowly, or in waves. Sometimes grief may arrive late — months or years after the original loss.

None of this is wrong. There’s no right way to grieve. But there is value in having a place where your grief is taken seriously, where you’re not hurried, and where what you’ve lost can be spoken about honestly, without the person listening trying to fix it or explain it away.

When therapy might help

People come to therapy for bereavement at very different points. Some come within weeks of a loss. Others come years later, surprised that the grief is still there — or that it has only just arrived. There is no right time, and you don’t need to justify the timing of bereavement therapy to anyone, including yourself.

It may be worth considering therapy if:

• You feel unable to talk about your loss with the people around you — perhaps because they’re grieving too, or perhaps because they seem to have already moved on
• Your grief feels stuck — neither lifting nor progressing, but just sitting there
• You’re carrying complicated feelings about the person you’ve lost — anger, relief, guilt — and have nowhere to put them
• The loss has shaken something deeper: your sense of who you are, what your life is for, or whether anything is stable
• You’re experiencing a loss that isn’t fully recognised by others — a miscarriage, an estrangement, the slow disappearance of someone through illness, or the loss of a pet
• A recent loss has stirred up feelings from an older bereavement that was never fully processed

Grief is not a problem to be solved. It may be something to learn to live with. But this task can be very lonely. Therapy can offer company and solace to those who are grieving, and the assurance that what they’re experiencing is a natural response to loss.

How therapy helps

Therapy for bereavement isn’t about moving on. It’s about making room — for the loss, for what the person or relationship meant to you, and for the complicated feelings that often come with their departure. Relief may sit alongside sorrow, anger alongside love, and guilt alongside tenderness. These combinations are far more common than most people expect, and it can be immensely relieving to have somewhere that you can speak about them without fear of judgement.

In our work we won’t follow a model of grief stages. The idea that grief moves neatly from denial through to acceptance doesn’t match many or even most people’s experience of grief, and what’s more it can leave those who deviate from the model feeling that they’re doing things wrong, or that they are somehow wrong. Instead, in our work, we will pay attention to your particular experience — the weight of this loss, at this time, in your life. We look at what has changed, what remains, and what feels unfinished or unsaid.

I draw on psychodynamic and person-centred approaches in this work. The psychodynamic perspective helps us begin to understand why certain losses hit as hard as they do — often because they connect with earlier experiences of separation, dependency, or love. A bereavement in the present can reawaken a loss from childhood that was never properly assimilated, or bring to the surface feelings about a relationship that was more complicated than you had consciously realised. The person-centred approach means I try to receive you with warmth and without conditions, so that you can grieve in whatever way is true for you, even if that way feels messy, contradictory, or shameful.

The aim isn’t to resolve grief. It’s to find a way of living a full life alongside it — so that the loss becomes something that you feel you can carry, rather than something which is too hard to bear.

What a course of therapy might look like

As discussed above, grief doesn’t move in a straight line, and therapy for bereavement reflects this fact. Unlike work on anxiety or depression, which can follow a recognisable arc, bereavement therapy can often move in circles — returning to the same ground repeatedly, but each time seeing it slightly differently.

The early sessions may tell the story of the loss. This can be difficult, and it may take several sessions for the full picture to emerge. However for many people it is a relief simply to say what has happened to someone who is willing to hear it, all of it, and not just the version which is performed for public consumption. I won’t stop you, and I’m not going to try to change the subject.

As the weeks go on, the conversation may deepen. You may find yourself talking about the person you’ve lost in more detail — not just the fact of their death, but who they were to you, what was good and what was difficult about the relationship. The complicated parts of a relationship don’t disappear when someone dies — sometimes they get louder — and therapy lets us sit with this complexity.

Some sessions may be painful. Others may surprise you with laughter, or tenderness for the one who’s been lost. Both are part of the work. There is no pressure to reach a particular destination or to feel a particular way. The pace is yours, and we can work together for as long as this work feels useful.

What you might bring

Loss takes many forms, and not all of them are recognised by the people around you. You might come to therapy with:

• The death of a partner, parent, child, sibling, or friend
• Grief that feels stuck, delayed, or complicated
• A loss that others don’t fully recognise — a miscarriage, a pet, an estrangement
• The end of a significant relationship
• Loss of health, independence, or a way of life
• Anticipatory grief — mourning someone who is still alive but changing
• A sense of emptiness or meaninglessness following a loss

You don’t need to be in the immediate aftermath. Grief that surfaces months or years later is still grief, and it still deserves to be heard.

What to expect

We meet weekly for 50 minutes, in person in Edinburgh’s New Town or online. I work from a consulting room on Drumsheugh Gardens, a quiet and private space a few minutes’ walk from the West End. If you’d rather work online, sessions are by secure video call, available throughout Scotland and the UK.

There’s no fixed number of sessions — we work for as long as feels useful. Some people come for a few months; others stay longer, especially if the loss has opened up deeper questions about identity, meaning, or earlier experiences that were never fully addressed.

The pace is yours. In the room, you don’t have to manage your feelings for anyone else’s comfort. You don’t need to be brave, and you don’t need to hold it together.

I offer a free 20-minute online consultation if you’d like to talk before deciding. No obligation — just a chance to ask any questions, hear a little about how I work, and see how talking together feels.

Frequently asked questions

• Is it too late to have therapy for a loss that happened years ago?

  No. Grief doesn’t expire. Junot Díaz wrote that ‘the half-life of love is forever’. Many people come to therapy months or years after a loss — sometimes because the grief has resurfaced, sometimes because it was never fully processed at the time. Whatever your experience — and whenever it's brought you here — it counts.

• Can therapy help with grief that other people don’t seem to recognise or understand?

  Yes. It’s a sad truth, that some losses aren’t widely recognised — a miscarriage, the death of a pet, an estrangement from a family member, the slow disappearance of someone through dementia. People are often afraid of acknowledging and sitting with other people’s loss, and this can make us feel more alone. Yet these losses are just as real, and can be just as painful as any other. What’s more, the lack of recognition from friends, family and workplaces, can be another burden to bear. In therapy, your loss can be taken seriously, whatever form it takes.

• I feel guilty about some of my feelings towards the person I’ve lost. Is that normal?

  Yes. Very. Our feelings about the dead are rarely straightforward, just as are our feelings about the living. Anger, relief, guilt, resentment — all of these emotions can sit alongside our love and sadness. This combination can feel confusing or shameful or enraging. In therapy, there’s room for all of it. You don’t need to present a tidy or sanitised version of your grief. The complicated feelings may be the ones that most need hearing.

• How long should grief last?

  How long should our love last? Grief doesn’t follow a timetable, much as we might wish it would, and the idea that it proceeds through neat stages is a widely held simplification. Some people feel the worst of their grief in the first weeks; for others it arrives months or even years later. You may feel better for a time and then be blindsided by feelings you thought had passed. All of this is as difficult to deal with as it is normal. Our relationships continue with those who are no longer with us; and they are as variable and idiosyncratic as the relationships we have with the living. Therapy doesn’t try to speed grief up, or give it a shape. It lets your grief be whatever it is, for as long as it needs to be.

• Is grief counselling different from regular therapy?

  Not fundamentally. I don’t use a separate model or technique for bereavement. What I offer is the same psychodynamic and person-centred therapy I use with all my clients, applied to the particular experience of your loss. This means we’re not following a programme or working through stages. We’re exploring what this loss means to you — which may involve your history, your other relationships, and parts of yourself that the loss has brought to the surface.

• Can therapy help with anticipatory grief?

  Yes. Anticipatory grief — the grief you feel before a loss has happened, often when someone you love is terminally ill or declining — is a real and painful experience. It can involve mourning the person you’re losing while they’re still here, which can bring its own particular confusion and guilt. Therapy gives you somewhere to bring these feelings as they arise, rather than waiting until after the loss to seek help.

• My grief feels complicated by a difficult relationship with the person who died. Can therapy help?

  Yes. Grief is rarely simple, and it can be at its most painful when your relationship with the departed was complicated. You may feel relief alongside sadness, anger alongside love, or guilt about things left unsaid. When the person who has died was someone who hurt you, or someone with whom your relationship was unresolved at their death, grief can feel especially difficult to live with. In therapy, all of these feelings can coexist without judgement, and you don’t have to present a tidy version of your loss.

About this page

Written by Tom Wells, MBACP, COSCA. Last reviewed April 2026.

Trained at the University of Edinburgh (PGDip Counselling and Psychotherapy). Registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (profile on the BACP register) and with Counselling and Psychotherapy in Scotland (COSCA).

Scope of practice: adults aged 18 and over; individual therapy only. I do not offer couples therapy, EMDR, formal diagnosis, or medication; where any of these would serve you better, I am glad to point you towards them.