When you lose someone who is special to you, it’s a blow unlike any other, and it’s something that can linger on for a long time.

Grief is not characterised merely by the length of time, but how it’s made to feel longer by the heaviness of that time spent in mourning.

There is a constant loss that lingers unlike anything else, in part because it can feel as though you’re trapped within yourself, suffering something no one can understand.

However, that’s what makes it so important to visit a grief counsellor. They are specially trained to empathise with and help clients in a variety of ways, such as:

Working through the stages of grief

Many of us know the five stages of grief, but knowing is different from accepting, which is of course the final stage. Grief counsellors can help you get there.

They are specially trained to help clients work through not just each stage of grief, but the many nuances therein.

For example, ‘anger’ is the second stage, but the causes of that anger, the forms that it takes, and how you choose to express it are incredibly varied.

A grief counsellor can help identify these different forms and come up with healthier ways to help you process them.

It isn’t as though going to a grief counsellor will magically rid you of ‘anger’, ‘fear’, ‘despair’, or any number of other negative emotions. These negative feelings and emotions are natural and legitimate in the wake of great loss.

That’s why a grief counsellor will work to get to the root of these emotions and find ways for you to naturally transfer the emotional causes and power behind them into exercises that can help you move past them.

In addition, they can give you an outlet to speak about those emotions.

A grief counsellor is always ready to listen, empathise, and work with you until you reach the final stage of ‘acceptance’.

Helping you cope

Grief counsellors can do this by helping you find healthy ways to cope with your grief.

People can easily fall into habits of substance abuse or self-harm as coping mechanisms. However, these areas are unhealthy and if left untreated, can have dire consequences.

Grief counsellors can help you find positive coping mechanisms to replace the more negative ones.

Talking through the particulars

Death is not an abstract thing, nor is grief. You didn’t just lose ‘someone’, but someone personally related to you in a deep and meaningful way.

Every life, love, and loss is different, and grief counsellors will both give you space to talk about the specifics of who you’ve lost and how you’re experiencing that loss while giving you particularised methods for coping with and moving past that initial pain.

Meeting goals

One of the most common after-effects of grief is a sense of being adrift without purpose.

After all, you have lost the person who helped give your life purpose, so you ask yourself, “What’s the point?”

Good grief counsellors can help you find ways to set and meet personal goals for yourself. This can help give purpose to your life again.

Maybe you need to get back out and socialise, or maybe you need to move past particular negative manifestations of pain or self-harm. Maybe you have lost a sense of routine and need to return to it.

Whatever the case, grief counsellors can help you meet and set goals that suit your needs.

What’s more, they can be there for you if you fall short or slip. Nobody is perfect, and recovery from such a deep loss is rarely linear.

Recovery may seem wobbly at times, and a good grief counsellor can help stabilise you.

Get the help you need with a qualified and compassionate grief counselling expert today.

Dennis Relojo-Howell is the founder of Psychreg and host of The DRH Show. You can connect with him on Twitter @drelojo_howell