The many shapes of loss
The clearest grief is the death of someone we love. It is also one of the loneliest experiences to go through far from home, where nobody around you knew the person, where you may have missed the last weeks or the funeral, and where life expects you to carry on as if a phone call had not changed everything.
But grief has many other shapes. A breakup or a separation, especially when it also means losing a shared life in a city that was yours together. A pregnancy that did not come, or did not continue. A diagnosis in the family. The end of a friendship. The loss of a profession, a status, a role that used to tell you who you were. And the quieter grief of migration itself: the home that carries on without you, the ease of being understood, the people you were close to, the person you used to be before you had to translate yourself.
These losses are real, and many of them go unrecognised. Nobody sends flowers when a relationship ends or when you realise that the life you built abroad is not the one you expected.
Grief is not a problem to fix
I do not treat grief as a disorder. It is a process, and it needs what processes need: time, space, contact with what was lost, and the slow work of finding meaning and rebuilding a life around the absence. There is no correct timeline. There is no stage you are supposed to have reached by now.
What people often need is permission: to feel what they feel, including the parts that do not fit the story (relief, anger, guilt, numbness, laughter at the wrong moment); to speak about the person or the life that was lost without the listener needing them to feel better; to stop performing recovery for the people around them.
Therapy can be the one hour in the week where you do not have to be fine.
How I work with grief
We go at your pace. Some people need to tell the story many times. Some cannot tell it yet and need to approach it sideways. Some arrive years after the loss, because they were too busy surviving at the time, and only now, in a calmer life, does the grief come through.
I pay attention to the body, because grief lives there too: in exhaustion, in a heaviness in the chest, in a stomach that will not accept food, in a restlessness that will not let you sit still. We do not force any of it. We make room.
When the loss is a breakup, we often look at what the relationship meant, what it protected you from, what patterns it repeated, and what you want to carry forward. When the loss is tied to living abroad, we look at the layers: the people, the places, the language, the identity, and the strange experience of grieving something you chose.
My approach is person-centred and Gestalt-informed. I listen more than I explain. I do not rush to interpretations or to the childhood story. I will not tell you that everything happens for a reason. I will stay with you in it, and help you find what helps.
When to get in touch
There is no threshold of suffering you need to reach. People come because they cannot stop crying, and people come because they cannot start. Both are good reasons. If you are not sure whether what you are going through counts as grief, that is often a sign that it does.
