In Your Own Time

Bereavement may be the most personal experience you will have in your lifetime. How you grieve is completely unique to you. 

If you are reading this section then you probably have lost someone important to you, or it is likely that you are facing a bereavement.

You might want to know how to prepare yourself for an expected loss and the events and challenges which inevitably you will face. 

Counselling supports and encourages the experience and expression of all that you are feeling. It can offer you a private space as you come to terms with the loss of that relationship, and as you witness the wider impact it can have on other relationships.

Each person's experience is highly personal and unfolds in an unique way. There is no agenda and no timetable for grieving. In your own time, you grieve.

In my practice as a counsellor I have witnessed the process of grieving a person goes through after a loved one or a significant person has died. I have also sat with individuals who were anticipating the death of a loved one as they prepare themselves for the loss and the grieving that is to come. 

Bereavement Counselling

Bereavement counselling can offer support as you try to manage and cope with the all the adjustment and change. Like the stress and challenges of the funeral arrangements and the rituals of saying goodbye, or your family communications and expectations.

Counselling can also provide a place to talk about your experiences in the aftermath of a bereavement as you move through feelings like immense sadness, solitude and loss.

Call: 086-120 6151

Dundrum & Wexford Street

Some people experience intense internal pressure to cope, disillusionment, or detachment from everyone and everything. Many feel loneliness, betrayal, abandonment and anger. Counselling can help you to untangle these feelings as you experience the life affecting blow that losing someone you love can cause. 

Bereavement Preparation

Bereavement is one of the most profoundly affecting experiences a person will endure. The death of someone you love is painful, numbing, heart-breaking, infuriating, lonely and much more.

The absence of your partner, or your mother, or your child can leave gapping holes in your heart and can undermine the meaning in everything you know.

Death affects your willingness to engage with others, your beliefs, your reason for getting up in the morning and how you sleep at night. Death affects you in many ways and how you manage the changes that grieving brings is truly a process that is unique to you. 

Bereavement Preparation at Erich Keller Counselling

- is a supportive counselling service for those who are facing loss through the death of someone important. 

Over the course of my practise people have come to counselling to talk about their concerns regarding the possible or inevitable death of a loved one.

Conditions like terminal illness, elderly and infirm parents, life threatening surgery, and pregnancy complications are some of the concerns that were presented. 

ANGER RELIEF SHOCK RELEASE DISBELIEF FATIGUE BETRAYAL HEARTBREAK NUMBNESS DISCONNECT DENIAL

- The range of feelings triggered by bereavement is limitless. Each person's experience and needs are unique.

Anticipating death

Can we really prepare for death? Whether the journey is your own and you are facing the end of your life or you are anticipating the death of someone you know or love, is it possible to be 'prepared'?

Counselling offers a support as you try to come to terms with the challenges of facing death. Many aspects of your life can be affected and these changes may have a profound affect on how you cope and mange in the world around you.

The changes may be practical and unavoidable like loss of routine, privacy, finances and lifestyle and independence. Or the changes may take a more abstract form like feeling loss of direction, lack of motivation, a sense of foreboding and fear, or anxiety and panic.

Everyone experiences the anticipation of death, the passing of that person and the subsequent bereavement differently. 

Counselling supports and encourages the experience and expression of all that you are feeling. 

Whether it is a private space for grieving, or an extra support as you manage and cope with the trauma of losing someone, or as you face your own death and try to prepare yourself. And most importantly, counselling will help you to find a way that you can feel and be present to everything that is happening to you in this time of turmoil, so that you can make the most of the time you have left with the people who are important to you, as you journey with them and as they journey with you.

Your time to grieve

Bereavement can make you feel like you are in a very isolated and dark place. Sometimes when you speak to close family, friends, relatives or partners what you need gets lost in their responses.

Everyone struggles to find the right thing to say. Sometimes in that struggle, a person who is grieving does not get the opportunity to be with their sadness. Part of that sadness may be too personal to share with others who are close to you or it may be too difficult to share with these people who are also grieving. 

Don’t Know What To Say

From the bereavement concept album Liv On, by Olivia Newton-John, Amy Sky, Beth Nielsen. Cover artwork by Rut Queralt Vinyals from their cover version of Immortality available on YouTube and written by Amy Sky also from album Liv On. Poignant and simple “You don’t know wha to say, you don’t know what to do. When life delivers this, the right words don′t exist. The fault is not with you.”

Jeux Interdits

This YouTube video features guitarist Narciso Yepes (1927-1997) playing "Jeux interdits" which was the theme music from the film - also known as Forbidden Games. The young girl pictured is actress Brigitte Fossy who played lead role at an impressive 6 years of age. 

Performance Art

I like the experience of attending live art, performance art. I have no idea what I am ‘meant’ to feel or understand about the piece / presentation / performance, which means I can relinquish my perceived and taught social contexts and pretexts of what art is meant ‘to do’. On days when I needed to feel something other than grieving performance art helped me to access some other realm within.

Francis Fay is an Irish artist active on the domestic scene since 2012. His performance and curatorial projects have been presented internationally and nationwide at galleries, theatres, libraries and public spaces.He is also Co-founder and curator of Livestock which is a platform building audiences and promoting Irish performance art. Livestock is an artist-led initiative set up to provide opportunities for performers to show new or evolving work.

Grief is the thing with Feathers by Max Porter

A mix of Prose, Poetry, Lyric with illustration.

From Eason’s website: In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him.