Unspoken grief
Counselling for unspoken grief
For the losses with no funeral, no card and no name — a home, a country, a career, a version of yourself.
Some grief arrives with rituals attached. People know what to say. There is a day, a service, a card. And then there is the other kind: the loss nobody around you registered as a loss, so there was never a moment where you were allowed to stop.
The home you left. The career you trained years for and walked away from. The language your children won’t speak properly. The version of yourself that existed before the migration, the diagnosis, the divorce, the baby. The friendship that didn’t end so much as thin out.
Grief doesn’t require permission, and you don’t have to earn it by having had it worse than someone else. You only have to have lost something. When grief has nowhere to go, it tends to go somewhere else — into the body, into irritability, into a coping pattern that takes the edge off.
Common questions
Is it really grief if nobody died?
Yes. Grief is the response to loss, not specifically to death. Losing a country, a role, a capability or a future you’d assumed produces the same processes — the disbelief, the searching, the anger, the flatness — without any of the social scaffolding a bereavement gets.
I feel like I don’t have the right to be sad about this.
That sentence is one of the most common things I hear. Grief isn’t a competition with a qualifying threshold. If something mattered and it’s gone, that’s enough.
What is migration grief?
The layered loss that comes with moving countries — language, status, proximity to parents, a professional identity that didn’t transfer, the smell of a particular street. It usually arrives long after arrival, often once things are objectively going well, which makes it confusing. See also cultural identity and belonging.
It’s been years. Is it too late to talk about it?
No. Grief that was never given room often waits. People frequently come to this work decades later, and it still moves.
What does the work actually look like?
Slower than you might expect. We name what was lost, in detail and without hurrying, and we look at what has had to be carried in silence. Where a memory is holding a charge, EMDR-informed work may be part of it.
Continue reading
Writing on this
The grief nobody names →
On losses that never got a card, and what happens when they have nowhere to go.
Forever is a long time to be small →
What if the roar was already inside you?
Two homes, one life →
On loving more than one home, and the weight of holding both.
Some grief has no funeral. It still deserves to be held
Fifteen minutes, free, no obligation. Sessions in English, Hindi or Gujarati,
weekday mornings and evenings, online across Australia.