Grief counselling - Jeffreys Bay and online across South Africa
Grief is usually associated with death. But grief is really the response to loss of any kind – and a great deal of what brings people to counselling is grief that doesn’t get recognised as grief, because it doesn’t come with a funeral, a sympathy card, or any of the social signals that tell us “this is a loss, and it’s okay to feel it.”
This page covers the more widely recognised forms of grief – the death of someone close, the end of a relationship, the loss of a job – alongside a form of grief I see often in my practice, and that least often gets named for what it is: the grief of leaving, watching from afar, or staying.
The grief that doesn't have a name - leaving, watching from afar, and staying
For many South Africans, grief shows up not around a single loss but around an ongoing, unresolved relationship with the country itself – whether they’ve left, are watching from abroad, or have chosen to stay.
The grief of leaving. Emigration is very often framed – by the person leaving, and by everyone around them – as a good thing. An opportunity. A smart decision. And it may well be all of those things. But it is also, almost always, a loss: of family, of friendships built over decades, of a particular kind of humour and shorthand that doesn’t translate, of the version of yourself that existed in that specific place, of a future that was once imagined to happen in South Africa and now won’t. This loss rarely gets acknowledged, because acknowledging it can feel like undermining the decision, or like ingratitude for an opportunity others would be grateful for. So it goes unspoken – and unspoken grief doesn’t go away. It tends to surface later, often once the practical demands of settling into a new country have eased enough to leave room for it.
The grief of watching from afar. For South Africans abroad, there’s a particular grief in watching the country – and the people in it – from a distance. Hearing about a relative’s illness, a friend’s struggle, a national event, and feeling the pull to be there alongside the practical impossibility of it. There’s also a quieter grief in watching South Africa change in your absence – realising that the place you carry in memory and the place that currently exists are no longer quite the same, and that the gap between them grows every year you’re away.
The grief of staying. Less often discussed, but real for many of my clients who remain in South Africa: grief connected to friends and family who have left. The experience of saying goodbye, repeatedly, to people who matter – and of building a life in a country that a significant part of your social world has chosen to leave. There can also be a complicated grief in staying when leaving felt like an option that was seriously considered and ultimately declined – a kind of grief for a life that was possible but not chosen, sitting alongside whatever grief comes with the life that was.
None of these forms of grief have a clear endpoint, a ritual, or a socially recognised way of being expressed. That doesn’t make them smaller. If any of this is familiar – whether you’re the one who left, the one who stayed, or someone managing both sides of that relationship across a screen – it’s a legitimate thing to bring to counselling, even if you’ve never quite had the words for what it is. If you’re living abroad, my pages for South Africans in the UK and Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the UAE and Saudi Arabia and digital nomads and remote workers go into more detail about the specific experience of being away.
Death and the loss of a loved one
This is grief in its most recognised form – the death of someone close, whether recent or from years ago. Even when a loss is widely understood and supported in the immediate aftermath, grief counselling is often most useful later: when the initial flurry of support has faded, when the people around you have moved on with the expectation that you have too, and when you’re left navigating an ongoing absence largely on your own.
Grief after a death doesn’t move in stages, and it doesn’t move at a predictable pace. Anniversaries, certain places, certain smells or songs, can bring it back with an intensity that feels like it should belong to the early days, not years later – and that can feel confusing or even alarming if you’ve been told, implicitly, that you should be “over it” by now.
Grief counselling here isn’t about reaching closure or “moving on” in the sense of leaving the person behind. It’s about finding a way to carry the relationship forward – to integrate the loss into an ongoing life, rather than treating it as something to be resolved and finished with.
Job loss, career endings, and retirement
Losing a job – through retrenchment, restructuring, being let go, or simply a role coming to an end – is grief, even though it’s rarely treated as such. There’s often an expectation that the appropriate response is to update the CV and start applying for the next thing, and while that’s practically necessary, it can leave no space for the loss itself: of identity, of routine, of colleagues who functioned as a second family, of a sense of competence and purpose that was tied up in the role.
Retirement carries a related but distinct kind of grief – one that’s often anticipated with enthusiasm and then arrives accompanied by something unexpected: a loss of structure, of the social contact that came with work, and sometimes of a sense of usefulness that was more central to identity than it seemed while still working. Retirement grief can be particularly disorienting because it’s a loss that was chosen, sometimes long planned for, and yet still leaves a gap that wasn’t fully anticipated.
In both cases – job loss and retirement – there’s often an underlying question worth exploring: if so much of who you understood yourself to be was connected to this role, who are you without it? That’s not a small question, and it’s one that counselling can hold space for without rushing toward an answer.
The end of a relationship, separation and divorce
The end of a relationship, regardless of how it happened or whose decision it was, is a significant loss – of a partner, of a shared future that had been built (even unconsciously) around assumptions that no longer hold, of routines and rituals and sometimes of a social circle that was shared. Divorce adds layers of practical complexity – finances, sometimes children, sometimes family relationships that don’t survive the split – on top of an already significant emotional loss.
I offer individual counselling for someone going through the end of a relationship, a separation, or a divorce, with a focus that’s entirely on you: making sense of what happened, what it meant, what story you’re telling yourself about it – about the relationship, about yourself, about what comes next – and whether that story is one that’s helping you move forward or one that’s keeping you stuck.
This is also where grief and identity intersect closely. A long relationship shapes a person – habits, routines, a sense of self that included being someone’s partner. The end of that relationship is, among other things, the end of that version of yourself, and grieving it as a loss – rather than only processing it as a problem to be solved or a situation to recover from – is often where the most useful work happens.
If you’re navigating the end of a relationship or a divorce and looking for individual support through it, this is something I work with regularly, and it’s a good fit for online counselling.
How counselling helps
Whether what’s underneath is grief connected to emigration, a death, a job ending, or the end of a relationship, the work tends to involve some combination of:
- Understanding what’s actually been lost – and treating that loss as something real, worth acknowledging, rather than something to talk yourself out of or rush past
- Examining the story that’s built up around the loss – what it’s come to mean about you, about what’s possible now, and about the future – and whether that story is the only one available
- Finding language for forms of grief that don’t have an obvious name or social ritual attached to them
- Slowly finding a way to carry what’s been lost forward, rather than treating grief as a problem to be resolved and finished with
I draw on both person-centred therapy and narrative therapy in this work. Narrative therapy is often particularly suited to grief, because so much of grief is about the story a person tells about the loss, about themselves, and about what comes next – and finding language for forms of loss that don’t otherwise have any. Person-centred therapy provides the steady, unhurried presence that grief work depends on, especially where grief has brought with it patterns like avoidance, disrupted sleep, or anxiety about the future that are easier to face with someone who isn’t rushing you toward feeling better. Which approach leads depends on what’s most useful for you at a given point.
Some people also find it helps to write things down between sessions. The free journal tool on this site is a private space for that, nothing you write is saved or sent anywhere.
How sessions work
Sessions are one hour, either in person in Jeffreys Bay or online via Zoom for clients across South Africa and internationally. I work with individuals. For details on session pricing, see the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Is Storme a counsellor or a psychologist, and what's the difference?
Storme Brand is a Registered Counsellor with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA Reg. PRC0023531) – you can verify this at hpcsa.co.za. Counsellors and psychologists are both registered with the HPCSA but have different scopes: psychologists can conduct formal psychological assessment and diagnosis and typically work with more complex clinical presentations, while counsellors work with the emotional and psychological difficulties most people experience – including grief and loss – within a therapeutic relationship. See the About page for more.
Is online grief counselling as effective as in-person?
For many people, yes – grief work depends most on having a consistent, reliable space to process loss over time, and that can be maintained over video as well as in person. See more about online counselling here. In-person sessions are also available in Jeffreys Bay.
Does medical aid cover grief counselling?
Most major South African medical aids recognise sessions with an HPCSA-registered counsellor. An invoice with the relevant ICD-10 codes is provided after each session for you to submit to your medical aid directly. For current session fees, see the pricing page.
What therapeutic approach is used for grief?
It's been years since my loss and I still feel affected by it. Is it too late for counselling to help?
No. Grief doesn’t follow a timeline, and counselling can be just as useful years after a loss as it is in the immediate aftermath – sometimes more so, once the initial support around you has moved on and you’re navigating it largely alone.
Do you offer couples counselling for relationships that are struggling?
My online practice is focused on individual counselling. If you’re going through the end of a relationship or a divorce, individual counselling can be a valuable space to process that experience – this is covered in more detail above. In-person couples and family sessions can be discussed for clients in the Jeffreys Bay area – see the About page or get in touch to discuss what would be most appropriate.