Traumatic Bereavement & Complex Grief

Sharon Nicholson 

Registered Member MBACP, Accred

Certified Bereavement Therapist

Some grief softens with time, the way people tell you it will.

Some doesn't.

It stays sharp. Intrusive. Present in a way that feels different from what you see in others, or from what you expected of yourself. The images won't settle. The moment of loss replays, uninvited. There's a numbness in places you'd expect to feel something, and an intensity in places you didn't expect at all.

Bereavement means the loss of someone through death - and that's often what brings people to this work. 

But profound grief isn't limited to death alone. 

It can follow divorce or estrangement, a miscarriage or a diagnosis that changed everything, the loss of your health, your identity, or a future you were building toward.

Grief like this deserves the same care.

If the loss was sudden, unexpected, or traumatic in how it happened - or if grief has become tangled with guilt, anger, or things left unresolved - ordinary time doesn't always do what it's supposed to.

That's not a sign you're grieving wrong.

It's a sign this grief needs a different kind of support to move through.

Grief becomes complicated, or traumatic, for understandable reasons - a death that was sudden or violent, a loss you weren't present for, a relationship that was unresolved or difficult when it ended, or circumstances that left you carrying guilt, anger, or disbelief alongside the sorrow.

When loss includes elements the nervous system experiences as traumatic, grief doesn't only live in the thinking mind. It lodges in the body, in fragments of memory that don't yet feel fully past.

Talking about it can help, but when grief has this quality, understanding what happened often isn't enough to change how it feels in your body.

You don't need to tell the story in full, or in order.

We work with Brainspotting - a body-based approach that helps process what the nervous system is still holding, including the parts of loss that are hardest to put into words.

This isn't about rushing grief, minimising it, or reaching for closure before you're ready. 

It's about helping the parts of this that still feel raw, frozen, or intrusive begin to settle, so grief can become something you carry rather than something that consumes you.

Clients often notice:

• The intrusive images or moments becoming less frequent, less sharp

• More capacity to remember the person without being overwhelmed

• Guilt, anger, or unfinished business feeling less consuming

• Sleep beginning to settle

• A returning sense of yourself, alongside the grief - rather than grief replacing you entirely

• The loss was sudden, unexpected, or traumatic in how it happened

• You feel "stuck" in a way that doesn't match what you expected grief to feel like

• Grief is tangled with guilt, anger, or things left unsaid or unresolved

• You're experiencing intrusive images, flashbacks, or a persistent replaying of the loss

• You want support that works with the body, not only through talking

• You don't need to be in crisis to reach out. You only need the sense that this grief needs somewhere to go.

I offer 90-minute sessions, weekly or fortnightly - longer than a standard therapy hour, because grief like this needs room to be held properly, not rushed through.

For some, concentrated intensive work can also help create space to process what feels most stuck. If that feels relevant, we can discuss this during your clarity call.

You don't have to make any decisions now, just come as you are and we can decide a way forward together.