I trained specifically in this work, including the grief that comes when someone leaves rather than dies. Whatever you are carrying, I will treat it as real, and I am not going to suggest you ought to be over it by now.
When someone has died
After a death, your life gets quietly reorganized, and the world around you usually does not slow down to notice. You are expected back at work, back in the group chat, back to being recognizable to the people who knew you before. In here we make room for the parts that do not fit that schedule: the grief that arrives in waves and then disappears for a week, the guilt over what was or wasn't said, the strange relief that sometimes comes mixed in with everything else and then makes you feel like a monster for feeling it. None of that gets a nudge toward moving on before you are ready.
Grieving people who are still alive
In a city this full of people who have moved, this kind of loss is everywhere, and almost nobody calls it grief. You miss friends who scattered across other countries. You miss family you only see through a screen now. And sometimes you are the one who left, maybe for hard reasons, maybe for a better life, but never quite because you wanted to leave anyone behind, and that carries its own quiet weight that is hard to explain to people back home or to the people here. Losing someone who is still alive but no longer close is a real grief. I see it that way, and we work with it that way.
When the one you lost was a pet
A pet is often steady, daily companionship, and for a good number of my gay clients in particular, something close to family. When that animal dies, the loss can land as hard as losing a person, and then you run into the people who say it was "just a dog" and you learn to grieve quietly so nobody thinks you're overdoing it. I won't do that to you. If this is hitting you the way a real loss hits, we will treat it as one, because that is what it is.
How long any of this takes
Honestly, there is no schedule, and grief almost never moves in a straight line. You can have a good month and then get flattened by a song in a supermarket. There is no point you are supposed to reach where it's officially finished, and I have no interest in hurrying you toward one. What we work toward instead is a way of carrying what you've lost that leaves room for the rest of your life to keep happening alongside it. That might take a handful of sessions or quite a few more. Around the ten-session mark I'll stop and we'll talk honestly about whether this is helping and what you actually need next.
Book a free 20-minute call if you want to talk it through.