Grief Literacy: A Guide for Australian Women

A resource from Safe Refuge Counselling, a private online and in-person counselling practice for women based in Mount Barker, South Australia. Safe Refuge Counselling is not a domestic violence service. This guide is written by Aana Carpenter, a registered counsellor (ACA Level 1).

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Content warning and a note before you begin

This guide discusses loss in many forms: bereavement, perinatal loss, estrangement, illness, the ending of relationships, and other losses that tend to be overlooked. There is no graphic detail about traumatic death, and no description of methods of self-harm. Still, reading about grief can bring grief closer. If you are inside a fresh wave of loss, or if today is a hard day, please feel free to skim, skip, or close this page and come back later. Your pacing is the right pacing.

If at any point you need to talk to someone now, scroll to the bottom for Australian helplines. You do not have to wait until things feel worse.

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1. What grief literacy is, and why it matters for women

Grief literacy is a relatively new phrase for a very old human need. Researchers at Curtin University, led by Professor Lauren Breen, have defined grief literacy as "the capacity to access, process, and use knowledge regarding the experience of loss." It is a multidimensional skillset. It includes emotional competence (recognising what grief feels like from the inside), relational competence (knowing how to offer and receive support), and cultural competence (understanding that grief is shaped by community, faith, gender, and circumstance).

Grief literacy is not about performing wellness. It is about having enough shared language and shared understanding that a person in the middle of a loss is not left to invent her own vocabulary alone.

Why does this matter particularly for women in Australia?

Because women tend to carry the emotional labour of loss for entire families. When a parent dies, it is often a daughter who coordinates the funeral, holds the grieving siblings, writes the eulogy, cleans the house, and then quietly returns to full-time work while being asked how her father is holding up. When a baby is lost before birth, it is the mother whose body carries both the physical and the emotional aftermath, often with very little community acknowledgement. When a marriage ends, women are more likely to be told to "move on" than to be invited to mourn. When a friendship dissolves, there is almost no cultural language for the grief that follows.

A 2024 Australian health literacy and inclusivity review of bereavement resources in healthcare settings found that the existing print materials given to grieving families scored poorly on both understandability and actionability. The mean PEMAT score for understandability was 61.5 percent. The mean score for actionability was only 35 percent. Readability sat at a grade 10.7 reading level, well above the recommended grade 8, and cultural relevance for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and for culturally and linguistically diverse communities was minimal. In short, the resources we hand to grieving people in Australia are not reaching most of them.

This guide tries, in a small way, to close some of that gap.

You do not need to read it in order. You do not need to read it all. Take what is useful. Leave what is not.

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2. The landscape of loss: what actually counts as grief

One of the quiet harms women experience around loss is the sense that their grief does not "qualify." We are good at recognising death. We are less good at recognising the hundred other ways a life can be restructured by loss.

Grief can arise from any of the following, and this list is not exhaustive.

Death of a loved one. The death of a parent, partner, child, sibling, close friend, grandparent, chosen family member. Death from illness, from accident, from suicide, from age. Each carries its own texture.

Miscarriage and perinatal loss. Miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, termination for medical reasons, the loss of a pregnancy that only you knew about. Perinatal loss sits at the intersection of bereavement and reproductive grief, and in Australia it is still too often met with "at least it was early" rather than "I am so sorry." SANDS Australia and Red Nose exist because the silence around this grief has been generations deep.

Infertility and reproductive loss. The grief of cycles that do not work, of a diagnosis that changes the shape of a future, of bodies that do not do what women were told they would do.

Divorce and the ending of long relationships. The death of a shared life, shared home, shared rituals. Grief for the partner you loved at twenty-two who is no longer the person across the kitchen table. Grief for the marriage you had hoped to have.

Friendship endings. The slow drift, the sudden fracture, the friendship that quietly did not survive a change in life stage. Friendship grief is almost entirely disenfranchised. There are no cards for it.

Estrangement. From a parent, a sibling, an adult child. Estrangement is sometimes the healthiest choice available, and it is almost always grieved.

Empty nest. When children leave home, or stop needing you in the way you were needed before. This grief is often dismissed as sentimental. It is not. It is a genuine restructuring of identity.

Identity loss. The self you were before a diagnosis, before motherhood, before immigration, before burnout. Matrescence (the psychological transition into motherhood) is itself a form of identity grief.

Career loss. Redundancy, forced early retirement, the end of a profession that shaped you, the career you stepped away from for caregiving.

Health loss. Chronic illness, disability, the loss of functions you once had. Grief for the body you had at thirty. Grief for the stamina you used to take for granted.

Pet loss. The death of an animal companion is a real bereavement. Dismissing it as "just a pet" is itself a form of disenfranchised grief.

Climate and ecological grief. Also known as solastalgia. The grief women feel about the state of the world they are raising children into. Researchers in Australia have taken this form of grief seriously for more than a decade.

Ambiguous loss. A term coined by American researcher Pauline Boss. Ambiguous loss describes grief when the lost person is physically absent but psychologically present (for example, a missing person), or physically present but psychologically absent (for example, a loved one with advanced dementia). Ambiguous loss is particularly hard because there is no funeral, no social script, no closure.

Disenfranchised grief. A term from American sociologist Kenneth Doka. Disenfranchised grief is grief that is not openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned, or publicly mourned. Miscarriage, estrangement, pet loss, the death of an ex-partner, grief within marginalised communities, and friendship endings all frequently sit in this category.

If your grief is on this list, or if it is on a list you would add yourself, it counts.

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3. How grief actually works: what contemporary models say

Most Australians have heard of the five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. This framework was introduced by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969. She developed it from her work with terminally ill patients, and it was originally a description of how dying people respond to their own impending death. It was never intended as a universal map of bereavement.

The stage model endures because it is tidy, and because grief is not. But clinicians and researchers moved past it decades ago. A few contemporary models are more useful and more honest.

The dual process model (Stroebe and Schut, 1999)

Dutch researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut proposed that grieving people oscillate between two states. One state is loss-orientation: crying, remembering, feeling the absence, processing the pain. The other state is restoration-orientation: getting the groceries, doing the school run, functioning at work, figuring out how to live a restructured life.

Healthy grieving moves back and forth between these two states. Some days are loss-heavy. Some days are restoration-heavy. Both are grief. Neither means you are doing grief wrong. Women who feel guilty for laughing two weeks after a death, or for sobbing in the car park six months on, are usually in the middle of a perfectly normal oscillation.

Continuing bonds (Klass, Silverman, and Nickman, 1996)

The older model of grief assumed that the "work" of mourning was to detach from the person who had died. Contemporary research rejects this. Continuing bonds theory holds that people can, and often do, maintain an ongoing internal relationship with the person they have lost, and that this can be healthy. Talking to a mother who has died, keeping a ritual on an anniversary, feeling a loved one's presence in a particular song, asking "what would she have said about this?" These are not pathological. They are often integrative.

Worden's tasks of mourning (Worden, 1982 onwards)

American psychologist J. William Worden offered an alternative to stages: four tasks that a grieving person works through, often not in order, often circling back.

1. To accept the reality of the loss.
2. To process the pain of grief.
3. To adjust to a world without the deceased person (or, more broadly, without the thing or relationship that has been lost).
4. To find an enduring connection with what has been lost while embarking on a new life.

Worden's language of tasks is sometimes more useful than stages because it is active. It acknowledges that grief asks something of you, over time, without dictating a schedule.

What this means practically

Grief is not linear. It is not a tunnel with a light at the end. It is more like a tide that comes in and out over a long coastline. Some tides are gentle. Some are storm surges. Plans for Christmas, a song in the supermarket, the smell of someone's jumper, a due date that never arrived, an anniversary you were not expecting to feel, all of these can bring the tide back up without warning. This is not regression. This is how grief behaves.

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4. How grief shows up in women's bodies

Grief is not only emotional. It is physiological. The body grieves.

A growing body of published physiology research has documented what clinicians have long observed. Bereavement is associated with measurable changes in the cardiovascular system, the immune system, sleep architecture, and cognitive function. A landmark 2012 study published in Circulation (Mostofsky et al.) found that the risk of acute myocardial infarction was significantly elevated in the days following the death of a significant person, giving physiological credibility to the clinical phenomenon sometimes called "broken heart syndrome" (takotsubo cardiomyopathy).

Some of the common ways grief shows up in women's bodies include:

• Sleep disturbance. Difficulty falling asleep, early-morning waking, vivid dreams, nightmares, or sometimes sleeping far more than usual. Sleep is one of the first systems to change.
• Appetite changes. Either loss of appetite or an increase. Food may taste different. Some women describe feeling nauseated around food for weeks.
• Fatigue. A deep, bone-level tiredness that is not fixed by a single good night's sleep.
• Chest tightness, palpitations, a feeling of heaviness. Often described as the body's literal weight of grief.
• Immune suppression. Increased susceptibility to colds, viruses, slower wound healing, flares of autoimmune conditions.
• Cognitive fog. Difficulty concentrating, forgetfulness, losing the thread of conversations, arriving at a room and not remembering why. This is sometimes called "grief brain" and it is well documented.
• Digestive upset. Constipation, diarrhoea, cramping, changes in how food is tolerated.
• Cycle disruption. Changes in menstrual regularity, heavier or lighter bleeding, delayed cycles, sometimes an earlier entry into perimenopausal symptoms.
• Tears at odd moments, or an absence of tears when you expected them. Both are normal.

If you are noticing these, you are not falling apart. Your body is responding to a genuine event. It is helpful to gently tell your GP that you are bereaved or going through significant loss, not because they will cure your grief, but because it gives context to anything that arises physically and helps them support you without over-medicalising a normal human response.

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5. The cultural pressure women face around grief

If grief is hard, grieving as a woman in Australia adds particular weight.

The emotional labourer role. Women are often positioned, inside families and workplaces, as the people who manage everyone else's feelings. When loss enters a family, women are expected to organise, inform, comfort, plan the wake, bring the food, write the thank you cards, check on the grandparents, and hold the children. Very little space is left over for her own grief, which is often postponed indefinitely.

The expectation of quick recovery. Bereavement leave in Australia is typically two to three days. That is enough time to attend a funeral. It is not enough time to grieve. Yet women often return to workplaces where colleagues feel visibly uncomfortable if grief is mentioned beyond the first fortnight.

The performance of being "fine." There is a specific social pressure on women to reassure others that they are coping. "I'm doing okay, thanks for asking." "We're getting through." "Mum would have wanted us to keep going." These phrases are often true. They are also often the only acceptable script. The woman underneath the script may be drowning.

The silencing of losses that do not fit neat categories. Miscarriages get condolence cards less often than funerals. Estrangements do not get condolence cards at all. Divorce after a long marriage can be met with "it must be a relief." Friendship endings have no ritual. When a loss is not recognised, the grief has nowhere to go.

The intersection with caregiving. Many women are grieving while still caregiving: for children, for ageing parents, for a partner with a chronic illness. Grief and caregiving are not mutually exclusive. They are often simultaneous, and the exhaustion compounds.

The intersection with identity. For women whose identity has been shaped by motherhood, partnership, career, faith, culture, or all of these at once, a loss that ruptures one strand can feel like a loss of self. This is real. It is not melodrama.

Naming these pressures is not complaint. It is orientation. If the room you are grieving in has gravity pulling against you, it helps to know that the gravity is there.

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6. Practical self-care during grief

Nothing in this section will make grief stop. That is not what self-care during grief is for. The aim is to give your body, your mind, and your spirit just enough scaffolding to move through the season without collapsing under the weight of it.

Routine, loosely held. Grief dissolves structure. A light daily rhythm helps: something to get up for, something to eat, something to move, something to rest. Not a schedule. A shape.

Nourishment. Eat something, even if it is small, even if you do not want to. Warm, simple, familiar foods. Soup. Toast with butter. Rice. A cup of tea. If cooking is beyond you, frozen meals, takeaway, or food delivered by a friend are completely acceptable solutions for as long as they need to be.

Gentle movement. Walking outside, if you can, for even ten minutes. A slow stretch in the morning. Swimming. Not as exercise, as regulation. Movement helps the body metabolise grief in ways that sitting still does not.

Hydration and caution with substances. Grief and alcohol are not friends. A glass of wine numbs briefly, disrupts sleep deeply, and amplifies the wave the next day. Caffeine, while understandable, can worsen the anxiety and sleep disruption that often accompany grief. Notice what you are reaching for, without shame.

Ritual. Humans have used ritual for grief across every culture and every century. Light a candle. Visit a place that held meaning. Write a letter you will not send. Cook a recipe that was hers. Plant something. Revisit photographs on an anniversary. Ritual gives grief somewhere to sit.

Contact, in small doses. Grief is isolating, and isolation worsens grief. Even brief contact with a trusted friend, one phone call, one walk, one shared meal a week, is protective.

Permission to not be okay. You do not owe anyone a performance of resilience. Saying "I am not okay today, and that is what today is" is allowed. So is saying "I actually feel alright today, and I am going to let that be true" without guilt.

Permission to keep joy. Laughing does not betray the person or thing you have lost. Joy during grief is not a failure of love. It is evidence of life continuing.

Lower the bar. Whatever you thought you should be doing this week, halve it. Then halve it again. Grief is work. It is not visible work, but it is work. Your capacity for everything else is temporarily reduced. That is appropriate.

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7. When and how to seek professional support

Most grief does not require professional support. Most grief is moved through with time, community, ritual, and rest. But sometimes grief becomes stuck, or sometimes it coexists with a clinical picture that benefits from more than community care.

Signs grief may have become complicated

Researchers now recognise a clinical category called prolonged grief disorder, which was added to the DSM-5-TR in 2022 and to the ICD-11. It is the domain of diagnosing clinicians (psychologists, psychiatrists, GPs). As a counsellor, I do not diagnose. What I can offer is a plain-language list of signs that suggest talking to a professional might be useful. These are signs, not labels.

• The intensity of the grief does not ease at all over many months and continues to dominate daily functioning.
• You feel unable to accept the reality of the loss, even after a long time.
• You feel that life has no meaning or purpose without what has been lost, and that sense does not soften.
• Intense avoidance of reminders (places, photographs, people) is narrowing your life.
• You are preoccupied with the lost person or thing to the point that it is hard to engage with anything else.
• Sleep has not recovered, or has significantly worsened, over many months.
• You are relying on alcohol, other substances, food, or overwork to avoid the grief.
• You are noticing thoughts of not wanting to be here, or thoughts of self-harm. Please reach out immediately if this is present. Lifeline 13 11 14 is available any time.

The difference between grief and depression

Grief and depression can look similar on the surface and often overlap, which is why a qualified assessment is useful if you are unsure. Broadly:

• Grief tends to come in waves, is centred on the loss, retains moments of connection and meaning between waves, and the person usually retains a sense of self-worth.
• Depression tends to be more pervasive, is not always tied to a specific event, often involves persistent low self-worth or self-criticism, and does not ease with the small breaks of connection and meaning that grief allows.

The two can coexist. If you are unsure, a conversation with your GP or a qualified mental health practitioner is the right next step. I can walk alongside you in that conversation; I cannot make the diagnosis.

What a grief counselling session looks like

Grief counselling with me at Safe Refuge Counselling is usually a conversation. Fifty minutes, online via secure video or in person at Mount Barker, South Australia. No couch, no pathologising, no homework you cannot manage. The first session is a gentle orientation. We talk about what you have lost, when, how, and what the loss has asked of you since. You do not need to have it all organised. Tears are welcome. So is silence. So is practical problem-solving if that is what the week needs.

Over time, a grief counselling relationship can help you:

• Give language to what you are carrying.
• Make space for feelings that other parts of your life do not have room for.
• Work through specific stuck points (complicated goodbyes, unresolved guilt, anger at someone who has died, the reshaping of identity after a loss).
• Build rituals and continuing bonds that feel right for you.
• Notice how your body is carrying the grief and what it might need.
• Navigate practical decisions (anniversaries, family dynamics, work disclosure, parenting through your own grief).

Scope of what a counsellor can do

I am a registered counsellor (ACA Level 1). Within that scope, I can support, help with, work through, explore, navigate, guide, and provide psychoeducation. I cannot diagnose, prescribe, or deliver clinical treatment for disorders. If what is happening for you needs diagnosis or medication, I will help you think about who to talk to and I will keep walking alongside you as part of a wider team.

No GP referral or Mental Health Treatment Plan is needed to book. Sessions are not Medicare-rebatable (this is standard for ACA-registered counsellors). Booking is via a free Discovery Call at saferefuge.com.au.

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8. A short note from Aana

This work matters to me for reasons I cannot separate from my own life.

I came to counselling after a first career in biomedical science. I know what it is to read the physiology of grief in a journal and to feel it in my own chest at the same time. I am a Singaporean-Australian woman, a mother, and a practising Catholic. I have known loss in my family and in my own body. I have sat with women for whom grief was the unspoken centre of the room for years before they could name it.

What I hope for the women who arrive in my practice is simple. I hope they find a space where their grief, in all its shapes, is allowed to take up room. I hope they leave their first session understanding that they are not broken, that they are not too much, and that what they are carrying has a name. I hope they move, in their own time, not past what they have lost, but into a life that carries it with them.

If you are reading this because a loss has found you, I am so sorry. And I am glad you are here.

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9. Resources

Australian grief organisations

• Grief Australia (formerly the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement). National education, research, and counselling referral. grief.org.au
• GriefLine. Free national helpline for grief support. 1300 845 745. griefline.org.au
• Red Nose Grief and Loss. Support for pregnancy loss, stillbirth, newborn death, and the death of a child. 24-hour support line 1300 308 307. rednose.org.au
• SANDS Australia. Stillbirth and newborn death support. National 24/7 bereavement support line 1300 072 637. sands.org.au
• Bears of Hope. Pregnancy and infant loss support. bearsofhope.org.au
• The Compassionate Friends Australia. Peer support for families bereaved by the death of a child of any age. compassionatefriendsvictoria.org.au
• StandBy Support After Suicide. 1300 727 247. standbysupport.com.au
• CanTeen. Support for young people affected by cancer and bereavement. canteen.org.au
• Palliative Care Australia. Bereavement resources connected to end-of-life care. palliativecare.org.au

Reading recommendations

• It's OK That You're Not OK, by Megan Devine. A clear, warm corrective to the tidy stage model of grief.
• Bearing the Unbearable, by Joanne Cacciatore. Written by a researcher and clinician who lost her own child, particularly attentive to perinatal loss.
• A Good Death, by Margaret Rice. An Australian journalist's compassionate guide to end-of-life conversations and the grief that follows.
• The Wild Edge of Sorrow, by Francis Weller. For readers drawn to the more contemplative and ritual side of grief.
• On Grief and Grieving, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler. Her later, less rigid return to the topic, more useful than her 1969 work alone.

Academic references worth knowing (for readers who find comfort in the research)

• Breen, L. J., Kawashima, D., Joy, K., Cadell, S., Roth, D., Chow, A., & Macdonald, M. E. (2022). Grief literacy: A call to action for compassionate communities. Death Studies.
• Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement.
• Worden, J. W. (2018, 5th ed.). Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy.
• Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing Bonds.
• Bartley et al. (2024). Health literacy and inclusivity review of bereavement resources available in an Australian healthcare setting. Health Literacy and Communication Open.

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Help-seeking strip

If you need to talk to someone now, you do not have to wait:

• Lifeline 13 11 14 (24/7)
• Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636 (24/7)
• GriefLine 1300 845 745
• PANDA (perinatal anxiety and depression) 1300 726 306
• 13YARN (First Nations crisis support) 13 92 76
• 1800RESPECT 1800 737 732

In an emergency, call 000.

To book a free Discovery Call with Aana at Safe Refuge Counselling, visit saferefuge.com.au. Safe Refuge Counselling is a private counselling practice for women, offered online nationally and in person from Mount Barker, South Australia.

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400-word guest post excerpt

The following excerpt is suitable for republication as a guest post, with attribution to Aana Carpenter, Safe Refuge Counselling, saferefuge.com.au.

The grief that Australian women are not allowed to name

Most of us know how to recognise grief when someone dies. We know how to send flowers, how to attend a funeral, how to murmur the words we have been taught. What we are much less sure about is how to recognise the grief that does not come with a funeral.

The grief of a miscarriage no one else knew you were carrying. The grief of a friendship that quietly did not survive your thirties. The grief of estrangement from a parent, which was the healthiest choice you could make and which still leaves a shape in your chest. The grief of a body that is not doing what it used to do. The grief of a marriage ending, of a career stopping, of the child who left home and left a house too quiet. The grief of a country you left behind to build a life in a new one.

These losses are real. They are also, in Australia, largely unspoken. A 2024 Australian review of bereavement resources in our healthcare settings found that most of the printed material given to grieving people scored poorly on understandability and almost failed on actionability. We are not giving women the language they need.

Contemporary grief research has moved well past the old five stages. The dual process model describes grief as an oscillation between feeling the loss and getting on with life, and says both are necessary. Continuing bonds theory suggests that keeping an ongoing internal relationship with what you have lost is not only healthy, it is often how healing happens. Worden's tasks of mourning frame grief as active work that unfolds in its own time.

What Australian women need, more than tidy models, is permission. Permission to name grief that does not fit neat categories. Permission to let the body do what grief asks the body to do. Permission to lower the bar, say no to the performance of being fine, and let joy return without guilt.

Grief literacy is the work of giving women that permission, at scale, as a culture. It is also, one session at a time, the work I do.

Aana Carpenter is a registered counsellor (ACA Level 1) and the founder of Safe Refuge Counselling, a private online and in-person counselling practice for women in Mount Barker, South Australia. She is not a domestic violence service. saferefuge.com.au.