Counselling in your later years, from someone who is growing older too

There is a quiet assumption that counselling belongs to the young — that at seventy or eighty you are supposed to simply manage, the way you always have. I don't accept that, and neither should you. Counselling in your later years is not a watered-down version of counselling for everyone else. It is proper work, about real things: loss, loneliness, purpose, and a body that no longer keeps its side of the bargain.

I have spent much of my working life alongside older people, including years working in a care home, and many of my clients today are in their seventies and eighties. I am also no youngster myself. I understand ageing from the inside — not as a topic I once studied, but as something I am doing too. That changes the conversation.

The things that are hard to say out loud

Late-life depression is real, common, and very often missed — by doctors, by family, and by older people themselves, who tend to call it "just feeling flat" or say nothing at all. So is loneliness, especially the particular loneliness of outliving people: a husband or wife, siblings, the friends who knew you when you were young. Each loss takes not only a person but a witness to your life.

Then there is retirement, which nobody warns you can feel like a small bereavement — the loss of purpose, structure, and a self you had been for forty years. If you were needed once and are not sure you are needed now, that is worth talking about, not swallowing.

A body that no longer cooperates

Much of the pain of ageing is not abstract. It is the walking stick you resent, the driving licence you may have to give up, the hip that decides what kind of day you'll have. It is the indignity of needing help with things you have done for yourself since you were five years old, and the fear — often unspoken — of becoming dependent, of moving out of the family home, of being "a burden".

These are losses, and they deserve to be grieved and negotiated rather than endured in silence. In our sessions there is room for the anger and the dark humour as well as the sadness. If a specific bereavement sits underneath all of this, my grief counselling page may also speak to you.

How I work with people in their later years

My approach is person-centred and unhurried. You have eight or nine decades of life in the room with you; I am not going to rush you through it in six sessions with a worksheet. We talk about what matters now — and often that means making sense of what happened long ago, because old griefs and old injuries have a way of surfacing in later life when the distractions fall away.

My years inside a care home taught me things no textbook covers: what dependence actually feels like day to day, how families negotiate it well and badly, and how much life is still lived after the move everyone dreaded. Very few counsellors have sat on that side of the work. I have.

Where it is welcome, I also work with the people closest to you. A husband or wife, a son or daughter, sometimes a sister — the family around a person in later life is rarely incidental, and a great deal that is difficult sits in those relationships rather than inside any one person. I have found over many years that including them, when you want them included, makes the work steadier and the decisions kinder.

If family members join a session — because a decision has to be made together, or simply because it helps — the cost does not change. It is the same session at the same fee, however many chairs are in the room.

Sessions online or in Fairmount — whichever suits your life

If getting around has become difficult, online counselling is a genuine solution rather than a compromise: a 60-minute video call from your own chair, no lifts to arrange, no waiting rooms. Most of my older clients manage the technology comfortably after the first session, and I am patient with the setup — a son or daughter can help you connect the first time if that's easier.

If you are in Johannesburg and prefer a room with a person in it, you are welcome at my practice in Fairmount. Some conversations want company, and I understand that.

If you are arranging counselling for a parent

Many enquiries come from adult sons and daughters worried about a mother or father who has gone quiet, or angry, or simply stopped enjoying anything. You are welcome to make the first contact on their behalf — but the counselling itself belongs to your parent, and it only works if they are willing. What I can promise you is that I will meet them with respect, not with the slightly-too-loud cheerfulness older people so often endure.

And if you are carrying a great deal yourself in caring for them, please look at my page of support for carers. You matter in this picture too.