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Grief affects a person in all their ways of being. As their therapist, the intensity of sadness, anger, relief and perhaps joy, can really challenge how we work with grief. We may suffer the initial shock of the circumstances or feel stuck with a person in their endless pain. Having worked with clients often on short-term contracts on bereavement in a person-centred manner, here are some areas to consider on how to support clients to feel less stuck and process their grief:

‘Am I doing it right?’

Often clients come with an expectation around grief and feel bad that they haven’t made more progress, especially if others around them appear to be doing well. Understanding their expectations and perhaps providing some psychoeducation around this and how grief manifests differently in different people, can relieve some of the pressure around ‘moving on’.

Moving on?

The idea of moving on can be jarring to the healing process as it assumes we can move on entirely. I often share Lois Tonkin’s theory on growing around loss because it supports clients to readjust their expectations - instead of expecting the pain to shrink, recognise that it can be easier to hold because of how life expands to support it. There can also be relief in knowing that the pain can also be a source of comfort, and not reject it; time to reconnect with the loved one and honour their memory or our hopes.

Hello comes before goodbye

In some circumstances, moving on may be inhibited because there wasn’t the opportunity to connect with the loved one when they were, or could have been, alive. This could happen with loss during pregnancy, the loss of siblings/parents before someone was born or when they were young. Such situations can be particularly complicated if family or friends don’t acknowledge the loss or show their grief.

Goodbye and what after?

The client may not have been able to say goodbye or been present in the way that they’d hoped. The death could have been sudden or the final moments may have been shared with other family members. The shock around wondering how they were as they died or the unknown around how those last moments played out (especially with suicide) can preoccupy a client. Separating out traumatic imagery and the emotional pain can be useful in finding manageable parts of the grief to work on. Understanding the client’s views on life after death, as well as the beliefs of the person who died, can help with finding meaning.

What is the goal?

Particularly when coming to the end of sessions, clients wonder if they’ll ever get over it. I often share with them that the grief doesn’t go away, that the goal is to find some way of holding it where all the emotions can be felt. We can feel the anger and sadness at what was lost, but also find hope and joy in our new reality.

‘What is grief, if not love preserving’ - spoken by Vision on the television show WandaVision