Holding Space for Your Grief
Grief doesn’t follow a schedule. It doesn’t end when people stop sending cards and flowers, or when the world expects us to be okay again. Sometimes, it doesn’t even look like grief at all. It shows up as tiredness, as anger, disconnection or as tears that come out of nowhere. In a therapeutic space, grief is allowed to take up the room it needs. It’s not treated like a problem to be solved, but more like a story that deserves to be told.
How Can Therapy Help You Through Loss And Grief?
In the early days of loss, grief takes up everything. In therapy, we learn that grief doesn’t mean you’re falling apart. Often, it means you’re alive to the truth of what you’ve lost. And often, what we’re really carrying isn’t just one loss, but many losses; the marriage that ended, the parent we never really had, the life we hoped would turn out differently. Grieving those things is part of healing.
Grief. To Feel Rather Than Fix
It’s also good to note that not every loss is death We grieve relationship breakups. We grieve jobs we’ve lost or left, places we’ve moved away from, versions of ourselves we no longer recognise. Grief doesn’t just mourn what was, it also mourns what could have been. That dream you had or future you imagined. It’s okay to grieve those too. Therapy can help you work through unfinished conversations when someone dies; the resentment, anger, and dissapointment. The love, however imperfect it was is there in the grief. One day, you’ll laugh and it won’t feel like a betrayal. You’ll love someone new, or return to an old passion, or feel joy for the first time in a long while. That doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten. It means you’re honouring the life you still have. Grief doesn’t end, it changes. And in time, it makes space for something else: a life that includes the love you lost.
Not Every Loss is Death
Grief is awful. Sometimes it knocks the wind out of you completely. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, or that something’s gone wrong. Sometimes, grief is just doing its job, showing up in the exact way it needs to when someone or something we’ve loved is no longer here. When you’ve lost someone, it can feel like you’re drowning one moment and fine the next. A sound, a smell, or memory can hit you out of nowhere, and suddenly you’re right back in the thick of it. There’s no neat timeline. In the early days after a loss, you might be too busy to feel much of anything; you might seem “fine.” But underneath, it can feel like you’re floating through a fog. Not really here. Not really okay. There is no right time to grieve. Therapy can help, not by speeding things up, but by making space. A space where you don’t have to pretend. Where you can speak about what you’ve lost, or just sit quietly while someone holds it with you.
Grief As Part Of Life
Grief might pop up when we least expect it; on birthdays or anniversaries or in the middle of an ordinary Monday. But outside of it, life might begin again. We might find ourselves laughing at something silly. We might notice the sound of the birds or the way sunlight shines through the window onto the desk. These moments don’t replace the grief. They simply grow around it. The grief doesn’t disappear. But it becomes one part of the whole, rather than the whole itself. This way of understanding grief doesn’t ask us to forget. It doesn’t rush us toward acceptance, but instead it allows us to carry our losses with us, not as a burden, but as something that has shaped who we are, woven into everything that follows.