How Can You Support Someone Through Grief?
Grief can be an overwhelming experience, but insights from leading experts can offer a beacon of hope. In this article, a Ph.D. Clinical Psychologist suggests developing meaningful rituals to honor loss, while a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist shares the ball in a box analogy. With a total of seven invaluable insights, readers will gain diverse strategies to support those navigating the challenging journey through grief.
- Develop Meaningful Rituals to Honor Loss
- Use Guided Storytelling to Process Grief
- Create a Safe Space for Emotions
- Educate on the Complexity of Emotions
- Guide Through Expressive Writing
- Build Emotional Muscles for Grief
- Share the Ball in a Box Analogy
Develop Meaningful Rituals to Honor Loss
One of the effective approaches I have found in helping clients through grief is helping them to develop meaningful rituals that honor their loss while adjusting to a new reality. Rather than pushing for "closure," this method creates space for both remembrance and healing.
I worked with a client who had difficulty eating dinner alone after the loss of their spouse - a time they had always shared together. We developed an evening ritual where they would light a candle at dinner, place a photo of their spouse nearby, and sometimes share thoughts about their day. This practice acknowledged both the presence of grief and the need to nurture oneself through the process.
The essence is validating the fact that grief continues on, while encouraging movement forward. The ritual then serves as a bridge between paying respect to the past and living in the present. Some clients want to write letters to their loved one; others want to volunteer for causes that the loved one cared about. The focus is still on finding personally meaningful ways to work with grief rather than trying to overcome it.
What this means for therapeutic practice is that grief work isn't about helping clients "get over" their loss, but rather supporting them in building a new relationship with their grief - one that acknowledges its permanence while allowing for growth. This approach recognizes that grief isn't a linear journey with a clear endpoint, but rather an ongoing process of learning to carry our losses while continuing to engage meaningfully with life.
Use Guided Storytelling to Process Grief
One approach I've taken to support a client through grief is guided storytelling. Grief often brings a sense of disconnection and a struggle to make sense of the loss, so I encourage clients to share the story of their relationship with the person or thing they've lost.
We begin by inviting them to talk about how the relationship started, focusing on moments of meaning and joy. This helps bring the relationship to life in their mind and reconnects them with what they valued most. Then, we explore the circumstances of the loss itself, allowing space for all the emotions, unspoken thoughts, and unanswered questions to surface. The goal is not to solve or fix their pain but to sit with it and honor their experience.
Over time, we work together to weave the loss into a larger narrative, helping them see it as a part of their story—not something that defines them, but something that has shaped them. This process creates a way to stay connected to what they've lost while making sense of how to move forward. By sharing their story in a structured way, they often find a sense of emotional relief, clarity, and a deeper understanding of their grief.
Create a Safe Space for Emotions
One approach I've taken to support a client through grief is to create a safe space where they feel comfortable expressing their emotions, no matter how complicated or overwhelming. Grief doesn't follow a straight line, and it's important to validate that each person's experience is unique. Sometimes, this means sitting silently or encouraging the client to share memories about their loved one. Other times, it might involve exploring practical coping strategies, like journaling or mindfulness exercises, to help them navigate their emotions day to day. The key is to honor their process while gently helping them find moments of connection and hope as they move forward.
Educate on the Complexity of Emotions
One approach I use to support clients through grief is educating them about the complex and multifaceted nature of their emotions. I often use the visual metaphor of a tangled ball of yarn, encouraging clients to label and assign each emotion they are experiencing to different parts of the ball. This exercise helps them visually grasp the complexity of grief and provides reassurance that their feelings are valid and not irrational. Finally, I like to conclude by labeling the ball as "love," discussing how, at its core, grief is a reflection of love.
Guide Through Expressive Writing
One way I have helped clients deal with grief is by guiding them through the process of expressive writing. This involves encouraging clients to write about their feelings, memories, and thoughts about their loss. This practice helps them process emotions, gain clarity, and externalize their grief safely and personally. Writing can also provide relief and help clients understand their emotional journey as they navigate through the stages of grief. I also suggest that when they are ready, they can write letters to the person/pet/job/or whatever they are grieving. It may help to write goodbye letters, forgiveness letters, or letters saying unspoken words.
Build Emotional Muscles for Grief
As a trauma and anxiety coach, I get a lot of people reaching out to me trying to process unresolved grief - either from recent losses or ones long ago.
The tricky thing with grief is that - as it is one of the heaviest emotional experiences to process - there is a massive amount of emotional energy moving through us when experiencing loss, and if we are not prepared in advance to deal with that amount of emotional energy, it can get stuck inside of us.
In other words, it's best if we build our emotional muscles before running into this experience.
For example, a year ago a close friend of mine passed and I had to actively sit and allow my body to shake and sweat for a few hours to even begin to process the emotions. I leaned into the experience because I had enough emotional awareness to understand that these uncomfortable things that my body wanted to do in that moment were actually a healthy (although unpleasant) way of processing this energy.
Most people who have never done this work ahead of time end up resisting these inner experiences. The grief itself - along with a lifetime's worth of defense mechanisms built up around our emotions - cause us to hold back when it comes to allowing our body to do what it needs to do to process heavy emotions. So, when one experiences grief and isn't ready to let it out, we resist the process and hold onto the emotional energy.
In much the same way that unused calories become stored as fat within us, unresolved emotional energy gets stored inside of us, and - over time - we have become actively resistant to the normal physiological actions that the body usually uses to deal with it.
So, when I work with clients processing grief, it's not about focusing on the person who passed specifically. It's about reopening the pathways for feeling, purging and processing our emotions in general. The body is already trying to help them heal. It's trying to move this energy. They're just afraid to let that happen.
We need to start small. Get them used to feeling and working through uncomfortable emotions bit by bit and open up the doors for heavier emotional weights to move through them.
One great exercise I start with is having them look in the mirror and repeat "I love myself and I am beautiful." For most people, this is a supremely uncomfortable experience (but, of course, it shouldn't be). Acknowledging self-love in this way causes an emotional reaction that helps them learn to start processing emotions again.
Share the Ball in a Box Analogy
Without fail, I share with my grieving clients the ball in a box analogy, which first appeared online on Twitter by Lauren Herschel in 2017 and subsequently went viral. And without fail, they all identify with the analogy and feel relief in that realization. The analogy is as follows: https://www.thepoke.com/2019/02/24/ball-box-analogy-grief-went-viral-struck-chord-with-many-people/
