Grief and Death
Death and grief are two words often intertwined, yet they each represent distinct experiences. At Spacious Minds, I am cautious about grouping them together. Death is an event: it marks a transition that leaves a lasting imprint on those left behind, though it may not be as final or fixed as it initially feels. Grief, on the other hand, is the deeply personal journey one may undergo in response to this transition. While death signals change, grief is fluid, evolving, and uniquely shaped by each person’s memories, attachments, and inner world. In this way, death and grief are both universal yet uniquely individual experiences.
At Spacious Minds, I recognise that grief isn’t only associated with death. Grief readily arises in response to all forms of trauma, the loss of relationships, friendship break-ups, family ruptures, or children leaving home. There is grief in broken parent-child relationships, in the missed opportunity to bear children, in unfulfilled dreams, and even in pains inherited from our ancestors. Many people also carry grief for the sorrows of the world, feeling deeply affected by events such as war, famine, and suffering on a broader scale.
Some clients find that grief doesn’t, or can’t, emerge immediately after a significant event, transition, or trauma, quite simply because there hasn’t been the mental or emotional space for it to surface. Many come to therapy after years of living in ‘survival mode,’ where grief has had no room or encouragement to emerge. Life’s routines and seasons have carried these clients through days, weeks, and years, and in this momentum, grief has been marginalised, pushed down, and left unacknowledged.
This unprocessed grief takes tremendous energy and willpower to keep submerged, often expending mental and emotional resources we may not even be consciously aware of. Therapy, in this way, becomes a space to reclaim that energy, creating room for stagnant or fresh grief to surface, be recognised, and ultimately be integrated into the fabric of one’s life.
Whether your grief is old or new, I work with your unique experience, utilising therapeutic interventions that support us in inquiring into the deeper layers of your grief: its meaning and its role in your journey toward healing and self-exploration. We work together to locate what is stuck and how it is stuck, using a variety of approaches, such as talk therapy, art, or movement, to explore your inner landscape associated with grief. Processwork techniques allow me to inquire deeply into your grief within a single session if it feels safe for both of us. So, grief work need not be a lengthy process to change the trajectory of your experience, though traumatic grief work often is.
I write separately about trauma elsewhere on this website, but traumatic grief deserves special mention here. Why? Because trauma fundamentally changes the nervous system and re-wires the brain, making it more reactive and prone to respond inappropriately to triggers and stimuli. Given this, grief work with traumatised clients requires special skill, care, attention, and expertise. If you have experienced any kind of trauma, please seek a qualified therapist who understands trauma-informed approaches; otherwise, you risk unnecessary destabilisation as you work through grief, loss, or death.
Now this wouldn’t be a comprehensive article on grief without discussing the Kubler-Ross model, which many are familiar with. Best known as the ‘five stages of grief’, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross made significant strides in bringing discussions of death, dying and grief into the social consciousness with her five-stage model, originally developed to describe the stages experienced by those facing their own mortality. This model was later adapted to represent the grieving process more broadly, the five stages in the Kubler-Ross model are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
While I deeply respect Kubler-Ross’s pioneering work and the awareness it brought to death and grief, I find that limiting the grieving process to five stages can feel restrictive in therapy. Grief is rarely a linear experience, and these stages don’t always appear in a predictable order, nor do they appear at all for some people. Each person’s grief journey is unique, unfolding in its own time and in its own way to bring individual meaning. In my work at Spacious Minds, I encourage clients to experience their grief in a way that feels true to them rather than following any predefined sequence. The complexity of grief deserves an approach that principles each person’s individuality. If you’re navigating grief in any form and would like support, please reach out for a connection call, email, or text. It would be my honour to work with you and walk this path toward healing together.
