Monthly Spotlight:

Bereavement, Mourning, Grief and the Experience of Loss.

A pluralistic and integrative approach through a psychodynamic lens

Loss changes the shape of a life.

When someone dies, something in the world is altered. The days may still continue. People may still go to work, answer messages, cook meals, pay bills and appear to function. But internally, life can feel completely different. The person who has died is no longer physically there, and yet they may still feel vividly present in the mind, the body, the home, the family, and the smallest ordinary moments.

Bereavement is often spoken about as if it is mainly sadness. But grief is rarely that simple. It can include sadness, shock, anger, guilt, relief, numbness, fear, longing, confusion, disbelief and even moments of laughter. Some people cry often. Some people cannot cry at all. Some feel overwhelmed by memories, while others feel strangely blank. Some want to talk about the person they have lost; others feel they can only manage the next practical task in front of them.

There is no single correct way to grieve.

In therapy, I think it is important to begin from that place. Bereavement is not a problem to be fixed, and mourning is not something that can be hurried along by advice. Loss has to be met carefully. It has to be given room. It may need words, silence, tears, anger, reflection, memory, or simply the steady presence of another person who is not frightened by the depth of what is being felt.

A pluralistic and integrative approach to bereavement recognises that different people need different things at different times. One person may need space to tell the story of the illness, the death, the funeral, or the final conversation. Another may need help with anxiety, panic, sleep, or the feeling that their body has gone into shock. Someone else may need to make sense of complicated feelings about the person who has died, especially if the relationship was painful, unresolved or emotionally confusing.

A psychodynamic lens can help because grief often touches more than the present loss. A death can stir older losses, earlier separations, family wounds, attachment fears and memories that may not have been fully processed. Sometimes a person is grieving not only who has died, but also what never happened, what was never said, what was never repaired, or what can no longer be hoped for.

For example, the death of a loving parent may bring a profound sense of being emotionally unanchored. The death of a difficult parent may bring a more complicated mixture: sadness, anger, guilt, relief, longing and regret. The death of a partner may bring not only the loss of the person, but the loss of a shared future. The death of a child, sibling, friend or close family member may disturb a person’s sense of safety, fairness and meaning in the world.

Loss is rarely only about absence. It is also about relationship.

When someone important dies, the relationship does not simply disappear. The person may still be spoken to internally. Their opinions may still be imagined. Their voice may still be heard in memory. Their absence may be felt at the kitchen table, in a birthday card that no longer arrives, in a photograph, in a piece of clothing, in a familiar road, or in the sudden instinct to phone them before remembering they are gone.

These moments can be intensely painful. They can also be part of how the mind slowly adjusts to loss. Mourning often involves finding a new internal relationship with the person who has died. It is not always about letting go. Sometimes it is about learning how to carry the person differently.

This is one reason why phrases such as “moving on” can feel so uncomfortable. Many bereaved people do not want to move on in the sense of leaving the person behind. They may want to live again, but not at the cost of forgetting. Therapy can offer a place where this can be understood. The aim is not to erase the bond, but to help the loss become more bearable, more integrated and less unbearably raw.

Bereavement can affect the whole self. It can affect sleep, appetite, concentration, energy, memory, confidence, work, relationships and the ability to feel pleasure. It can make ordinary tasks feel strangely difficult. It can also affect the body. Some people describe heaviness in the chest, tightness in the throat, exhaustion, restlessness, nausea or a sense of being outside themselves. Grief is not only emotional. It can be physical, relational and deeply disorientating.

For some people, grief appears as anxiety.

After one loss, the world may feel unsafe. A person may become frightened of losing someone else. They may feel anxious when family members do not answer the phone. They may worry about their own health, or become preoccupied with the possibility of another death. This does not mean they are being irrational or dramatic. It may mean that loss has shaken their basic sense that life is predictable and secure.

For others, grief may look more like depression.

There may be withdrawal, hopelessness, flatness or a loss of interest in things that once mattered. The future may feel empty. The person may feel as though part of them has stopped moving. In therapy, it can be important to listen carefully to this. Sometimes depression after loss is not simply an illness in isolation, but an expression of a life trying to reorganise itself around an absence that feels impossible to accept.

Guilt is also common in bereavement. People may go over the same questions again and again. Did I do enough? Should I have visited more? Why did I say that? Why did I not say this? Could I have noticed something sooner? Should I have been there at the end?

These thoughts can be very painful. They can also be a way the mind tries to create control where there was helplessness. If I can blame myself, then perhaps I can avoid feeling just how powerless I was. A compassionate therapy does not simply dismiss guilt, but neither does it allow the person to be endlessly punished by it. It gently explores what the guilt may be carrying: love, regret, responsibility, anger, helplessness, or an old pattern of feeling responsible for everyone else.

Some losses are complicated by the nature of the relationship.

Not every bereavement is straightforward. A person may grieve someone they loved deeply but also felt hurt by. They may grieve a parent who was emotionally absent, critical or frightening. They may grieve a partner after a relationship that was both intimate and difficult. They may grieve someone from whom they were estranged.

In these situations, mourning can feel confusing. The person may think, “Why am I so upset when the relationship was so painful?” Or, “Why do I feel relief?” Or, “Why do I still want their love?” Therapy can help make space for these mixed feelings without judgement. Human relationships are rarely simple, and grief often reveals the full complexity of love, dependency, disappointment and longing.

Attachment is also important in understanding bereavement. When we lose someone who has been part of our emotional world, the loss can touch very early needs for safety, comfort and connection. A person may feel abandoned, even when they know intellectually that death is not abandonment. They may feel younger, more frightened, or more dependent than they expected. They may feel ashamed of needing others.

A pluralistic and integrative therapist can work with this in different ways. Sometimes the work may be reflective and exploratory, helping the person understand the emotional meaning of the loss. Sometimes it may be more supportive and stabilising, helping them get through the week. Sometimes it may involve practical attention to routines, sleep, food, work and support networks. Sometimes it may involve helping the person speak honestly about feelings they have had to hide from others.

This flexibility matters because grief changes from week to week. At first, there may be shock and practical demands. Later, when other people begin to return to normal, the bereaved person may feel the loss more sharply. There can be a loneliness when the world seems to move on too quickly. People may stop asking. The messages may slow down. Yet internally, the grief may still be very alive.

Anniversaries, birthdays, holidays and ordinary routines can also bring grief back with force. A date in the calendar can carry emotional weight long before the person consciously realises why they feel unsettled. The first Christmas, the first birthday, the first anniversary of the death, or even a familiar season can reopen the pain of loss. Therapy can help someone prepare for these moments, not by trying to make them painless, but by helping the person approach them with care.

Rituals can sometimes help. Lighting a candle, visiting a place, writing a letter, cooking a familiar meal, listening to a piece of music, or simply naming the person who has died can offer a way of continuing the bond. For some people, rituals are private. For others, they are shared with family or friends. The important thing is not that grief is performed correctly, but that the loss is given some form of recognition.

Bereavement can also affect identity. A person may no longer be a husband, wife, partner, daughter, son, carer, sibling, or friend in quite the same way. They may have organised their life around the person who has died. This can be especially true after a long period of caring for someone. When the caring role ends, there may be grief, exhaustion, relief and emptiness.

The question “Who am I now?” may feel frightening. This is not selfish. It is part of loss.

When someone dies, we lose not only them, but also the version of ourselves that existed in relation to them. Therapy can help a person slowly find themselves again, without feeling that doing so betrays the person who has died.

Family dynamics can also become more visible after a death. People grieve differently, and this can cause tension. One person may want to talk openly, while another becomes practical and silent. One person may appear to cope, while another falls apart. Old roles may return: the responsible one, the angry one, the invisible one, the one who holds everyone together. A systemic sensitivity can be useful here, because bereavement happens not just inside one person, but within families and relationships.

Sometimes people come to therapy because they feel they are grieving “wrong”. They may feel too emotional, not emotional enough, too angry, too numb, too preoccupied, or too changed. I think it is important to challenge the idea that grief has to look a certain way. Mourning is not a straight line. It can come in waves. A person may feel stable one day and devastated the next. They may laugh and then feel guilty for laughing. They may have moments of peace and then suddenly feel overwhelmed in a supermarket aisle.

This does not mean they are going backwards. It means they are grieving.

A psychodynamic way of working can help by listening for what is beneath the surface. What does this loss mean? What has been stirred? What remains unsaid? What part of the person feels alone? What earlier experiences does this resemble? How has this person learned to manage pain, need, anger or dependency? What kind of relationship with the lost person is now being carried internally?

At the same time, an integrative approach keeps the work grounded. It asks what might help now. Does the person need emotional exploration, or do they first need rest and stabilisation? Do they need to talk about the past, or find a way to get through the next few days? Do they need to understand their guilt, or do they need support in being kinder to themselves? Do they need silence, structure, memory, meaning, or simply the experience of not being alone?

Good therapy for bereavement does not impose an answer.

It accompanies the person as they find their own way through the loss. It respects the depth of the bond and the difficulty of the absence. It allows for love and anger, sorrow and relief, memory and forgetting, closeness and distance.

Over time, grief may not disappear, but it may change. The loss may become less sharp, less constantly present, less overwhelming. The person may begin to feel moments of interest, connection or aliveness again. This can sometimes bring guilt, as though living means leaving the person behind. Therapy can help hold the truth that continuing to live does not mean the loss mattered any less.

Mourning is a deeply human process. It asks something of us that we would often rather not face: that love makes us vulnerable, that life changes without our permission, and that some absences cannot be filled. But it can also reveal the depth of attachment, the importance of memory, and the ways we carry people within us.

In a pluralistic and integrative therapy, using a psychodynamic lens, bereavement can be approached with both compassion and depth. The work may include practical support, emotional expression, exploration of family patterns, attention to the body, attachment, guilt, anger, depression, anxiety, meaning and memory. But at the heart of it is something simple and important: the bereaved person is given a place where their loss can be spoken, felt and understood.

Loss does not need to be made neat. It needs to be met.

And sometimes, when grief is given enough space, the person does not exactly move on, but begins to move with it. They find a way to carry the person they have lost, while also slowly returning to their own life. Not because the love has ended, and not because the loss has stopped mattering, but because mourning has gradually found a place inside them where it can be held with a little more tenderness.