There is no single right path towards healing. What offers one person something to hold on to may not feel helpful to another. It can therefore be worthwhile to remain open to healthy forms of support that may ease the burden, help us understand our loss and gradually guide us back towards life.
Seek Personalised Professional Guidance
Before choosing a therapeutic or self-exploratory approach, take time to learn about its purpose, scientific foundations, potential benefits, limitations and possible risks from several independent and professionally reliable sources.
Whenever possible, ask a psychologist, psychiatrist, psychotherapist or another appropriately qualified professional with experience in bereavement to help you consider which form of support may be best suited to your current emotional state, the circumstances of your loss and your individual needs.
Check the Practitioner’s Qualifications
When considering a particular method, look for recognised professional organisations, accredited training institutions and respected practitioners in your local area.
Check the practitioner’s qualifications, method-specific training and professional experience. It is also important to ask whether they have appropriate experience in working with grief and, where relevant, trauma.
Professional titles such as “therapist”, “coach”, “facilitator” or “grief companion” may represent very different levels of training and professional authority from one country to another. On their own, these titles do not necessarily indicate that someone is a qualified psychologist or psychotherapist.
Before Your First Meeting
Ask about the aims of the process, what the sessions are likely to involve, how long the work may continue, the fees, confidentiality arrangements, the practitioner’s qualifications and how strong emotional reactions or a possible crisis would be managed.
It is important that you feel safe and respected within the therapeutic relationship, receive information that you can understand, have the freedom to ask questions and can say at any time if an exercise or method feels too overwhelming.
You have the right to ask for a pause, seek a second professional opinion or choose a different practitioner or therapeutic approach.
Seek Immediate Help in a Crisis
Exercises practised at home, books, groups and creative self-help activities can offer valuable additional support, but they are not a substitute for professional assessment and treatment.
If you are experiencing intense traumatic memories, panic, persistent sleep disturbance, severe depression, thoughts of self-harm or suicide, a significant deterioration in your ability to manage everyday life, or grief that remains prolonged and is becoming increasingly distressing, it is especially important to seek help from a qualified mental health or healthcare professional as soon as possible.
If you are in immediate danger or facing an urgent crisis, contact your local emergency service or crisis support service without delay.
Which Form of Support Might Be Right for You?
Both individual attention and the companionship of others who have experienced loss can hold immense value in grief.
Individual support offers a safe space in which to focus on your own story, feelings and questions. In a group, you may encounter something grieving people often miss most deeply: the knowledge that you are not alone.
We frequently recognise parts of ourselves in other people’s stories. Shared understanding, acceptance and compassionate presence may become sources of strength that can be difficult to find in isolation.
The approaches below support grief in different ways. The list is not exhaustive, does not establish an order of preference, and no description should be understood as a personalised therapeutic recommendation. An approach that has helped one person may not be suitable for every situation or every grieving individual.
They are not tools that can answer every question, but possibilities—forms of support that may help you reconnect with yourself, your emotions and, ultimately, with life.
Individual Therapy and Supportive Counselling
Every experience of grief is unique, and no two stories of loss are exactly alike. Individual counselling or therapy offers a safe, non-judgemental space in which the attention is centred on you. It can allow you to express thoughts and emotions that you may be unable—or simply not ready—to share with others.
Working with a qualified professional may help you understand the natural processes of grief, recognise your own strengths and resources, and gradually establish a new inner balance. Over time, the loss may no longer be present solely as pain, but may find a place within the wider story of your life.
Bereavement Support Groups
One of the most difficult aspects of grief can be the sense of isolation. Many bereaved people feel that no one can truly understand what they are going through. In a grief group, you can meet others who have come to understand this language through their own experiences of loss.
Shared stories, attentive listening and mutual acceptance can create a supportive community in which you do not have to appear strong. You may discover that you are not alone and that other people’s experiences can offer hope and companionship as you find your own way forward.
Bodywork Groups
Grief places a strain not only on our emotional world, but also on the body. After a loss, people may experience physical symptoms such as tightness in the chest, muscular tension, exhaustion, disrupted sleep or a sense that something within them has become “stuck”.
Bodywork is a body-centred approach that can help us reconnect with physical sensations, recognise patterns of tension and gradually create space for release. When the body begins to experience greater ease, the emotional self may also find it easier to move gently towards healing.
Somatodrama
The body may hold stories that are difficult to express in words. Somatodrama is an experiential self-awareness method that draws on the perceived wisdom of the body to help participants move closer to their inner processes.
Through dramatic techniques and embodied experiences, it may become possible to view the loss from a different perspective, recognise recurring internal patterns and reconnect with inner resources that can offer support during grief.
Psychodrama—Encountering What Remained Unspoken
Some emotions and sentences remain within us for years: farewells that were never spoken, conversations left unfinished, anger held back, love that was never fully expressed, or an inner experience that needs to be given a visible place in the room.
Psychodrama can provide a safe, facilitated setting in which these experiences are given form. Through role-play and other dramatic techniques, inner experiences that may be difficult to access through conversation alone can become more tangible and available for reflection.
For some people, this approach may help them discover new meaning within their loss, explore unfinished stories and develop a deeper connection with themselves.
Art Therapy
Art therapy offers a safe way to connect with inner feelings and experiences through drawing, painting, clay work, collage or other forms of creative expression.
No artistic training or talent is required. The emphasis is not on the finished artwork, but on the process: how creating something may give shape to what feels unspeakable, reveal a different perspective on the loss and gradually open space for healing.
Mindfulness- and Self-Compassion-Based Groups
Mindfulness practices can help us observe our thoughts, emotions and physical reactions without judgement and without being entirely swept away by them.
Self-compassion teaches us to respond to ourselves during loss with the same kindness, patience and understanding that we might offer to a beloved friend. In a group setting, shared practice and the presence of others with similar experiences may deepen feelings of safety, acceptance and connection.
Family and Couples Therapy
A loss rarely affects only one person. Every member of a family grieves differently, moves at a different pace and expresses emotion in their own way. Even within the strongest relationships, these differences can lead to misunderstanding, conflict or emotional distance.
Family and couples therapy can help people understand these differences, improve communication and find a new balance in which each person’s grief is given space.
It may be particularly valuable following the death of a child or parent, during grief related to separation or divorce, or after any loss that profoundly affects the entire family system.
KIP—Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy
KIP, or Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy, is a psychodynamic method that uses guided imagery to help people explore deeper inner experiences. In English-speaking contexts, it is also known as Guided Affective Imagery.
During a session, the therapist may introduce a simple motif—such as a landscape, a stream, a tree or a place associated with safety—and then accompany the client as the inner images begin to unfold.
The participant does not follow a predetermined story. Instead, they move through the landscape of their own imagination while the therapist supports the process through attentive presence and carefully considered questions. The imagery may later be explored through conversation, drawing or another form of creative reflection.
In grief, KIP may allow emotions that are difficult to express in words to take on a symbolic form. The images may contain absence, anger, guilt, a shared memory, an unfinished farewell or an inner reflection of the relationship with the person who died.
They may also help us recognise the resources, experiences of safety and precious memories that remain within us and can be carried forward.
It is important to understand that KIP is not simply a relaxation exercise or a form of visualisation intended for independent use at home. It is a psychotherapeutic method facilitated by an appropriately trained professional.
Because imagery can bring intense emotions and traumatic memories to the surface, a suitably qualified therapist, a safe therapeutic framework and a pace adapted to the individual’s emotional capacity are especially important.
Direct research evidence concerning KIP specifically in bereavement remains limited. It is therefore best presented as an individualised therapeutic possibility rather than a method proven to be suitable for every grieving person.
EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing
Some losses bring not only grief, but trauma. Following a sudden death, an accident, suicide, the death of a child, distressing experiences in intensive care or witnessing a loved one’s suffering, intrusive images, memories or physical reactions may return again and again.
EMDR is an established psychotherapeutic approach used in the treatment of trauma-related symptoms. Through structured attention and bilateral stimulation, it aims to help the brain process distressing memories so that they gradually lose some of their overwhelming emotional intensity.
EMDR is not intended to diminish the memory of the person who died. Instead, it may help reduce the intensity of traumatic memories connected with the circumstances of the death, allowing the person to engage more fully with the wider and natural process of mourning.
It may be especially relevant for those who feel repeatedly pulled back into distressing images or circumstances surrounding the loss and find that these experiences are making it difficult to move forward.
Important noteThe methods and reading recommendations presented on this website are intended to inform and support. The list is not exhaustive, does not establish an order of preference, and no description should be understood as a personalised therapeutic recommendation. An approach that has helped one person may not be suitable for every situation or every grieving individual.
If you feel that the pain of loss has become too difficult to carry alone, please do not remain isolated. Share what you are feeling with someone you trust, and do not hesitate to seek professional support. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness, but an important step towards healing.
References
- J. William Worden: Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner, 5th edition. Springer Publishing Company, 2018.
- William G. Hoy: Bereavement Groups and the Role of Social Support: Integrating Theory, Research, and Practice. Routledge, 2016.
- Babette Rothschild: The Body Remembers, Volume 2: Revolutionizing Trauma Treatment. W. W. Norton, 2017.
- Bessel van der Kolk: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
- Nancy S. James and Scott Giacomucci: Experiential Action Methods and Tools for Healing Grief and Loss-Related Trauma: Life, Death, and Transformation. Routledge, 2022.
- Barbara E. Thompson and Robert A. Neimeyer, editors: Grief and the Expressive Arts: Practices for Creating Meaning. Routledge, 2014.
- Froma Walsh and Monica McGoldrick, editors: Living Beyond Loss: Death in the Family, 2nd edition. W. W. Norton, 2004.
- Roger M. Solomon: EMDR Therapy Treatment for Grief and Mourning: Transforming the Connection to the Deceased Loved One. Oxford University Press, 2024.
