How to Grieve: What It Actually Means, and Tools to Help Clients Do It
"How do I grieve?" is one of the most common questions clients ask, and it usually stems from feeling like they're doing it wrong. Grieving isn't a single task or stage to complete or a feeling to get through; it's an ongoing process of adjusting to a death while staying connected to the person who died. Therapists can help clients understand what that process actually involves, and give them concrete tools to move forward with love rather than pain.
What does "grieving" actually mean?
Grieving is a normal, natural reaction to loss. It is not something to get over, but learn to live with. There is no specific ending, and it doesn’t follow a set of stages or timeline. It's the active, ongoing work of adjusting to life without someone physically present, learning new routines, tolerating painful memories and emotions, and figuring out how to stay connected to that person in a different way. It includes practical adjustment (who handles the tasks the person used to do) and emotional adjustment (tolerating waves of sadness, anger, guilt, or relief) at the same time, and clients often experience both simultaneously rather than in a clean, sequential order.
A client who is laughing at a memory one hour and sobbing the next isn't grieving wrong; they're doing exactly what grief looks like.
Why do clients need tools instead of just "time"?
I had a client who came to me after seeing another therapist; she told me I need more than just being told: “It’s going to take time.” Time alone doesn't do the work of grief. Clients need active coping skills to deal with the waves of grief and ways to tolerate the pain that don't require them to shut it down or get consumed by it.
The dual process model of coping with bereavement (Stroebe & Schut) describes grieving as an oscillation between two kinds of coping: loss-oriented coping, which involves confronting and processing the pain of the death directly, and restoration-oriented coping, which involves attending to the practical and life changes the death has created. This is what grief looks like and a great visual to share with your clients to help them understand that what they are feeling is normal and they aren’t “crazy,” as many grieving individuals think.
This gives clinicians a useful lens: instead of asking whether a client is "processing enough," ask whether they're able to move between confronting the loss and re-engaging with daily life, or whether they're stuck exclusively on one side.
A note on traumatic grief
Not every death allows a client to move straight into this kind of oscillating grief work — and clinicians need to assess for that before applying any of the tools below. When a death was sudden, violent, or otherwise traumatic, the nervous system is often still in a trauma response: hypervigilance, intrusive images, dissociation, or an inability to tolerate even thinking about the death without becoming flooded. In these cases, grief work has to wait. The priority is stabilization and trauma processing first, building safety and regulation, and addressing the traumatic material itself, often with trauma-focused modalities like EMDR or Brainspotting before the client has the capacity to do the oscillating, reflective work that grieving requires. Pushing loss-oriented grief work onto a still-traumatized nervous system tends to retraumatize rather than help.
A framework for facilitating grief work
So once a client has the capacity to do this oscillating work, what does it actually look like in session? Rather than a checklist of isolated techniques, Karyn Arnold and I, through our work as the GRIEF Ladies, built the G.R.I.E.F. Framework as a structure clinicians can use to organize that work across the areas grief actually touches, including physical, practical, relational, emotional, and existential:
G — GROUNDING (PHYSICAL WELL-BEING) Addressing basic needs: sleep, nutrition, and movement, with the intention of finding more energy, anywhere we can find it.
R — REBUILDING (ROUTINE & STRUCTURE) Creating new patterns and structures to anchor daily life.
I — INTERACTING (COMMUNICATION & RELATIONSHIPS) Rebuilding connections and learning to communicate about loss.
E — EVOLVING (SELF-ESTEEM & PROCESSING ROADBLOCK EMOTIONS) Developing tools to navigate the emotional landscape of grief, including the very complex "roadblocks" of grief: anger, guilt, and regret.
F — FINDING (MEANING, PURPOSE & WHAT COMES NEXT) Looking at "purpose" in a new way: feeling useful and figuring out what's next.
Used together, these five areas give clinicians a way to check in on the whole picture of a client's grief, rather than defaulting to whichever piece feels most urgent in the moment.
Much of the clinical work in grief isn't teaching a technique; it's helping clients let go of the expectation that grieving should look orderly, fast, or complete. Once a client understands that oscillating between confronting the loss and living their life is the process working, not the process failing, the framework above becomes much easier to use.
Grieving isn't a problem to solve; it’s a process to move through. Clients don't need to be told to "let it out" or to "give it time." They need tools that help them do both the emotional and practical work of adjusting, at their own pace, in their own way.
Want to learn more about working with grieving clients? Check out these on-demand trainings through EngagedMinds Continuing Education
10 Things Graduate School Didn’t Teach You About Grief and Loss: https://courses.engagedmindsce.com/courses/10-things-graduate-school-didnt-teach-you-about-grief-and-loss
Grief-Informed Professional Certification: Tools and Techniques for Effective Therapy: https://courses.engagedmindsce.com/courses/grief-informed-professional-certification-tools-and-techniques-for-effective-therapy
Want to learn more about the GRIEF Ladies? Check out www.griefladies.com
