Grief counselling: a love story
Therapy Today, March 2023

Counselling offers a rare and protected space where the bereaved person can voice and experience grief in a society that tends to favour a short and private grieving process, and where our lives as workers and consumers are expected to be quickly resumed after a loss. In this article, we explore the idea of grief as the endurance and transformation of love following its initial displacement by death and loss. We consider grief counselling as a process through which love transforms and endures via the telling of the grief story. Space to express, narrate and make sense of this experience in grief counselling is part of a creative reinvention of this love and ultimately a wider creative reinvention of the self to accommodate the loss, practically, emotionally, psychologically and existentially.

Informed by changing models of grief, counselling has begun to shift away from understandings based on earlier phased models of grief, such as Kübler-Ross’s five-stage model.¹ While it is helpful in identifying and normalising elements of grief experience, there has been a recognition that such staged models can establish normative expectations for the experience of grief that do not reflect individual variations. More recent developments in the field have articulated a complex and nuanced dual process of grieving and coping that can lead to overload as the bereaved are faced with multiple stressors.^2,3 In Tonkin’s ‘fried egg’ model of grief, the yolk represents the loss and the egg white is post-grief growth.⁴ The loss remains a part of the person but is accommodated. More recently, Samuel’s pillars of strength model emphasises the need to support rather than resolve grief through expressing feelings and reflecting on the changed relationship with the deceased and with the self, while addressing the somatic effects of grief.⁵

When developing our own model, we considered the need to capture a process while navigating the limitations of prescriptive or linear phases.⁶ We recognise that, although much can be commonly experienced, each person grieves in their own unique way. We liked the idea of grief as a story that unfolds and develops. Each page or chapter only fully makes sense as part of the wider story. Counselling aims to accompany and support the client in their grief, providing a space for them to piece their story together in a meaningful way. We may not yet really believe it is our story, that this is happening to us and our loved ones. It is often in the telling and retelling that the reality of the loss begins to sink in.

Our LOVE model articulates how love transforms and endures during the process of grief therapy. The title LOVE is not meant to be an acronym for separate phases; it is one word, love, with each letter a part of the whole. The process referred to is part of the client’s whole experience of grief and therapeutic grief work, with each component interlinked. The bereaved may seem to occupy one or more components at different points within grief therapy, and this may not be a linear process. The model assumes the potential for adaptation to grief rather than a phased resolution. It is intended to articulate general tendencies that may vary widely between individuals rather than prescribe a uniform way of working through grief.

The model integrates experiential processing and Jungian and narrative theories, and articulates the processing of emotional, psychological and somatic experience in response to external life events. It does this through allowing the experience fully into awareness and making sense of it by attaching a narrative within grief counselling. The model draws on White and Epston’s work on narrative therapy.⁷ It is underpinned by Rogers’ idea that processing our real experience fully into awareness can reduce psychological distress,⁸ and by Jung’s concept of creative illness – that inner turmoil can, through a process of psychological integration, lead to creative reinvention of the self.⁹ We view the storytelling process in grief therapy as the central catalyst for processing and integration.

The model involves four stages:

1. Loss
2. Orientation
3. Variation
4. Endurance

1 Loss of love – tell the story

The loss stage is concerned with the telling of the grief story to the counsellor. The main characters are introduced and the scene is set as we get the backstory of the relationship, the life before the loss, and hear of events surrounding the death or the moment the loss occurred. This could be illness, an accident or the moment bad news was received. There may be an idealised or censored story, with pressure to ‘not speak ill of the dead’. The person grieving can be in survival mode at this point, trying to process overwhelming events while dealing with the practicalities of death, such as planning the funeral and coping financially, alongside trying to process existential anxiety as the reality of mortality and impermanence unfolds. Love is often devastated by loss as an emotionally apocalyptic event. Clients are piecing together an unassimilated story to try to make sense of it through beginning to process powerful feelings of guilt, denial and loss of control.

2 Orientation – retell and develop

Orientation to grief is the beginning of a process of adaptation and regeneration. In the narrative process, the retelling of the story allows processing and sense-making to continue as the story develops further. Subplots and nuances in the story emerge – there may be more detailed characterisation and ‘plot twists’ such as family secrets, abuse and affairs. We can begin to get more of the full, uncensored story rather than the initial idealisation of the loved one.

In the grief process, love endures and begins a process of transformation, needing to find a new form or place in the person’s emotional and psychological landscape. The bereaved need to consider a new way of being in the world without the physical presence of the loved one. Clients may feel a loss of secure attachment and sense of self, and possibly a need to rethink identity and consider who they are without the loved one. The client’s sense of a stable, static or predictable world can be undermined. The unexpected intrusiveness and intensity of our own feelings during grief can feel very disorientating. There can be a sense of feeling lost at sea and drifting through depression, with bouts of intense emotions such as anger, irritability, suicidal feelings, anxiety and a sense of futility and ‘craziness’. Hope undergoes a process of transformation. There is a need to let go of old hopes that the loved one could survive, while new hopes for the future need to emerge, but this is difficult as it necessarily involves life without the loved one.

Orientation in grief therapy may be facilitated by creative approaches such as writing or journalling, and the use of photo narratives or drawings. Focusing can aid the processing of affective states through exploring embodied emotions. Offering a protected space to cry and begin to piece the story together can help clients to release feelings, attach a narrative and make sense of the experience.⁹

3 Variation – adapt the story, love transforms

Variation through telling and retelling the story creates space and narrative for love in the client’s life story as they work through the loss. Love transforms as the story is adapted and developed into one where it endures. Most importantly the focus is not on reaching a point where the love story is silenced or no longer told. Permission is given for juxtaposition within the story, and to tell the story from different narratives. Adaptations emerge in the story as the client’s identity and relationship with self and world begin to transform. The beginnings of a new narrative emerge as part of a creative process of self-reinvention. Jung discussed the idea of ‘creative illness’, using the word illness to refer to psychological distress, and a sign that the elements of our psyche are not in homeostatic balance and that we are stuck.9 Illness is a creative process of reintegration of parts of the self under abnormal, difficult or overwhelming circumstances, part of a process of individuation or maturation and becoming a healthy whole. In this way, psychological distress may be viewed as part of an adaptive, creative process of self-reinvention.

Similarly, Rogers viewed psychological distress and the process clients undergo in counselling as the breakdown and reorganisation of the self-structure so that our ideas about self and world match our real experience more closely.8 As part of the process of transformation and endurance, love is reassimilated into the person’s identity, as the relationship to self, world and loved one is reconfigured. This is the adaptive function of self-actualisation, allowing love to be accommodated in a different way and explaining the physical absence of the person in the world.

Therapeutically, a balance of narrative that encompasses resilience and perspective is created. Narrative themes that emerge may involve consideration of the legacy of the deceased and how the client fits into that, along with acceptance of their own mortality and reflections on creating their own legacy. The counsellor bears witness and validates feelings. Techniques such as creating a memory box or visual narrative can help with establishing a sense of legacy. The client’s process may continue between sessions through dreams and nightmares and seemingly meaningful coincidences. Exploring experiences with curiosity and considering what they mean to the client in their own frame of reference can aid processing and sense-making.

4 Endurance – telling the new story; love endures

Love endures through the creative and adaptive process of retelling the story in a way that transforms the self and love for the deceased into something new. The loved one becomes loved as an absent presence in the client’s life – as a memory or spirit, depending on one’s beliefs, or through legacy. The counsellor may need to shift into supporting the client’s transition into emerging aspects of their life, identity or way of being. This is an ongoing process of accommodating the loss into their life, rather than the end of the story, as new chapters may be written in the context of the wider story.

Grief is a love story that needs to be told and retold until it sinks in. Through the telling of the story we can connect with the visceral feelings associated with the loss of love. Through connecting with these feelings, experiential processing, psychological integration and ultimately sense-making take place. Meaning is attached through narratives to make sense of the senseless, find beginnings in endings and a way to live with the previously unthinkable. Love brings the possibility of loss, but the intensity of this experience is often underestimated until directly experienced. The sense of ‘going crazy’ during grief that some describe can lead to viewing grief as pathology. We hope this model can serve as a reminder that grief is love – a painful but adaptive part of human experience.

* The case studies are fictionalised and do not describe real case examples.