11/04/2025
Grief is not a diagnosis...rather it is a time when human beings need compassionate presence.
For far too long, grief has been treated as abnormal, especially under traumatic circumstances. Today, normal reactions to extraordinary tragedy are being diagnosed, contained, or corrected by systems of supposed-care.
But, as I have said for more than three decades, grief is not a disorder that needs to be fixed or abbreviated or rushed. This type of coercion is imperialist coercion, and it adds to the extreme loneliness and despair that many grievers report.
When clinicians view those who are bereaved as problems they need to fix, they fail to see the sacredness of deep emotional experiences. Right after my own child died, I wrote, "Our love is worth every tear I shed." That remains true today; for me, and for anyone who has lost someone so beloved that our 'house' has become a 'house' of sorrow.
True caring of the bereaved begins with reverence and compassion, not with symptom management and "treatment". Most bereaved need others to willingly sit beside them as they bear the unbearable.
We must change the pedagogical models and cultural responses to those who are bereaved. We have to change the lexicon. Bereaved parents, for example, don't usually appreciate the words “dysfunctional” or "disordered“ or "excessive" as it relates to their grief. And, importantly, every word either opens or closes the heart.
In one of my study's findings, the least helpful 'strategy' of therapists, amongst four other points, was the therapists' attempt to 'find meaning' for the client. This is bad therapy, and I encourage clients to find another therapist if they are being pushed toward meaning-making.
In the Compassionate Bereavement Care (tm) provider training (30 CEUs available), we teach clinicians how to let meaning emerge. How to invite stories that help clients process deep, traumatic grief, instead of imposing their own interpretations of the loss. We teach them when and how to ask about the love, the regrets, the fragments of beauty that still flicker - and the moments of terror that still rage - in the context of a resonantly safe relationship. We teach them how to listen for the mourner’s language and culture and context, not using the clinician’s standards or understandings or diagnostic systems of harm. We teach clinicians to practice sacred silence and sacred presence. We teach how to release the urge to direct or fix: silence will do her quiet work. We teach clinicians to bear witness to sorrow as an act of love, not pathology.
Caring for others in a professional or para-professional role is not a "treatment" for bereavement. Caring for others is an ethic, a way of seeing, bearing witness to tragedies that elude the conception of most.
For clinicians to honor grief is to remember that the one who mourns is not broken, but faithfully still loving, even when who they so deeply love is gone. The question is not how to make grief smaller but how to make our presence worthy of its immensity.
With compassion for all,
Dr. Jo
** Next training is April of 2026. More information can be found here: https://www.missfoundation.org/compassionate-bereavement-care-certification/ **
Please share if you know a clinician or peer counselor who may benefit from this training (online and in person, though I LOVE the in-person option because its held Selah Carefarm )
