Working with Bereavement
- Billi Silverstein
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
I work with bereavement in my psychotherapy practice with a degree of caution and humility. It has always felt like stepping into a realm where words lose their capacity to comfort, and yet, where silence can feel equally intolerable. Grief occupies a strange psychological territory. It resists the linear progression we so often wish to impose upon emotional healing. Instead, it seeps into the ordinary rhythms of life, becoming woven into our patterns of thought and behaviour in ways both subtle and profound.
In Western society, we tend to treat grief as a problem to be resolved, a process to be completed, or a chapter to be closed. This clinical neatness may offer a semblance of control, but it often denies the truth that mourning is not an event with an endpoint. It is a state of being that reconfigures one’s relationship with self and with the world. I have observed that unresolved grief often manifests as a pervasive dullness, a muted quality in one’s emotional range, an erosion of vitality. People may mistake this for recovery when, in fact, it is a quiet surrender to absence.
In contrast, I have long admired cultures in which loss is ritualised through colour, music and collective celebration. In parts of Mexico, for instance, death is greeted not with solemnity but with reverence and continuity. The Day of the Dead is not a denial of pain but a dialogue with it, allowing memory and joy to coexist. Such traditions seem to permit a psychological integration of loss that is both grounding and life affirming.
Perhaps the task, then, is not to conquer grief but to learn to live alongside it. To recognise its presence not as pathology but as a reminder of attachment, meaning and love that persists beyond absence.
Grief and bereavement, though often spoken of in tandem, are not quite synonymous. Bereavement refers to the external condition of having lost someone, the factual state of absence that alters the structure of a person’s world. Grief, however, is the internal landscape that follows, a subjective and deeply personal response to that loss. One may be bereaved yet not consciously grieving, just as one may continue to grieve long after bereavement has passed into the past tense of life. In psychotherapy, the distinction matters. Bereavement demands adjustment to circumstance; grief requires integration of meaning. One is situational, the other existential, and both demand compassion.
In psychotherapy, we explore diversity of experience with empathy and without judgement.
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