Carrying Grief Together: How Group Therapy Can Help Us Live With Loss

There is something profoundly solitary about grief. Even when we are surrounded by people who love us, loss can leave us separated from the ordinary world. Life continues: people work, make plans, laugh, complain about the weather and decide what to have for dinner, while something fundamental in our own world has changed. The person we loved may no longer be there; a relationship may have ended; a family may have fractured; a future we imagined may have disappeared. Sometimes the loss is less visible but no less significant: health, identity, home, belonging, youth, purpose, certainty, or a version of ourselves we can no longer inhabit. From my perspective as a therapist, grief is not simply sadness. It is the emotional and psychological experience of learning how to live in a world that is no longer quite the world we knew.

Although grief is deeply personal, I have increasingly come to believe it was never meant to be entirely private. For much of human history, grief belonged partly to the community, held through rituals, gatherings, funerals, mourning and remembrance. Contemporary life can be less generous. There is often an unspoken expectation that grief should gradually become less visible and that, after an acceptable period, we should return to normal. Compassion may be plentiful immediately after a death, separation or significant loss, but weeks and months later the world inevitably moves on. The grieving person may not.

This is one reason I find group therapy for grief and loss so powerful. A therapy group cannot remove grief, nor should it try. Instead, it creates something grief frequently needs: a place where it can exist without being hurried, explained away or made comfortable for other people. Grief is not a psychological problem waiting for the correct solution. Very often it is evidence that something mattered. We grieve because we have loved, belonged, hoped, attached and invested parts of ourselves in people and possibilities beyond ourselves. In a group, that evidence can be witnessed by others who understand, in their own different ways, what it means to have loved and lost.

When something significant is lost, its psychological presence does not necessarily disappear with its physical absence. Carl Jung’s idea of individuation is useful here because it is not about becoming invulnerable, but about becoming more whole through encountering difficult and unwanted parts of experience (Jung, 1969). Grief can ask precisely this of us. Something has ended, yet we remain, and gradually the question may change from How do I get over this? to something more complex: Who am I now that this has happened?

A group holds that question differently from individual therapy because the therapist is no longer the only witness. When six or eight people sit together, each carrying their own relationship with loss, something particular begins to emerge. At first, people notice their differences: a bereavement, estrangement, divorce, illness, redundancy, the loss of a friendship, or the life they expected to have. Yet as the group develops, those differences sit alongside more universal experiences of longing, anger, guilt, relief, loneliness, regret, fear and love.

This is where the wonder of group therapy can reveal itself. Someone speaks aloud something another person has privately thought but never dared to say. A feeling that seemed shameful becomes recognisable when somebody else describes it. One person admits to relief after a death and discovers that nobody condemns them. Another is furious with the person who has died. Someone laughs while remembering something ridiculous, and laughter becomes permissible alongside sorrow. Someone cries and nobody rushes to stop them or insist that everything will be fine. These moments may seem small, yet they can be profound because grief is so often complicated by what we believe we are supposed to feel.

Petruska Clarkson’s understanding of the therapeutic relationship helps explain what happens here. Clarkson (1990) described five relational dimensions in psychotherapy, including the working alliance, reparative relationship, person-to-person relationship and transpersonal relationship. In a therapy group these possibilities multiply, because healing is not located solely between therapist and client. Members can become witnesses, mirrors, companions and challengers for one another. We recognise ourselves through other people while also discovering that another person’s experience may be profoundly different from our own. Difference and similarity learn to occupy the same room.

This matters because loss itself is relational. We do not only grieve people; we grieve who we were with them. The death of a parent can mean losing one of the few people who remembered us as a child. The ending of a partnership can mean losing not only another person but the future self we imagined becoming alongside them. Estrangement can mean grieving somebody who remains alive but psychologically unavailable. Retirement, redundancy or illness can bring grief for a role through which we understood ourselves. Every meaningful ending alters something about how we know ourselves, and sometimes we need other people to help us discover what remains.

A group can also challenge the hierarchy we unconsciously create around suffering. People often minimise their grief because somebody else’s loss appears greater: I shouldn’t feel like this because other people have been through much worse. Yet grief resists comparison. What matters psychologically is not simply what happened, but what the person, relationship or possibility represented. A therapeutic group is not a place for deciding whose suffering is most legitimate. Its task is to become curious about meaning: what was lost, what remains, what has been disrupted and what the person now finds themselves carrying.

Grief can strip away many of the assumptions through which we live. It reminds us, sometimes brutally, that loving another person exposes us to the possibility of losing them and that certainty is more fragile than we imagine. Existential therapy does not require us to turn suffering into a lesson. It asks us to meet experience honestly and consider what it means to continue living from within it.

I am wary of narratives that rush towards transformation after loss. We can become so eager to find meaning that meaning itself becomes another way of avoiding grief. Sometimes there is no lesson to be learned. Sometimes what happened was simply devastating, unfair or unwanted. A psychologically mature group must be able to remain with this too, without immediately searching for hope, gratitude or a silver lining. As a therapist, I think this restraint matters: the group’s task is not to make grief acceptable, but to make it bearable enough to be shared.

Grief often reveals multiplicity. One part of us wants to move forward while another refuses to let go. We may feel devastated and relieved, lonely and desperate to be left alone, frightened of forgetting someone while longing for a day when remembering does not hurt as much. These positions are not contradictions to be solved. They may be different truths asking to be held together.

The therapist’s role is not to manage grief out of the room, but to help create the conditions in which it can be spoken, heard and thought about safely. This means attending not only to what each person says, but to how the group responds: where silence appears, where reassurance comes too quickly, where comparison enters, where shame softens, and where one person’s courage makes it possible for another to speak.

Over the life of a group, trust accumulates. People remember one another’s stories and notice subtle changes. Someone who could barely speak about their loss begins to find words. Someone who has spent their life caring for others allows themselves, perhaps awkwardly, to receive care. Another realises how much energy they have spent reassuring friends and family that they are “fine” because their continuing grief might feel exhausting or inconvenient. Within the group they discover that grief does not have to be edited quite so carefully.

This may be one of the quiet wonders of group therapy: we discover that our pain can be witnessed without destroying the people who witness it. Another person’s grief does not diminish our own. Sorrow and humour can occupy the same conversation. We can feel deeply for somebody else without having to rescue them. In a group, the catalytic relationship exists in several directions at once. We can be held by others and discover our capacity to hold others too.

For me, one of the most important understandings in grief work is that healing does not necessarily mean leaving behind what we have lost. The idea of “moving on” can imply an abandonment that many grieving people understandably resist. I prefer to think about movement with grief. The relationship changes. The intensity changes. Our capacity around it changes. What has happened becomes woven into our continuing life rather than erased from it.

The healing possibility of the group is therefore not that grief disappears. It is that grief no longer has to exist only in isolation. What has been carried privately can be spoken, witnessed and held within relationship. We may begin to understand that the people and experiences we have loved can remain part of us without becoming the entirety of who we are, and that continuing to live does not require forgetting.

For anyone considering joining a grief and loss group, the invitation is not to arrive with grief already organised or made acceptable. It is enough to arrive as you are: uncertain, angry, numb, articulate, confused, guarded, exhausted or unsure whether your loss is legitimate enough to bring. The work begins from there.

Sometimes the first movement through grief is simply discovering that we do not have to carry it alone. In the presence of others, grief may remain painful, but it can become less exiled. It can be spoken into a room and met by people who do not need us to recover quickly, explain ourselves neatly or protect them from the truth of what has happened. That, for me, is one of the profound benefits of group therapy: not that loss is taken away, but that the person grieving is no longer left entirely alone with it.

References

Clarkson, P. (1990) ‘A multiplicity of psychotherapeutic relationships’, British Journal of Psychotherapy, 7(2), pp. 148–163.

Jung, C.G. (1969) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. 2nd edn. Collected Works, Vol. 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.