What I Shared About How to Effectively Manage Grief and Protect Your Mental Health After Loss

As part of a 2023 public health awareness campaign produced by Williamson County Television, I was asked to share my clinical recommendations for improving mental health after a loss. The question was direct: as a grief specialist, what do you actually recommend?

The video above is my answer. What I want to expand on here is the clinical reasoning behind each recommendation, because grief is one of the most misunderstood human experiences, and the advice people receive after a loss is often either too thin to be useful or too prescriptive to account for how differently grief actually moves through people.

I speak about this from both a clinical and personal place. I lost my husband, and I wrote about that experience for The Mighty. What I know from both sides of that experience is that grief does not follow a schedule, and the people who struggle most are often the ones who were told it should.

What Does Healthy Grief Actually Look Like?

One of the most important things I want people to understand is that grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a natural, necessary human response to loss. The goal is not to stop grieving. The goal is to be able to carry the loss without being consumed by it, to move forward while still honoring what was lost.

A comprehensive scoping review published in PMC in 2024, analyzing 212 systematic reviews on grief and bereavement, confirmed that grief is non-linear in nature, meaning there is no predictable sequence of stages and no standardized timeline for how long it should last. The Kübler-Ross stages of grief, while culturally familiar, were never intended as a universal map. People grieve in their own order, at their own pace, and with their own combination of emotions. Knowing this matters because one of the most common things that complicates grief is the belief that you are doing it wrong. Frontiers

Why Finding a Trusted Therapist Is My First Recommendation

In the video I name finding a therapist as one of my primary recommendations, and I want to be clear about why — because it is not simply a professional endorsement of my own field.

Grief held in a consistent, attuned clinical relationship moves differently than grief that is managed privately or worked through with people who love you but are often grieving the same loss. A skilled grief therapist provides something specific: a space where the full weight of what you are carrying can be named and witnessed without the other person needing you to be okay, without the relationship dynamic shifting because you said the hard thing, and without a timeline imposed on when you should start to feel better.

Evidence-based approaches including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Meaning-Centered Grief Therapy, and Trauma and Grief Component Therapy have been shown to reduce symptoms of prolonged grief disorder, address co-occurring conditions, and promote coping skills and post-traumatic growth. These are not vague interventions. They are clinically validated approaches that produce measurable outcomes for people who are struggling, including people who thought they were handling things fine until they were not.

The fear that therapy means you are broken or cannot handle your own grief is one I hear often, particularly from the high-achieving professionals and Black women I work with. What therapy actually means is that you are taking your grief seriously enough to give it real attention rather than managing it around the edges of everything else.

What Giving Yourself Time Actually Means

Time is one of the most commonly offered condolences after a loss, and also one of the most commonly misunderstood. Time alone does not heal grief. What time provides is opportunity. The opportunity to process, to feel, to integrate the loss into a life that keeps moving.

Without that active engagement, time simply passes and the grief waits. I have worked with people carrying losses from decades earlier that had never been fully processed, losses they had been too busy, too needed by others, or too afraid to fully feel. The grief had not diminished with time. It had settled in.

This is where giving yourself time intersects with giving yourself permission. Permission to feel what you feel. Permission to be less productive, less available, less composed than your life usually requires. Permission to need something. For caregivers, faith leaders, and high-achieving professionals who have been operating at full capacity through a loss, this permission is often the hardest part to grant themselves.

How Physical Movement and Community Support the Grieving Body

Grief is not only an emotional experience. It is a physical one. The body responds to loss in measurable ways, disrupted sleep, changes in appetite, fatigue, physical pain. And interventions that address the body directly can meaningfully support the psychological process of grieving.

A systematic review published in PMC found that physical activity provides documented benefit for the physical health and psychological wellbeing of those who are bereaved, including allowing a sense of freedom, a means to express emotions, distraction and escape from grief, and enhancement of social support. This does not mean exercise fixes grief. It means movement can create conditions, in the nervous system and in the body, that make the emotional work of grieving more bearable. Oxford Academic

Similarly, staying connected to community during grief matters in ways that go beyond social comfort. Community provides structure, meaning, and the experience of being witnessed in loss. Isolation during grief tends to intensify it. The people who fare best after significant loss are typically those who remain connected, not necessarily to large networks, but to a few people who can tolerate being present without trying to fix what cannot be fixed.

What to Do When Standard Grief Support Is Not Enough

For most people, grief moves through them — slowly, unevenly, but with a general trajectory toward integration. For some, it does not. When grief remains as acute and disorienting months or years after a loss as it was in the immediate aftermath, that is not a sign of weakness. It is a clinical signal that something specific is needed.

Prolonged grief disorder, now formally recognized in both the DSM-5-TR and ICD-11, is characterized by persistent yearning, preoccupation, emotional pain, identity disturbance, and functional impairment that continues well beyond what most people experience. It is distinct from depression and anxiety, and it responds to specific clinical approaches that differ from standard grief support.

If you recognize yourself in this description, if you have been told repeatedly that you should be further along by now, or if the loss feels as raw today as it did when it happened, that is worth bringing to a clinician who specializes in grief. Not because something is wrong with you, but because what you are experiencing has a name, a treatment, and a path forward.

Explore further:
My work on grief, loss, and life transitions speaks directly to the kinds of losses I work with and how I approach that work. I wrote personally about grief in my essay forThe Mighty. For those carrying grief alongside a health condition, therapy for chronic illness and pain addresses the particular weight of those intersecting experiences. If you need focused, concentrated support in a shorter timeframe rather than ongoing weekly sessions, my therapy intensives are designed for exactly that. Schedule a consultation.