Trueform Therapy

Author: Dorottya Nagy

Grief Isn’t Just Tears and Sad Songs—It’s Talking to the Dead and Getting Annoyed with Them Too

Grief is strange. One moment you’re making a cup of tea, the next, a song sneaks up on you, and suddenly you’re back in a moment you can never return to. It’s an uninvited guest, showing up at the worst times and making itself comfortable when you least expect it.

Despite what we’re led to believe, grief doesn’t follow a neat arc from devastation to closure. If you’ve ever found yourself talking to someone who’s no longer here, feeling a surge of anger at them for leaving, or wondering who you even are without them, you’re not alone. It’s like trying to walk through your home in the dark after someone has rearranged the furniture. You know the space, but nothing is quite where it should be.

We expect grief to be a storm that eventually clears. For many people, it’s more like fog: it lingers, lifts, returns, and reshapes the way we move through the world.

Grief often lingers like fog, lifting and returning.

The Script We’re Handed

We tend to carry a scripted idea of grief: sadness, tears, a series of stages, and a gradual journey towards “moving on”.

Part of that script comes from the famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. What many people don’t know is that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first described these stages in her work with people who were themselves dying, not with people who were bereaved. They were never meant to be a timetable that grieving people should follow in order, and research hasn’t found that most people move through grief that way.

Real grief doesn’t fit into a script. It spills over into the everyday, creeping into moments you never expected. It’s waking up and, just for a split second, forgetting they’re gone. It’s laughing at a joke they would have loved, then feeling the punch of their absence a moment later. It’s carrying an invisible weight that changes size, sometimes crushing, sometimes barely noticeable, but never really gone.

Still Talking to Them

I still think of my grandmother every time I bake. I can hear her scolding me if I rush or measure something wrong. It’s been more than 20 years, but in those moments she’s as present as the flour dusting my hands. I reach for a rolling pin, and suddenly I’m a child again, watching her knead dough with a patience I’ve never quite mastered.

Many people keep these conversations going with the people they’ve lost, sometimes out loud, sometimes only in their heads. It can feel odd at first, like speaking into an empty room. People sometimes worry that it means they’re not coping, or not “letting go”.

For much of the twentieth century, that’s roughly what psychology told them. Following Freud, the dominant view was that healthy grieving meant gradually detaching from the person who had died. Then, in 1996, the researchers Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman published a book called Continuing Bonds, which challenged that idea. They argued that keeping a connection with the person who died, through memories, rituals, conversations or objects, is a common and often comforting part of grief, not a failure to move on.

Later research has added some nuance. Whether a continuing bond helps seems to depend on the person, the relationship and the culture they live in. But for many people, the rolling pin, the recipe, the habit of telling them about your day, is simply what love looks like once someone has gone.

Love lingers in the rituals: a photograph, a cup of tea, a conversation that carries on.

The Feelings That Surprise Us

Nobody warns you that grief might involve being furious with the person who’s gone. They didn’t choose to leave, or even if they did, the loss was never truly in your control. But that doesn’t make the anger any less real. Maybe they left things unsaid or unresolved. Maybe their absence just feels unfair. It’s like being abandoned mid-sentence, left holding words that will never be heard.

Anger doesn’t mean you didn’t love them. Often, it reflects just how much you did. Love doesn’t disappear in grief, but it can turn into something harder to carry, something with edges that catch and sting when you least expect it. We are complicated creatures, capable of loving and resenting in the same breath.

Grief can also bring relief, and then the guilt that follows. If someone suffered before they died, you might feel grateful that they’re no longer in pain. If your relationship with them was tangled in conflict, you might feel relief that certain tensions are over. Then guilt creeps in, whispering that grief should be pure sorrow and nothing else. But feeling relief doesn’t mean you didn’t love them. It means you’re human. Sometimes the end of their suffering marks the start of ours, an unfair trade that we never agreed to, but must find a way to live with.

And sometimes, grief doesn’t look the way we expect at all. The psychologist George Bonanno, who has studied bereavement for decades, found that most people cope with loss better than they expected to. Only a smaller group, roughly 5 to 15 percent in his research, struggle in a way that suggests they need extra help. So if you haven’t cried as much as you thought you would, or you find yourself laughing and getting on with things, that isn’t a sign that you didn’t care. People grieve in very different ways.

Who Am I Without Them?

When we lose someone, we don’t just mourn their absence. We mourn the version of ourselves that existed with them.

The people we love shape us, sometimes in ways we don’t notice until they’re gone. They influence our choices, our routines, and even the way we see ourselves. When they die, it can feel as if part of our identity has gone with them. It’s like looking in the mirror and finding your reflection slightly altered: recognisable, but no longer quite the same.

So grieving isn’t only about remembering them. It’s also about discovering who we are now, and how we carry them with us into a life that has changed.

This is also why grief isn’t only about death. We can grieve a relationship that ended, a version of our lives we hoped for, a childhood we didn’t have, or a sense of who we used to be. These losses are often less visible, and less recognised by the people around us, but they can be felt just as deeply.

In many cultures, staying connected with those who have died isn’t a sign of being stuck. It’s a way of honouring them.

Growing Around Grief

There’s a simple image that many bereaved people find helpful. It comes from the grief counsellor Lois Tonkin, who developed it after a conversation with a mother whose child had died.

The mother described her grief as a circle that, at first, filled her whole life. She’d expected the circle to shrink over time. It didn’t. Instead, her life gradually grew around it. The grief stayed just as big, but there was more of her life alongside it: new experiences, new relationships, room to breathe.

I find this image honest in a way that much talk about grief isn’t. It doesn’t promise that the pain will disappear. It suggests that, over time, grief stops being the whole of our world and becomes something we carry within a larger life.

There’s so much pressure to “move on”. But that isn’t really how grief works. You don’t move on from it; you move forward with it. The people we lose stay with us, not just in memory, but in the ways they shaped us. We hear their laughter in the jokes we still tell. We see their influence in the way we comfort others, in the way we take our tea, in the way we arrange our bookshelves just so.

Why It Comes in Waves

Some days, grief is sharp and raw. Other days, it’s a soft hum in the background. You might go months feeling fine, and then, out of nowhere, it crashes over you again.

This can be frightening, especially if you thought you were “past the worst”. But it may be exactly how grief is meant to work. In their dual process model of grief, the researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut suggest that healthy grieving involves moving back and forth between two things: facing the loss itself, and getting on with the changes life now asks of us. Turning towards the pain, then turning away from it to rest, work, laugh or cope.

So the days when you feel fine aren’t denial, and the days when it floods back aren’t a setback. Both are part of the process.

The people we love shape us, often in ways we only notice once they’re gone.

When Grief Gets Stuck

For most people, grief gradually becomes more bearable, even if it never fully goes away. But for some, it stays so intense and all-consuming that life can’t move forward at all.

This has now been recognised as prolonged grief disorder, in both the World Health Organization’s ICD-11 and the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5-TR. Research suggests that around one in ten people bereaved through natural causes experience it, and it may be more common after sudden or violent deaths. Signs can include intense longing for the person that doesn’t ease over many months, feeling that life is meaningless without them, or being unable to engage with life at all.

If that sounds familiar, it isn’t a sign of weakness, and it isn’t a sign that you loved them more or better than anyone else. It’s a sign that you may need more support, and that support can help.

Not the Same, But Never Alone

Losing someone forces us to ask hard questions. Who am I without them? What do I carry forward? It can be an uncomfortable, painful process. But grief, at its core, isn’t only about death. It’s also about life: how we continue, how we change, and how we shape our world in the wake of loss.

And if there’s one thing many of us learn, it’s this: love doesn’t die with the people we lose. It lingers in the spaces they once filled, in the stories we tell, and in the ways we choose to live. Not the same, but never alone.

If you’re finding grief hard to carry, you don’t have to do it by yourself. At Trueform Therapy, I offer one-to-one bereavement and loss counselling in person in Cardiff and online across the UK and EU, and I’ve trained with Cruse Bereavement Support. You’re welcome to get in touch for an initial conversation.

You can also contact Cruse Bereavement Support’s free national helpline on 0808 808 1677. And if you’re struggling to cope or having thoughts of not wanting to be here, you can call Samaritans any time on 116 123.

If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further

Julia Samuel’s Grief Works (2017) is one of the most humane books on grief I know. Written by a UK psychotherapist, it follows real people through different kinds of loss, and is honest about how varied grief can be.

If the idea of grief as part of life rather than something to get over speaks to you, Megan Devine’s It’s OK That You’re Not OK (2017) is a frank, compassionate book that pushes back against the pressure to move on.

For a short, raw and very personal account of loss, C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961) remains one of the most honest pieces of writing on the subject.

And if you’d like to look at the research and ideas directly:

How common prolonged grief disorder is (Lundorff and colleagues, 2017): PubMed

Lois Tonkin’s growing around grief model: Cruse Bereavement Support

Continuing bonds and how thinking about grief has changed: Wikipedia overview

Stroebe and Schut’s dual process model of grief: Wikipedia overview

George Bonanno’s research on resilience after loss: Teachers College, Columbia University

February 25, 2025
Are Your Values Really Yours?

If you’ve ever been asked to name your values, you’ve probably seen a list like this: integrity, freedom, compassion, growth, connection, adventure. You’re invited to pick your top five, and then live by them.

It’s a reasonable exercise. But in the therapy room, I’ve noticed it often misses the harder question. Most people can pick five words from a list without much trouble. What’s much harder is knowing which of those words are really theirs, and which they picked up somewhere along the way, from family, culture or the people they needed to belong to.

That difference turns out to matter a great deal.

The Values We Inherit

We don’t arrive at our values from nowhere. Many of them come from what we learned growing up: what earned approval, what was expected of us, what was simply “how things are done”. Some of those values fit us well. Others we carry around like hand-me-down clothes that never quite fitted.

You can often tell the difference by the feeling attached to them. A value that’s genuinely yours tends to feel like something you care about. An inherited one often feels more like a rule: something you should do, and feel guilty or anxious about when you don’t.

Psychologists working with self-determination theory, a well-established framework for understanding motivation, make a similar distinction. They describe some motivation as “introjected”: driven by guilt, pressure or the need for approval, as if someone else’s voice had moved into your head. Other motivation is “identified” or intrinsic: you do it because you value it, or because you genuinely enjoy it.

Why It Matters Which Is Which

In an influential 1999 study, the psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot looked at what happens when people pursue goals for these different reasons. They found that people who pursued goals because they genuinely valued them put in more sustained effort and were more likely to achieve them. And reaching those goals made them happier.

But the more striking finding was what happened with goals driven by guilt or pressure. People could achieve them, and still feel no better. Same goal, same effort, but a different reason behind it, and a very different result.

I see this often. Someone builds the career they were “supposed” to want, earns the promotion, buys the house, and then wonders why it all feels so hollow. It isn’t that they’ve failed. It’s that they’ve succeeded at something that was never quite theirs.

This is also why I think the question “what are my values?” connects so closely with belonging. When our sense of being accepted depends on agreeing with the people around us, it can be very hard to notice where their values end and ours begin. I’ve written more about that in How Belonging Shapes Our Thoughts.

Values Are Directions, Not Destinations

There’s another distinction that I find helpful, and it comes from acceptance and commitment therapy, often known as ACT.

In ACT, values are understood as directions rather than destinations. A goal is something you can tick off: get a new job, run a 10k, call your sister more often. A value is more like a compass bearing: being a caring friend, living creatively, being honest. You never “complete” a value. You just choose, again and again, whether to move towards it.

This helps because it takes some of the pressure off. You don’t have to overhaul your life to live by your values. You can move a little in their direction today, in a single conversation or a single choice, and that counts.

Where It Hurts

One of the founders of ACT, Steven Hayes, has made a point I come back to often: our pain and our values are closely linked. We tend to hurt most about the things we care about most.

So if you’re not sure what you value, it can help to look at what hurts. What do you feel guilty about, or envious of, or sad to have lost? Loneliness can point to a value of connection. Frustration at work can point to a value of fairness, or creativity, or doing something that matters. Grief, in particular, is often love with nowhere to go.

This can also explain why living by your values isn’t always comfortable. Caring about something means it can hurt you. And choosing one value sometimes means letting go of something else that also mattered. Choosing time with your family may mean letting go of a certain kind of career. Choosing honesty may mean disappointing someone. There’s often a small grief in these choices, and it’s worth allowing room for it, rather than pretending every values-led decision should feel good.

Questions Worth Sitting With

Rather than a checklist, here are a few questions you might carry with you this week.

When you think about something you value, does it feel like a choice or a rule? If it feels like a rule, whose voice does it sound like?

If no one would ever know or approve, would you still choose it?

When have you felt most like yourself? What were you doing, and who were you with?

What hurts at the moment, and what does that hurt say about what you care about?

And when you look at how you spend your days, what values would someone guess you hold? How close is that to the values you’d name?

There are no right answers. And it’s normal for your answers to change over time. Values shift as we grow, as our circumstances change, and as we let go of some of the expectations we were carrying.

When It’s Hard to Know What You Want

For some people, these questions are genuinely difficult. If you’ve spent years fitting in, keeping the peace, or adapting to what others needed, you may have had little chance to notice what you actually want. That isn’t a failing. It’s often what happens when keeping others happy has felt more important, or safer, than listening to yourself.

Therapy can be a place to slow down and untangle this: to notice which values feel like yours, which ones you might be ready to put down, and what it might look like to live a little closer to what matters to you.

At Trueform Therapy, I offer one-to-one sessions in person in Cardiff and online across the UK and EU. If any of this resonates, you’re welcome to get in touch for an initial conversation.

If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further

For a practical introduction to values as directions rather than destinations, Russ Harris’s The Happiness Trap is a clear and accessible guide to acceptance and commitment therapy, with plenty of exercises.

If you’re interested in the psychology of motivation, Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do explains self-determination theory in a readable, personal way.

And for a deeper, more philosophical exploration of how we choose what matters in a limited life, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks (2021) is thoughtful, honest and surprisingly comforting.

And if you’d like to look at the research directly:

An introduction to values in acceptance and commitment therapy: Psychology Tools

Sheldon and Elliot’s self-concordance model: summary

January 4, 2025
When Something Feels Off With Your Therapist

Maybe it’s a small thing. Your therapist said something that didn’t sit right, and you nodded along. Maybe it’s bigger: weeks of sessions that feel like they’re going nowhere, or a sense that you’re not being understood. You notice it on the way home. You think about mentioning it next time. And then, next time, you don’t.

Many people never say it. They keep going for a while, feeling a little worse about it each week, and then they stop booking sessions. Sometimes they conclude that therapy just doesn’t work for them.

I want to suggest something different. That uneasy feeling is worth taking seriously. And saying it out loud, to your therapist, might be one of the most useful things you ever do in therapy.

The Things People Don’t Say

If you’ve ever held something back from a therapist, you’re far from alone. In research by Barry Farber, Matt Blanchard and Melanie Love, 93 percent of people surveyed said they had lied to a therapist at least once. Most often, it was out of embarrassment. But some of it was something else: wanting the therapist’s approval, or not wanting to cause problems. In other words, the same people-pleasing that brings many people to therapy in the first place can follow them into the therapy room.

It doesn’t help that therapists aren’t as good at noticing when something’s wrong as you might hope. In one well-known study, therapists were asked to predict which of their clients would get worse. Out of 550 clients, they predicted three, even though they’d been told that around 8 percent of clients in their clinic usually did.

So if you’re waiting for your therapist to notice that something isn’t working, you might be waiting a long time. That’s not because they don’t care. It’s because what goes on inside you isn’t always visible from the other chair.

Why Saying It Can Help

Here’s what I find most interesting about this.

Researchers who study the therapy relationship, particularly Jeremy Safran, Christopher Muran and Catherine Eubanks, have looked at what they call “ruptures”: moments when the connection between client and therapist strains or breaks down, through a misunderstanding, a disagreement, or a sense of not being heard. You might expect ruptures to be bad for therapy. But their research suggests that when a rupture is noticed and worked through together, therapy tends to go better, not worse. The evidence is still fairly small, but it points in an encouraging direction.

I see why in my own work. For many people, telling their therapist “that didn’t feel right” or “I’m not sure this is helping” is the first time they’ve ever said something like that to someone who matters to them, and had it heard rather than punished. If you grew up learning to keep the peace, to avoid disappointing people, or to hide your needs, then saying it in the therapy room isn’t a detour from therapy. It’s therapy, happening in real time.

A good therapist will welcome it. They may feel a flicker of discomfort, as anyone would, but they’ll be curious rather than defensive. And how they respond will tell you a lot about whether this is the right person for you.

Comfort Isn’t the Whole Story

It’s natural to look for a therapist you feel comfortable with, and that matters. But “comfortable” can be a little misleading.

Good therapy isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it touches on things you’ve spent years avoiding, and that’s going to feel uneasy, at least for a while. Feeling uncomfortable isn’t necessarily a sign of a bad fit. Sometimes it’s a sign that you’re getting somewhere.

The difference is in how the discomfort feels. Uncomfortable but safe is one thing: you’re finding something hard, but you feel respected, heard and free to slow down. Feeling judged, dismissed, pushed too fast or not taken seriously is something else. That’s worth paying attention to.

A few questions can help you tell the difference. Do I feel listened to? Do we agree, roughly, on what we’re working on? Does the way we work suit me, or am I fitting myself around their approach? Could I tell them if something wasn’t working? If the answer to the last question is no, that in itself is worth exploring, with them if you can.

What Experience Does and Doesn’t Tell You

It’s easy to assume that the more years a therapist has been practising, the better they’ll be. The research is more surprising.

In a 2016 study, Simon Goldberg and colleagues followed 170 therapists working with more than 6,500 clients over as many as 18 years. On average, the therapists’ outcomes didn’t improve with experience. If anything, they declined very slightly.

That doesn’t mean experience counts for nothing, or that new therapists are better. Some therapists do keep improving, and specific training matters a great deal for some difficulties, such as trauma or eating disorders. But it does mean that years in practice on their own aren’t a reliable guide. It’s more useful to ask how a therapist keeps learning, how they check whether therapy is helping, and whether they’ve trained in what you’re looking for help with.

Checking the Basics

There are a few practical things worth checking before you start.

In the UK, “counsellor” and “psychotherapist” are not legally protected titles. In theory, anyone can use them. The best safeguard is to check that your therapist is registered with a professional body that holds an accredited register approved by the Professional Standards Authority, such as the BACP, UKCP or National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society. You can search each organisation’s register online. Registration means they’ve met training standards, follow an ethical framework, have regular supervision, and that there’s somewhere to turn if something goes wrong.

It’s also reasonable to expect a clear agreement at the start: how often you’ll meet, what it costs, the cancellation policy, and how confidentiality works, including its limits.

And then there are the everyday practicalities: whether session times fit around your life, whether the cost is sustainable, and whether the location, or online sessions, work for you. These matter more than they might seem. Therapy that’s hard to get to is hard to keep up.

One thing worth knowing: most therapists in private practice aren’t able to offer support between sessions in a crisis. If you need urgent help, you can contact your GP, call NHS 111 (in Wales, 111 and press 2 for mental health support), or call Samaritans any time on 116 123.

If It Still Isn’t Right

Sometimes, even after talking about it, the fit just isn’t there. That’s OK. It’s not a failure, on your part or theirs. People are different, and so are therapists.

If you decide to end, it can help to have a final session to close things properly, rather than just stopping. Many therapists are also happy to suggest colleagues who might suit you better. And when you start again with someone new, you’ll know more about what you need, which is useful in itself.

A Relationship Worth Getting Right

The relationship with your therapist is one of the strongest predictors of whether therapy helps. That makes it worth paying attention to, and worth speaking up for.

At Trueform Therapy, I offer one-to-one sessions in person in Cardiff and online across the UK and EU. I’m a registered member of the BACP, and I’ll regularly check with you how the work feels and whether it’s helping. If something isn’t working, I want to know. If you’d like to see whether we’d be a good fit, you’re welcome to get in touch for an initial conversation.

If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further

If you’re curious about what goes unsaid in therapy, Barry Farber, Matt Blanchard and Melanie Love’s Secrets and Lies in Psychotherapy explores why clients hold things back, and what helps. It’s written for professionals, but it’s readable.

For a sense of what a good therapy relationship looks like from the therapist’s side, Irvin Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy (2002) is short, warm and full of practical wisdom.

And if you’d like to look at the research directly:

How to check a therapist is registered in the UK: Therapy Route

Why people lie to their therapists: TIME

Do therapists improve with experience? (Goldberg and colleagues, 2016): Society of Clinical Psychology summary

Alliance ruptures and repair in therapy (Safran, Muran and Eubanks-Carter): summary (PDF)

December 18, 2024