When Grief Support Doesn’t Work
And Why Practitioners Need to Know What That Feels Like
It’s important for us, as grief support practitioners, to experience what it’s like to be the client of a grief support service. There’s much we can learn about approaching our work with respect and humility when we sit in the client’s chair. Hopefully, you’ve had a few different experiences as a client of grief support, some wonderful, and others uncomfortable or even terrible.
Why should grief support practitioners experience bad grief “support”?
Most of us do this work because we truly want to help people, and we’d be horrified to think we were causing harm. But it’s not always easy to know when something we’re doing or saying is not helpful or even hurtful. Clients rarely tell us if they find the conversation judgmental, marginalizing, boring, or irrelevant. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of bad grief support, you know how uncomfortable that is, and how hard it can be to speak up.
Even when we try to create an open, collaborative relationship, powerful social narratives about “therapy” and “expertise” make it difficult for clients to be fully honest. Our clients are statistically more likely to be women, and social scripts often discourage women from expressing disagreement or asking for what they need.
Tamara Beachum, a Grief Support Educator with the Creative Grief Studio, shares her story:
When my late husband was diagnosed with cancer at 44, I knew I would need the support of a counselor. My father had died from cancer just a little over a year before, and there was turmoil in my corporate job. I had been laid off from a position I loved with a great team earlier in the year, and though my new position was in the same company, it came with an abusive coworker no one was willing to confront.
The first therapist I saw, recommended by someone I trusted, was underprepared for the layers of grief I brought with me. Her sage advice, upon hearing my story, was simply to tell me to ‘Stop and smell the roses.’ That was it — no tools to use, no curious inquiry, just a useless platitude. I left with my existing overwhelm, knowing that I still had more work to do to find a therapist.
Stories like this remind us how easy it can be for even well-meaning practitioners to miss the mark and how deeply that can affect someone who’s already vulnerable.
That’s why we ask our students to look closely at questions like these:
How do you notice when a conversation or tool isn’t working for your client?
What signs — physical, emotional, or relational — signal that something’s off?
How do you invite honest feedback in a way that feels safe for both of you?
And when the interaction doesn’t work, how do you repair it?
These aren’t quick-fix questions. They’re invitations to deeper reflection about power, humility, and relationship, skills that can transform your practice.
There’s much more to say on this topic. If you value practitioner-focused reflections like this, please become a paid subscriber. We will provide you with more feedback strategies and prompts for recognizing when things aren’t working. We’ll also talk about how to rebuild connection and trust when needed.
To learn with us in a supportive community, consider joining the Creative Grief Studio program.
Develop your senses and skills for knowing when it isn’t working
As practitioners, we all have moments when a session feels “off”—but it takes practice to notice the subtle signs and understand what they’re telling us.
Consider these reflective questions for your journal, peer discussion, or supervision sessions:
What first alerts you that a conversation or activity isn’t working? A shift in your client’s tone or energy? A feeling in your body? A thought that flickers through your mind?
How often do you pause after sessions to notice patterns or themes in your work with a client?
Do you seek supervision that challenges your assumptions and helps you stretch, rather than simply confirming what you already believe?
How and when do you invite client feedback, and do you show them what you do with that feedback afterward?
To what extent do you explore the social dynamics or cultural discourses that can silence your client’s voice?
When we become more attuned to these signals, we can adjust in real time instead of realizing later that a conversation missed the mark.
Help your clients build awareness of when it isn’t working
A key goal of grief support is helping clients develop their own agency in relationships, including their relationship with you. That means teaching them, gently and explicitly, that it’s okay to notice when something isn’t working.
How do you model curiosity instead of certainty?
In what ways do you encourage your client to weigh their experiences against their own ethics, values, or needs?
How can you help them recognize the systems — social, familial, or institutional — that sometimes blur their ability to name what’s true for them?
Do you make space for them to critique ideas or deconstruct social discourses and ideas that might separate them from their sense of ethics, agency or belonging?
Create a culture where it’s safe to say, “This isn’t working.”
We can normalize reflection by making it a regular part of the work, not something that only happens when there’s a rupture.
Try weaving questions like these into your sessions or follow-up messages:
“How are we doing in our work together?”
“What felt most or least helpful today?”
“Would you like to try something different next time?”
“That tool doesn’t seem to be working. Is it OK if we pivot to something else?”
Building this culture of shared reflection shows clients that you value their perspective and that giving you feedback won’t be punished or ignored.
You can also reflect on how you model humility and repair:
Have your clients ever seen you receive criticism and respond with openness?
How might sharing a story of a time you missed the mark, and learned to do better, help them trust that you can handle honest feedback?
Do you speak in totalities and certainties, or do you speak with more nuance and tolerance for uncertainty?
When you realize you’ve said something hurtful, invalidating, or irrelevant, do you bring it up and apologize?
Look deeper at your everyday way of relating:
To what degree do you give advice or “teach” ideas, as opposed to interviewing your client about their unique experience and their own forms of agency?
To what degree do you explicitly name potential power imbalances or privileges that might set you up as more powerful in your relationship with your client?
When we can name these dynamics out loud and without defensiveness, we make it safer for clients to name their experiences, too. That kind of openness doesn’t weaken your role; it strengthens trust and shared humanity.
We can’t always avoid mistakes or missteps in grief support work, but we can learn to recognize, repair, and grow from them. When we practice that kind of humility and curiosity, our clients learn to trust us not as experts, but as fellow humans walking beside them in uncertainty.
That’s the kind of relationship where creative grief support truly thrives.
These are the types of practices we explore more deeply in the Creative Grief Support Certification Course, a four-month online journey into creativity, relationship, and social awareness in grief work. If this post sparked new questions or insights, we’d love to have you join us in that deeper learning. Learn more about the course here.