After 35 years working in the NHS as a nurse and midwife, and now as a clinical hypnotherapist supporting people through loss, I’ve sat with grief in almost every form it takes. The grief of losing a parent. A partner. A child. A version of life that didn’t turn out the way it was meant to.
Somewhere along the way, certain truths became clear to me — truths that now sit at the heart of everything I do at Grief Recovery with Gwen. I want to share them with you, because I think they matter. Not just as professional principles, but as things I genuinely believe.
Grief Isn’t Something You Get Over
This is the belief I return to more than any other.
So many of the people I work with come to me exhausted — not from grieving, but from trying to stop. Trying to “move on.” Trying to feel normal again. Trying to reach some invisible finish line that everyone else seems to expect of them.
But grief doesn’t work that way. There is no finish line. There’s no point at which loss is fully resolved and life clicks back into place exactly as it was.
What changes — what can change, with time and the right support — is how you carry it. The weight doesn’t necessarily disappear. But your relationship with that weight can transform completely.
There Is No Timeline You Have to Meet
One of the cruellest things our culture does to grieving people is impose a schedule on their pain. Six weeks of compassionate leave. A year of “acceptable” mourning. An unspoken expectation that by some arbitrary date, you should be “back to yourself.”
I don’t believe in that timeline, because I haven’t seen it hold true for a single person I’ve worked with.
Grief moves in its own time, and it moves differently for everyone. Some days it’s loud. Some days it’s quiet. Sometimes it resurfaces years later, triggered by something as small as a song or a smell. None of that means you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re human, and you loved someone.
Grief Is Love With Nowhere to Go
I think this is the simplest and truest way I can describe what grief actually is.
It isn’t a malfunction. It isn’t a problem to be fixed. It’s love — all the love you still feel for someone who is no longer there to receive it. That love has to go somewhere, and grief is often what it looks like when it doesn’t have its usual outlet.
Understanding grief this way changes how you treat yourself in the middle of it. You stop seeing your pain as something wrong with you, and start seeing it as evidence of how deeply you loved.
Healing Doesn’t Mean Forgetting
People sometimes worry that healing from grief means letting go of the person they lost — that feeling better is a kind of betrayal.
I want to be very clear: that isn’t what healing looks like, and it’s never what I’m working towards with anyone I support.
Healing means you can think of your person without being flattened by it every time. It means you can hold the memory and the loss together, without one having to cancel out the other. The goal is never to forget. The goal is to find a way to remember that doesn’t keep you frozen in the worst moment.
You Don’t Have to Carry This Alone
This is perhaps the belief that drives the practical side of my work the most.
So many grieving people isolate themselves, either because they don’t want to burden others, or because they’ve been met with platitudes and discomfort when they’ve tried to talk about it honestly. Grief can be one of the loneliest experiences there is, even when you’re surrounded by people who care about you.
But you don’t have to carry it by yourself. Support — real, attuned, patient support — makes an enormous difference. That’s what the GRIEF Method™ was built for: a structured, compassionate way through, grounded in Ground, Release, Integrate, Expand, and Flourish. Not a way to rush you past your grief, but a way to walk alongside you through it.
Why This Matters to Me
I didn’t arrive at these beliefs from a textbook. They’ve come from three and a half decades of sitting with people at some of the hardest moments of their lives, and from training in clinical hypnotherapy that taught me how much healing can happen below the surface, in places conversation alone doesn’t always reach.
If you’re grieving right now, I hope something in this resonates. And if you’d like support walking through it, that’s exactly what I’m here for.
Gwen Gould is a Clinical Hypnotherapist, RTT® Practitioner, and EFT Specialist based in the Scottish Highlands, supporting clients face-to-face and via Zoom across the UK.
If this resonates and you’d like personal support, I offer a one-to-one Clarity & Calm session. You can book using the link below.