Grief is a natural response to loss, but when it feels unending, overwhelming, or tangled with emotions that don’t seem to belong to ordinary mourning, it may be what’s known as complicated grief. This form of bereavement can feel isolating, particularly when the people around you expect you to have moved on. If you’re carrying a loss that doesn’t seem to ease over time, you’re not alone, and you don’t have to face it without support.

What Is Complicated Grief?

Complicated grief, sometimes called prolonged grief disorder, is a persistent and intense mourning that interferes with everyday life. It may come with feelings of guilt, anger, numbness, or a sense of losing your own identity alongside the person you’ve lost. People often describe feeling stuck, as though the grief has become their entire interior landscape, or disconnected from others who seem to be living in a world they can no longer quite access.

This doesn’t mean you’re grieving wrongly. There’s no timetable for mourning and no correct way to do it. But it does mean that something in your loss may need more careful attention than time alone can provide.

What It Can Look Like

Complicated grief doesn’t always announce itself clearly. It can look like depression, or anxiety, or a generalised sense of flatness that you can’t quite account for. Some of the signs worth paying attention to include:

• An intense longing for the person you’ve lost that doesn’t soften over time, and that disrupts your ability to function day to day
• Difficulty accepting the reality of the death, even months or years later
• Bitterness or anger about the loss that feels stuck rather than moving
• Feeling that life has no meaning or purpose without the person who died
• Withdrawing from relationships or activities that previously mattered to you
• A sense of guilt, about things said or unsaid, done or left undone, that you can’t release
• Feeling that part of your own identity died alongside the person you lost

Complicated grief is also more likely when the loss itself was complicated: a death that was sudden or traumatic, a relationship that was ambivalent or unresolved, a person whose death brings relief alongside grief, or a loss that others don’t fully recognise or validate. Grief after estrangement, suicide, or the death of someone with whom your relationship was difficult sits in its own particular territory, and deserves particular care.

How Psychotherapy Helps with grief

In my work as a relational psychodynamic psychotherapist, I pay close attention not just to the story of the loss but to your inner world: your memories, your emotional responses, and the relationship you had, or perhaps wished you could have had, with the person who died. Together we make sense of how the past is shaping your present, including earlier losses, attachment patterns, and feelings that may have been present long before this death but that grief has brought closer to the surface.

Grief is not something to be fixed. It is something to be held, honoured, and understood. Our sessions offer a space for exactly that, not rushing you toward feeling better, but supporting you to feel safe enough to feel at all.

The therapeutic relationship itself is part of what helps. A space where your grief is not too much, where you are not expected to manage it for someone else’s comfort, and where you are not carrying it alone. Whether your loss was recent or many years ago, therapy can help you reconnect with parts of yourself that grief may have silenced.

Writing as Part of the Healing Process

Many people find that writing can be a powerful companion to therapy, and a way to continue working with grief between sessions or after therapy ends. Letters to the person you’ve lost, journaling, or simply noting how you feel on a given day, all of these allow a kind of expression that doesn’t need to be shared or polished to have value.

Sometimes words on a page can hold what feels too much to say aloud. In therapy, we can explore what emerges from your writing and how it reflects your inner process.

You Don’t Have to Go Through This Alone

If you’re living with grief that feels too heavy or tangled to carry alone, reaching out for support is a meaningful step. I work with adults navigating complicated bereavement in a safe, relational space, at a pace that respects the weight of what you’re carrying.

If you’d like to explore working together, get in touch at samanthamerry.co.uk/contacts.

Resources worth exploring:

• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, one of the most precise and honest accounts of acute grief ever written, particularly useful for those whose grief has an intensity that feels hard to explain to others
• It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine, a grief counsellor and bereaved person herself, writing against the cultural pressure to recover and offering a more honest frame for what grief actually demands
• Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, a short, fierce, formally inventive piece of writing that captures the strangeness of grief in ways that prose alone often cannot
• Griefcast with Cariad Lloyd, honest and often unexpectedly funny conversations about loss with people who have been bereaved, which many listeners find quietly companioning
• Cruse Bereavement Support (cruse.org.uk), the UK’s leading bereavement charity, with a helpline, online resources, and local support groups for adults navigating loss

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Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist in private practice in Bromley, South East London, and a doctoral researcher at the University of Chester.