Healing Grief and Loss: What Sadness Is Really For - and How to Work With It

Grief is not the enemy

We live in a culture that is deeply uncomfortable with Grief. Cry too long and someone will try to fix it. Mention a loss and people will hurry you toward the silver lining. Stay sad and you’ll be told to move on.

But Grief isn’t a malfunction. It’s a signal. One of the most precise emotional signals we have.

In the Emotional Liberation® framework, Grief and Sadness belong to their own emotion family – a spectrum that moves from longing, yearning, and missing through sadness, loss, and sorrow, all the way to anguish and deep Grief. Each is a different intensity of the same fundamental response: the heart registering that something it loved is gone, or may not come.

Throughout this page you’ll notice we use Grief and Sadness interchangeably. They belong to the same emotion family – Sadness being the quieter expression, Grief the deeper one. Both are the heart’s response to loss.

And here’s what we know about that response: it connects us. It connects us to what matters most… to ourselves, to our humanity, and to others who share the same human experience of losing things they love. Research shows that the capacity to feel this kind of deep sadness correlates with aliveness – the ability to be fully present, fully human, fully here.

A good cry feels like relief because it is relief – the emotion doing its job.

What Grief is actually doing

Grief and Sadness arise whenever something changes or is lost… when what you once had is gone. When what you hoped for hasn’t arrived. Or when you sense that something you love won’t last.

The job of Grief is not to make you suffer. Its job is to help you adjust. To shift your expectations. To fill the hole that loss has left. To help you find your way from what was to what can be.

Grief has evolutionary roots. It developed alongside our drive to acquire and protect what we need. And because impermanence is the nature of everything: seasons pass, youth fades, loved ones die, good times end, we have Grief to help us make peace with the gap between what we want and what is.

When Grief is allowed to do its work, it clarifies for us. By pointing to what has been lost, it reveals what is most important to us. And that clarity – about what you truly value, what you genuinely need – is the beginning of finding it again, or finding a new way to it.

Grief is a bittersweet emotion that opens the heart, painfully, to what it desires. The pain is the guide and hidden beneath the bitter feeling is a longing that knows exactly where to look.

What happens when Grief is blocked

Grief wants to be felt, expressed, and witnessed. When it can’t – when it gets suppressed, hurried past, or apologized for – it stays with us.

Blocked Grief is what keeps people stuck in the past, unable to be present or fully enjoy what is. The loss that was never properly mourned sits in the body, quietly draining the energy that should be available for living.

We know that people who are labelled as ‘strong’ because they never cry often carry the heaviest weight of all. The capacity to grieve is not a weakness. On the contrary, it is evidence of an open heart. And an open heart is the only kind that is capable of real connection, real joy, and real love.

Be proud of a tender heart, a big heart, a broken heart. The alternative – a cold heart, a closed heart, a heart that has learned not to feel – is a far heavier burden than any Grief.

Grief wants to be witnessed

Sadness calls you inward. To sit quietly, to go inside, to have a heart-to-heart with your own heart. This quiet, personal dimension of grieving is essential.

But it also wants to be shared. Telling the story, being heard without someone trying to fix it or hurry you out of it, brings measurably better outcomes to healing loss and navigating change.

In the Emotional Liberation work, Grief is understood as both a human and a spiritual experience. We hold that space intentionally – drawing on ancient wisdom traditions that have always understood the heart as its own kind of intelligence, and on the practical tools that help you actually reach it. We start with the cognitive layer – understanding what Grief is, what it is doing, and why what you’re feeling makes complete sense given what you’ve lost.

Then comes the experiential work: psycho-spiritual inquiry, expressive movement, breath, and sound. These are the tools that drop you into your deep inner knowing, beneath the story the mind has been telling, to where the Grief actually lives. That is where it can finally be fully felt, processed and released.

You can’t keep what was – but you keep what it gave you

In our emotional release work, one of the most profound truths about Grief is that loss is inevitable. But what was awakened in you by being open to loving – that never leaves.

When you lose someone or something that brought you joy, love, beauty, or meaning, those qualities don’t die with the loss. Those qualities were awakened in you. And what has been awakened can be found again, in other forms, in other places, in other people.

Effective grieving doesn’t mean “getting over” the loss. It means being enriched by it. You carry the happiness that the person or experience helped you rise to, while remaining open to new and different – and possibly even better – ways to experience joy. That shift, from loss to love, from absence to gratitude, is not something you force. It’s something you arrive at through the Emotional Liberation work – through the practice of actually feeling what you feel.

“Grief is not the enemy of joy. It’s the path back to it.”
— Becca Williams

Where healing meets real life

As Grief is allowed to move, the weight of it – the sadness, the numbness, the sense of incompleteness – begins to lift. You haven’t forgotten, you’ve just learned to hold it differently.

Goodbyes become different. Endings become beautiful, bittersweet moments rather than devastating ones. You can feel the fullness in your heart of what someone or something meant to you – and let them go.

I know this from my own life. I used to have a terrible time with goodbyes. Saying farewell to friends, dying pets and even the end of retreats I loved. The sadness would wash over me with a deep gloom. Once I was able to be present with the Sadness and Grief and began exploring it through our emotional release tools, the dots started connecting. The goodbye grief was tethered to a festering wound from childhood – two parents, divorced when I was a small child, couldn’t bear to be in the same space. The dispassionate handoffs of little me between the two of them, left me believing that love always ends in separation and despair.

Today, goodbyes are different. I still feel Sadness when I lose something meaningful. But I’m no longer devastated or consumed with gloom – because I’ve done the emotional release work.

Emotional Liberation harmonizes with your needs, whether you’re moving through a specific loss or carrying Grief that has been with you for years. Either way, you don’t navigate it alone.

My group masterclasses, trainings, retreats, and ceremonial gatherings create a dynamic that accelerates this healing. When people do this work together, the healing goes deeper – witnessing and being witnessed is its own powerful medicine. Teachers and facilitators often find this work particularly valuable as understanding Grief in yourself makes you more effective in holding space for others.

What the research says

Grief is one of the most studied emotional experiences in psychology, and the findings consistently point in the same direction: suppressing or avoiding grief does not make it smaller. It makes it harder to carry.

A meta-analysis of 146 randomized studies found that people who expressed difficult thoughts and feelings about personally meaningful experiences showed significantly better psychological and physical health outcomes than those who did not.[1]

A 2025 systematic review of 30 randomized controlled trials found that psychotherapeutic interventions for prolonged grief disorder produce meaningful improvements, with experiential approaches including exposure therapy and EMDR showing particular promise for trauma-related grief.[2]

And a 2026 clinical trial of psilocybin for psychological and existential distress in people with advanced illness found that 69% reported meaningful global improvement and 62% reported more than 50% improvement in depression scores, with no serious adverse events.[3]

---

Sources

1. Frattaroli J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: a meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin, 132(6), 823–865.
   https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.823
   
2. Srivastava, T., Lee, K., Ehrenkranz, R., Cozzolino, P. J., Wise, F. A., Burns, M., McCormick, T., Yaden, D., Agrawal, M., & Penberthy, J. K. (2025). The efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions for prolonged grief disorder: A systematic review. Journal of affective disorders, 380, 561–575.
   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2025.03.173
3. Downar, J., Lapenskie, J., Anderson, K., Parsons, G., Polskaia, N., Lalumiere, G., & Lawlor, P. (2026). PSilocybin for psYCHological and existential distress in PALliative care (PSYCHED-PAL): A single arm unblinded clinical trial. Palliative medicine, 40(4), 514–523. https://doi.org/10.1177/02692163261416269