The Limits of Lived Experience in Grief Support Work

There’s a deep tenderness that lives in the choice to support others in grief. For many of us, this work is a calling. It is a nudge that lives in our hearts & minds. It gets louder & louder until we finally listen and take the inevitable next step.

Most of us arrive at this work because we’ve known loss ourselves. Because we’ve lived the disorientation, the suffering and the existentialism of significant loss. This work is often a quest for deeper understanding, purpose, meaning, and service. It is soul work.

Our own experience, then, becomes the doorway in. The call to action. Our desire to provide the support we either didn’t get, or benefited greatly from.

But personal experience, while powerful, is not enough.

Grief is not one path, one truth, one shape. Grief is complex, unique to the person bearing it & incredibly nuanced. And our story, no matter how honest, no matter how vulnerable, is not a universal map. It is one voice in a vast and nuanced landscape. A landscape that is shaped not only by the individual’s personality & history but also, by the systems and culture that this individual belongs to.

When we begin to treat our own grief as the truth, rather than a truth, we risk doing harm.

I’ve seen this happen. Coaches, doulas, even therapists, who, consciously or unconsciously, speak from the center of their own story as if it explains all others. They share frameworks built not from years spent sitting with grieving people, but from the lens of their own heartbreak. And then offer it as guidance.

This is where there is potential for harm, for exclusion, for silencing the complexity that grief so often requires.

Because while our own loss can give us compassion, it does not make us wise. Wisdom comes from listening to grief in many forms, from learning what it’s like to companion a parent who’s lost a child, a child who’s lost a parent, a partner whose world collapsed overnight, someone grieving an ambiguous or disenfranchised loss, someone whose loss reactivated trauma from decades ago.

There is no one way grief shows up for people.
No one way it moves through the body.
No single “right” philosophy for a “healthy” or “normal” healing process.

As those who support grief & act as companions to the bereaved, we are called to stay humble, curious, open, and willing to learn from the grief that unfolds in front of us. The work requires us to remain attuned to our biases and keep questioning where we’re standing when we speak, and who we might be leaving out.

It’s not enough to have lived grief.

We must also study it, sit with it, be impacted by others’ versions of it. We must learn to listen when the grief in front of us contradicts our own experience. We must create space for truths that challenge our frameworks, not just confirm them.

Because supporting grieving people is not about being a mirror, it’s about being a witness.

And that’s different.

A mirror shows people your reflection. A witness holds space for theirs.

So if you are someone doing this work, or aspiring to, you don’t need to have all the answers.

The answers are not what’s required. What is required is curiosity. And a willingness to keep learning & growing.

If you're walking this path as a grief coach or death doula, and you’re longing for ethical grounding in this tender work, you’re not alone. The Grief Coaching Code of Ethics is a resource I created for this very reason, to help us stay rooted in humility, integrity, and care as we hold space for grief in all its forms. [You can purchase the guide for 25$ here]