A Journey Through Grief

Today, I feel it is finally time for me to write this article.

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It has been a couple of years since I lost my Mum to Dementia at the age of 89 and only now do I feel like I understand the emotional path that I have travelled specifically enough to share it with you and to add value.

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Losing a loved one at any time is a pivotal life experience. The journey into and out of grief can be short and smooth or lengthy and feels like a bumpy road to follow, full of pot holes, there to catch you out when you least expect them. I discovered that losing a person close to you to from Dementia is a unique experience because the grief begins before the loss.

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Over a period of three years, my family watched as our healthy, fit, confident, intelligent, capable and beautiful Mum became a shadow of herself. The grief I felt intensified slowly, an additional weight in my heart with each lost skill and forgotten word. I found myself mourning the loss of the Mum I had and she was still in the world.

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I found dealing with the emotions I felt very challenging because they were so varied. I frequently experienced polarity responses to the same event. Desperate sadness as I watched Mum get so frightened when she realised that she no longer knew how to complete the simplest of tasks. Complete joy when she recognised my face and recalled my name. Frustration when I took action to keep her healthy day to day and she refused to eat a meal that I had prepared for her or her upset at having to get into the shower or for me to wash her hair. Then the guilt because I felt frustrated at my lovely Mum when she had little conscious control over her responses. It was all confusing and overwhelming in equal measure.

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Then there was the pressure I placed on myself. I’m a Master Trainer of NLP and Hypnosis. I, of all people should be able to deal with this, right? Wrong! I realised that I am first a human being, my profession is secondary to that. The emotions I felt were real and raw and now, with hindsight, I realise that they were necessary for me to experience so that I could come out the other end as healthy as possible.  

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Grief is a deeply human experience, a landscape that every person travels in their own way and in their own time. When you lose someone you love, the world changes in a moment, and so do you. The rhythms of daily life, the things that once brought joy, the very sense of who you are can feel unfamiliar. For a while, I lost joy in dance, something that had provided my energy, motivation, creativity and expression for most of my life. I lost the joy of running my amazing business and the joy of travel and visiting new cultures. I only recently realised that I had inadvertently turned off my joy tap, because it wasn’t right for me to be joyful without Mum.

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There is no single path through grief, no universal model that captures what it means to say goodbye to someone who mattered deeply. Each person’s experience is as individual as a fingerprint, shaped by the relationship they had, the circumstances of the loss, and the meanings they make as they move forward.

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When you grieve, you might find yourself moving through waves of emotion that seem unpredictable. Some days feel heavy, as if the air itself has thickened. Other days, a sense of calm might come unexpectedly. Then, without warning, a memory, a song, or a scent brings the ache flooding back. This is the natural ebb and flow of healing. The mind and body are processing something profound, something that cannot be hurried or contained by any timeline.

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Several months after Mum’s release back into the universal energy (my belief system at work here), I thought a holiday would do me good. To remove myself from everyone and everything associated with Mum and the inevitable complexities of executing her estate.

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My partner and I went of to Kenya on Safari. A busy, active holiday to take my mind off things. It was way too early in my grieving process. Halfway through the holiday I got sick. My body went into a healing crisis in response to the trauma I had experienced and I spent the final 3 days of the holiday in the hotel room, enclosed in the bed sheets in the foetal position, sobbing and thinking of nothing except “I want my Mum”. At the age of 55, it’s been years since that sort of behaviour has expressed itself.

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This was a pivotal moment for me and I believe that my healing began after that point.

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Many people try to make sense of their grief by comparing it to models they have heard about. You may have come across the so-called stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and perhaps wondered why your experience doesn’t fit neatly into that sequence. Mine certainly didn’t.

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The truth is, those models were never meant to prescribe how you should feel. They were observations of patterns, not rules. Real grief is far more fluid. You might feel acceptance in the morning and anger by the afternoon. You may find yourself laughing at a cherished memory and crying moments later. This is not a contradiction. It is how the mind and heart heal, through movement, not through order.

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Grief has its own language. It was nearly a year after Mum moved on that I began utilising my NLP knowledge to heal. NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) can offer you gentle tools to notice how your mind encodes experiences. The images you hold, the sounds you replay, the words you say to yourself, and the sensations in your body. These are the building blocks of your inner world, and through awareness of them, you can begin to soften the intensity of your pain while keeping the love and meaning alive.

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When you think about your loved one, notice how you represent them in your mind. Do you see a vivid picture, close and bright, or a distant one, soft and blurred? Do you hear their voice clearly, or is it faint? Do you feel warmth or heaviness in your chest as you think of them? These details matter because they influence how your nervous system responds. When the pain feels too sharp, you can experiment gently with changing the qualities of those inner images or sounds. You might imagine moving the picture a little further away or dimming the brightness slightly. You are not erasing the memory, you are simply allowing your system to breathe. Over time, you might find that doing this gives you more choice about when and how to connect with the memory.

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Language also shapes your experience of grief. The words you use internally can either soften your heart or tighten it. When you tell yourself, “I’ll never get over this,” your unconscious mind treats that as an instruction, reinforcing the sense of permanence. You could experiment by saying instead, “I am learning to remember with love.” The experience of grief doesn’t disappear, it evolves. Your words become the bridge between where you are now and where you want to be.

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In NLP, there is also the idea of reframing. Shifting the perspective around an experience so you can see it from a place of choice and strength. Reframing grief does not mean pretending everything is fine. It means recognising that within your loss there may also be moments of gratitude, connection, or wisdom. Perhaps you discover a deeper compassion for others who are grieving. Perhaps you realise how precious time is and how you want to live more fully in honour of the one you lost. This is not to deny the pain, it is to allow the pain to transform into purpose.

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The reframe that really resonated with me was this, ‘Grief only exists because of love. The pain of the grief is directly proportional to the depth of the love that you had with the person you lost. If you are in the pain of grief, it’s only because you were lucky enough to have experienced deep love and that’s comforting and special.’ I turned the joy tap back on in her memory.

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It is important to remember that moving out of grief does not mean forgetting. The bond you had remains part of you, woven into who you are. You might find that your relationship with the person you lost continues to evolve in your inner world. You talk to them, feel their guidance, sense their presence in moments of stillness. This ongoing connection is not a sign of being stuck, it is a sign of love that transcends bodily matter, the energy in the field that surrounds you. NLP encourages you to honour these inner experiences, to understand that the meaning you give them can bring strength and peace. The human mind is incredibly adaptable, and with kindness and curiosity, you can guide it towards healing without letting go of what truly matters.

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There will be days when nothing helps, when the ache feels raw and unrelenting. In those times, give yourself permission to feel what you feel. Grief is not a problem to solve, it’s a process to experience. Allowing yourself to feel is part of the healing. When you stop fighting the emotions and start observing them and understanding them, you begin to create space for transformation. Notice where in your body you feel the emotion. Breathe into that space and imagine softening around it. You are not the emotion, you are the awareness that can hold it.

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Every step on this path is yours alone. No one can tell you how long it should take or what it should look, sound and feel like. The models, theories, and frameworks can offer understanding, yet they can never fully capture the uniqueness of your experience. Grief is not a straight road, it is more like a winding river that sometimes slows, sometimes rushes, and sometimes disappears underground before resurfacing in unexpected places. Through it all, you are learning to navigate, to trust that the current knows where it is going even when you cannot see the destination.

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You are not broken. You are adapting, growing, and rediscovering yourself in the shadow and the light of love.

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NLP offers you tools to notice how your mind works, to communicate with yourself in more compassionate ways, and to shape the meanings that guide your healing. The process will not erase the past, it will help you to build a future that honours it.

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Grief is not something to get over. When you learn to meet it with awareness, gentleness, and curiosity, you begin to find strength you didn’t know you had. In time, the pain softens, and what remains is the love, the learning, and the quiet confidence that you can live fully while carrying the memory of what is past.

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This is not the end of my story of loss. It’s a new chapter, written with courage, compassion, and the deep knowing that every life you have loved becomes part of the person you are and will be. At the end of the day, the only true emotion is love.

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