The Future of Grief Support Won't Choose Between Clinical and Spiritual Care
Something is shifting in the grief support landscape, and if you have been paying attention to where the field is moving, you already felt it, even if you don’t have the language for what you’re sensing.
You know that two coined system that created a Westernized mostly White (Males) organized grief support for the majority of a century, the one that created a clear separation between clinical care and spiritual practice. The “required” separation between the evidence-based, the ancestral, and between the therapeutic and the sacred, is now beginning to dissolve, not because the field suddenly decided to be more open-minded, but because folks are seeking grief support that meets the complexity of their actual experience.
This is where I make a prediction, which I would never do however, I believe that what I’m about to say is 100% accurate. There will be a shift occurring within mental health that will integrate and include spirituality for mental health treatment, because it’s already happening.
Why the Two Coin System Has Always Been Insufficient
The separation between clinical care and spiritual practice in grief support wasn’t inevitable, and it wasn’t based on evidence that one approach was more effective than the other for all folks in all contexts. It was actually the product of a particular historical moment in the 19th century when Western psychology was in the process of legitimizing itself as a science and distinguishing itself as clearly as possible from everything that could’ve been characterized as non-empirical, including spirituality, ancestral practices, and the communal dimensions of the human experience that didn’t fit inside an individualistic, secular, and materialist framework.
That distinction served certain professional and institutional interests, and it also left enormous gaps in the care available to grieving people, particularly BIPOC/BBIA folks whose cultural and ancestral understanding of grief, death, and the relationship between the living and the dead was never organized around that tow coin system in the first place.
For many BIPOC/BBIA communities grief has always been simultaneously psychological and spiritual, individual and communal, present-tense and ancestral, and the demand to choose between clinical support and spiritual practice in order to access either one has always been a demand rooted in a framework that wasn’t built with our experience in mind. The cost of that demand has been burdened by the folks who were already carrying the most.
What the Evidence Is Already Showing
The movement toward integrated grief support isn’t only a cultural or philosophical shift; it’s also being supported by a growing body of research that makes it increasingly difficult to maintain the binary system with intellectual integrity.
Research on meaning-making in grief has consistently demonstrated that the ability to find or construct meaning in loss, a process that is for many people fundamentally spiritual in nature, is one of the strongest predictors of adaptive grieving outcomes, which means that spiritual practice is not a supplement to effective grief support but a mechanism of it, and clinical frameworks that have no place for spiritual meaning-making are missing a clinically significant dimension of what helps.
The field of psychology is already discussing the impacting of integrating psychology and spirituality in reference to grief as evidenced by the article, The Integrated Process Model of Loss and Grief: An Interprofessional Understanding by Van den Berg, M., et al. (2023); however, The Psychospiritual Grief Method focuses on folks of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian cultural backgrounds.
Research on intergenerational and ancestral trauma has established beyond reasonable clinical doubt that grief travels through generations and through both epigenetic and social transmission mechanisms, which means that a grief framework that locates the work entirely inside the individual client’s personal history is operating with an incomplete picture of what is clinically present in the room, and the ancestral and lineage dimensions of grief aren’t a spiritual addition to clinical work but a clinical reality that the work cannot fully address without them.
Research on somatic approaches to trauma and grief have demonstrated that the body holds what the mind hasn’t yet processed and that interventions that only work on the cognitive level leave the physiological dimension of grief largely untouched, which is exactly what many traditional talk-based clinical approaches have done, and why so many grieving folks report that therapy helped them understand their grief without ever quite reaching the place where it actually lived.
The evidence is pointing toward exactly the integration that a psychospiritual approach to grief has always held, and the clinical field is beginning, slowly and imperfectly beginning to follow where this evidence leads.
What the Future Actually Looks Like
The grief support model that’s going to define the next generation of care isn’t going to be the one that most closely resembles what the field has always done with minor cultural competency adjustments and it’s going to be the one that was built from the inside of the complexity it’s trying to hold.
It’s going to be built by practitioners who are clinically rigorous and spiritually literate, who hold their professional accountability and their ancestral and spiritual knowledge in the same practice rather than sequestering one from the other. It’ll be those who understand that evidence base practices and the wisdom of ancient traditions aren’tt in competition but are pointing toward the same truths about human experience from different directions.
It’s going to center the communities that have been most inadequately served by the existing model, BIPOC/BBIA communities whose grief has always been collective and ancestral as much as individual, who have always known that the two coined system was insufficient because their experience was never adequately contained by it.
It’s going to hold grief as sacred as well as psychological, as communal as well as individual, as ancestral as well as personal, and somatic as well as cognitive, because those dimensions are all present in every grieving person whether the clinical framework acknowledges them or not.
Why This Is Already Here
What I want to say to the folks in this community who are both the grieving women who have been searching for this kind of support and the clinicians who have been searching for this kind of framework, is that the future of grief support is no longer something you’re waiting for, because it is already here.
The Psychospiritual Grief Method wasn’t built as a prediction about where grief support is going, and it was built as a response to where it had already failed. The fact that the broader field is now moving in the same direction isn’t a validation of the approach, rather it’s a confirmation that clients who most needed something different were always right about what they needed.
The future of grief support looks like holding the clinical and the sacred without asking anyone to choose. It’s treating the lineage as part of the clinical picture rather than as background. It’s meeting grief in the body as well as the mind and bringing the full complexity of who a grieving person is into the room rather than leaving parts of her at the door because the framework wasn’t large enough to hold all of her.
That future is already available, and the women who are ready for it don’t have to wait.
Come Find the Care You Have Been Searching For
📞 Free Grief Counseling Consultation is for California residents who are ready to explore grief support that holds the clinical and the spiritual without asking you to choose between them, a consultation is where that conversation begins. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
🎓 Psychospiritual Grief Method Training — October 17th — for clinicians who are ready to stop improvising through the gaps and work from a framework that was built for the complexity their clients are actually bringing, this is the live training where the method becomes something you can use in your practice immediately, with 6 CEs provided through the NBCC, a small cohort by design, and direct access to Amber throughout. If you’ve been sensing that the field is moving toward this intersection and you want to be among the practitioners who are already there, this is where that positioning begins. [Register at healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method-training
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is ongoing space for weekly practices and a container built specifically for the future of grief support for women who are done with the binary and ready for something that holds all of who they are.
With care and intention,
Amber
