Your Grief Training Was Built for White Clients and Your BIPOC/BBIA Clients Can Tell
Culturally Neutral Grief Care Isn’t Neutral and the Clients Who Notice First Are the Ones Who Stop Coming Back.
She brings up, during one of the later sessions, that her grandmother has been appearing in her dreams. It’s not just a symptom she’s reporting; it’s something she’s sharing intentionally, gauging your reaction as she speaks to determine if this setting is safe for her to be honest. You notice her observing you, subtly trying to find a way to fit her experience into a clinical framework with what she’s feeling.
She notices everything. Every time something similar surfaces in her grief, she’ll likely hold back from discussing it with you again.
This scenario highlights a gap in the training that many clinicians receive. It’s not an isolated incident; it’s happening in therapy rooms across the board, especially for BIPOC/BBIA women who are often left carrying the weight of their grief into spaces that were never designed to accommodate its entirety.
Where Our Dominant Grief Models Actually Come From
The well-known stage model of grief created by Kübler-Ross, which has shaped clinical training for many years, was based on discussions with terminally ill patients during the late 1960s in a predominantly white, Western, and Christian medical context. It was never meant to be a universal guide for how people experience loss, yet it became one. The underlying perspective of detachment, viewing loss as an individual psychological occurrence with acceptance as the ultimate goal, permeated clinical training without critical examination on how it would impact different cultures.
Bowlby's attachment theory also influenced the understanding of bereavement, suggesting that healthy grieving involves gradually letting go of the bond with the deceased. Nope, we’re not teaching this are we? Within an individualistic and secular framework, the deceased is seen as definitively lost, while continued attachment is viewed as a failure to adapt rather than a culturally significant ongoing relationship.
These models weren’t designed to address communal grief, ancestral loss, or the kind of grief that sees death as a threshold instead of an ending. They don’t account for grief intertwined with spirituality or collective experiences. Instead, they emerged from specific cultural assumptions about grief and what constitutes healthy mourning. Clients who arrive with different worldviews often try to fit themselves into a framework that doesn’t serve them or leave when the effort to adapt outweighs the support they receive.
The Losses That Never Get Named in Session
Disenfranchised grief refers to feelings of loss that the broader culture fails to recognize. BIPOC/BBIA clients frequently carry this grief, yet clinical training often lacks the vocabulary to address it, leaving them to navigate sessions with feelings unrecognized and unnamed.
One example is continues to occur is the physiological impact of chronic exposure to racial stress, as highlighted by researcher Arline Geronimus. Black women may grieve for their health and wellbeing which is something that should still be viable for us, but there’s no clinical term for this grief. It doesn’t come with a funeral or a defined moment of loss; instead, it accumulates silently within the body along with other burdens.
Then there’s the grief stemming from medical neglect and racism. A woman who was ignored for years before finally receiving a diagnosis grieves not just her health but also the lost time and trust. These losses often go unnamed in clinical settings.
Community grief manifests in watching neighborhoods change, communities disperse, or children growing up disconnected from cultural roots. This collective sorrow lacks recognition in a culture that doesn’t provide rituals to contain it. In BIPOC/BBIA communities, pregnancy and infant loss carries the additional pain of medical racism, as disparities in how Black maternal pain is treated compound the grief with a sense of rage that finds no outlet in standard grief frameworks.
Ancestral and cultural grief is another layer, rooted in histories of slavery and colonization. It encompasses the loss of traditions, languages, and knowledge systems without opportunity for closure. This grief doesn’t start with a specific personal loss; it’s an ever-present weight carried within the body and the patterns of life.
None of these losses are adequately addressed by dominant grief models. Clients sense this absence from the very beginning of therapy.
What Happens When Spirituality Isn’t Explored
There exists a form of cultural competence that encourages clinicians to acknowledge a client’s spiritual beliefs, only to set them aside during the clinical work. Although the intention behind this is positive, the outcome is often exclusionary. By sidelining the client’s spiritual life, the clinical space inadvertently communicates that the core of how they understand death and loss falls into an area which is either uncomfortable or unknowledgeable to explore.
For a Black woman whose grandmother visits her in dreams, this isn’t just a symptom of grief. It reflects a persistent connection, a relationship with the deceased that her cultural background recognizes as both valid and beneficial. Research by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman since 1996 has shown that maintaining such connections is a facet of healthy grieving, contrary to earlier models that pathologized it.
When clinicians ignore this experience, clients feel pressured to reshape their grief into language that fits the room’s parameters, a translation that comes at a cost. Every time they do this, they lose a part of themselves, and in time, this diminishes the therapeutic relationship because the version of themselves that they bring to sessions is too constrained to tackle the work they seek to accomplish.
What Decolonized, Culturally Centered Grief Care Actually Looks Like
The ARISE Arc, central to the Psychospiritual Grief Method, evolves from the understanding of these challenges rather than simply adding on to existing frameworks that were never meant to encompass them.
Acknowledge means naming the full scope of the loss, including the losses that have no funeral and no cultural recognition and no clinical category, and the grief that is ancestral and inherited and communal as well as personal, and the spiritual experiences that are arriving in the grieving person's life and asking to be received rather than assessed.
Reconnect means returning the client to the relational and spiritual resources her grief has disrupted or obscured, including her ancestral lineage, her cultural practices, the continuing bond with the person she lost, and the community context that most individualist grief models have never included as a clinical resource, and this reconnection is somatic as well as relational, working with grief where it actually lives in the body, in the specific locations where loss is stored and where survival patterns have calcified, using practices drawn from the client's own cultural and ancestral tradition to reach what cognitive processing alone cannot touch.
Integrate means holding the grief inside the full story of who the client is, including her lineage and her identity and her spiritual framework, rather than treating it as a psychological event to be processed in isolation from the rest of her life.
Sustain means building the ongoing practices, relationships, and spiritual structures that allow the integrated self to remain in contact with her grief, her lineage, and her healing without requiring constant acute intervention, creating a sustainable relationship with loss rather than a finished resolution of it.
Emerge means the self that surfaces on the other side of the work, a self that is not defined only by the loss but informed by it, carrying what the grief has taught and what the ancestors have offered into a life that is genuinely different from the one that existed before the loss, and genuinely livable.
This is what culturally centered grief care embodies. It’s not more challenging than the training most clinicians have received; it just requires more than what we’ve been taught. The training on October 17th offers practitioners the chance to bridge that gap.
Join the Training Before Seats Close
On Saturday, October 17th, 2026, the Psychospiritual Grief Method training titled Grief, Disenfranchised Loss, and Culturally Centered Care for BIPOC Clients will take place. This six-hour live session grants six CE credits. It’s designed for clinicians who have felt the disconnect between their training and the needs of their clients, ready for a rigorous framework that can address these issues.
This isn’t a cultural sensitivity webinar or a lecture on demographics. It’s a comprehensive methodology training led by a Black, LPCC, and evidential medium who has developed this framework through years of both clinical and spiritual work with BIPOC/BBIA women.
Seats are limited and filling. This is the week to register.
🎓 The Psychospiritual Grief Method Training is on Saturday, October 17th, 2026, 6 hours, 6 CE credits.
🍂 The Elements of Grief Course opens October 25th, a self-paced psychospiritual course for women who to work more with their grief through elemental themes.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary for women seeking ongoing community and monthly psychospiritual grief support that holds the cultural, ancestral, and spiritual dimensions of their experience.
📞 Grief Counseling Consultation is free and available for California residents seeking individual grief counseling inside a framework that was built to hold all of what they are carrying.
With care and intention,
Amber
