How ISTDP Therapy Can Help You Move Through Grief

Grief is a natural response to loss, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple.

For some, it moves through in waves. For others, it lingers for years.

You might understand why you’re grieving. You might even have talked about it in therapy.

And yet, something still feels unresolved.

You’re not alone.

In the therapy I practise Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), we work with grief by going beneath the surface. Not just talking about the loss, but helping you actually feel and process what’s been buried, blocked, or shut down.

Because grief doesn’t just hurt. It asks us to feel everything.

Sadness. Longing. Rage. Love. Guilt. Relief.

And many of us were never shown how to do that safely.

Grief Is About Love, but Also About Conflict

Grief isn’t just about letting go. It’s about reorganising a deep emotional bond.

Even if the person who’s gone was loved, there may also be unspoken anger. Resentment. Regret. Or a longing that was never met.

When those feelings are too painful to face, or too conflicted to make sense of, your mind and body may suppress them to protect you. Over time, that kind of emotional suppression can lead to a sense of flatness, disconnection, or even burnout; not just emotional pain, but a system that feels shut down.

This is where ISTDP can help.

How ISTDP Helps When Grief Won’t Move

If you’ve ever felt like you “should be over it by now” but still feel stuck, ISTDP can help by addressing why your emotional system is holding on.

We do this by:

• Identifying how your system protects you from painful feelings (with strategies like emotional numbing, detachment, or overthinking)

• Bringing those defences into awareness, so you can start to feel what’s underneath them

• Helping you regulate anxiety so that avoided feelings can safely emerge

• Staying with the emotion, rather than talking around it, until something breaks through

Often, when people start to connect with avoided emotions, their anxiety rises, not because something is wrong, but because they’re getting close to what’s been buried. If you’d like to understand more about how anxiety functions in this way, I’ve written about it here.

What's important to remember is that the goal isn’t just insight. It’s transformation through emotional experience.

Why Some Grief Feels Complicated

For many people, grief becomes complicated when the pain of the loss activates older emotional wounds.

Maybe the person you lost never gave you the love you needed and now you’re grieving what never was.

Maybe the loss reactivates earlier losses you never fully felt.

Maybe part of you feels you shouldn’t feel grief at all.

These emotional conflicts don’t resolve through talking alone.

They need to be felt.

In ISTDP, the therapist tracks your experience moment by moment, helping you notice what’s happening in your body, emotions, and anxiety. As you stay with the process, what’s been held in can finally begin to move.

What Makes ISTDP Different?

Many grief therapies aim to help you process the loss cognitively or behaviourally. That can be useful.

But ISTDP works deeper. It helps you:

• Feel what’s been avoided

• Face what’s been defended against

• Break through to the emotions that were too painful to access alone

And from that emotional breakthrough, something starts to shift.

The grief begins to move. The pain transforms. And space opens for something new.

If You’re Still Grieving, It Doesn’t Mean You’re Doing It Wrong

Sometimes we stay stuck not because we’re resisting grief, but because our system is still protecting us.

And those protections often formed long ago.

ISTDP doesn’t pathologise that. It meets it with respect and helps you gradually move through, not around, what’s there.

If grief has felt unresolved, even after time or therapy, ISTDP may help you connect to what really needs to be felt.

Because it’s not about getting over the loss.

It’s about making space for all the feelings that come with it, so grief can finally move and healing can begin.

If this resonates with you and you’d like to explore working together, then get in touch:

contact: benjonespsychotherapist@gmail.com