My Grief Story

Losing my gran felt like losing the sun, as if the warmth had been drained from the world and I was left to navigate a fog that wouldn’t lift. She was more than a grandmother. She was my anchor, my cheerleader, my safe place. Every memory I cherished had her woven into it, the talks over biscuits and tea, the sound of her laugh echoing in the kitchen when she made cakes, the way she hugged me and held me tight. 

When she passed, the silence was deafening.

I tried to grieve "normally"  if there is such a thing. It hit me like a train, I cried...endless tears, talked to friends who'd lost loved ones. But, I still felt stuck, like grief was a storm that had flooded my house and no matter how many buckets I emptied, the water kept rising.

I wasn’t looking for a miracle, just something, anything, that could help me breathe again. I hesitated. Hypnosis seemed so far removed from what I thought grief needed. But pain makes you open, sometimes in ways you didn’t expect.

In our first session, the therapist guided me into a state of deep relaxation — not sleep, not dreaming, but a calm space in between. There, I could feel my body soften for the first time in weeks. It was like sinking into a warm bath after being frozen from the inside out.

Through guided visualisation, I was invited to visit a garden in my mind, a garden that slowly began to fill with memories of my gran. Her favorite flowers bloomed. Her voice returned, not in a ghostly way, but in a way that made me feel connected to her spirit rather than haunted by her absence. We didn’t talk about death. We talked about her, her humour, her kindness, her stubbornness. The things I was scared to forget.

I still cried, but the tears felt different. They weren’t from a place of being lost. They were from being held.

Over time, hypnotherapy helped me meet the grief with gentleness. It didn't erase the loss, nothing ever could, but it gave me space to feel it without drowning in it. It helped me rewrite the story from “She’s gone and I’m alone,” to “She’s gone, and I carry her with me.”

Now, I return to that garden often, sometimes in sessions, sometimes when I’m lying in bed, missing her. It’s not a replacement for her presence, but it's a bridge between what was and what still lives inside me.

Grief is not linear, and there are still days that ache. But hypnotherapy offered me a path forward, not away from the pain, but through it.

And in that process, I’ve learned: my gran may no longer be here, but the love she gave me is woven into who I am. That is something death can never take.