Working Through Grief with Art Therapy

Grief doesn't follow a schedule and, in the hardest moments, can feel limitless. It floods in without warning and takes over completely. Whether you’re at work, running errands, or out with family or friends, you can find yourself suddenly unable to think, talk, or move. Within a matter of seconds, the tears start falling. That fact that it feels uncontainable is part of what makes it so intimidating and even a little frightening.

Art therapy, in a very literal sense, can be a container for grief. What art therapy can do, in the most tangible way possible, is give those feelings some limits. The four sides of a page or holding a piece of clay in your hands can give your feelings form, and make them feel a little less infinite. And working with an art therapist there to guide you can create boundaries and safety — you’re not in this alone.

Art therapy exercises for grief

People often wonder what art therapy for grief looks like in practice. Even though the work is deep, the exercises can be surprisingly simple.

A session might start with something like: Draw the emotions you're feeling. If there are several, how do they interact on the page together? Or: If your grief were a creature of some kind, what would it look like? Sometimes I'll ask someone to embody a memory, to bring to life something they hold of a person they've lost.

We might also do deeper identity work: Who were you before this happened? Who are you now? Who are you becoming? That could look like drawing a road or a path and noticing how you change along it. There are so many different ways to approach it, depending on what you need.

What makes working with an art therapist unique is that they’re there to catch things you might not notice yourself. They might ask: What does that represent for you? Does it connect to this person's legacy? Does it speak to what you've lost and how you're going to rebuild?

The value of the art as embodied memory

Art therapy is very much about the process, but sometimes the product is equally valuable. A piece you make in a session can become a ritual object. Maybe you created something during the holidays, and every Christmas you take it out because it holds something meaningful about someone you loved. That's not a small thing. That's a living, ongoing relationship with grief that you carry forward in a healthy way.

When a piece gets shared within a family—when someone gifts their art to another person who shared in that loss—I almost imagine it like weaving. A strengthening of the fabric between people. It's warm, it's meaningful, and it's a way to come together around something that can otherwise feel incredibly isolating.

Ambiguous loss: when grief is even harder to explain

Not all loss is concrete. Ambiguous loss is where it gets complicated and sometimes even more painful, because it's so hard to acknowledge.

This could be a family member diagnosed with dementia, someone who is physically present but no longer mentally who they were. It could be a loved one who is incarcerated; you can talk to them on the phone, but they're not with you. It's so complicated they're here, but they're not here.

We experienced this collectively during COVID. We had our people, but we couldn't see them, touch them, or be with them. The social anxiety that has followed is still hitting us in ways we might not even be fully aware of. And there was no clear marker that said: this is over. No memorial, no ceremony. The grief just lingered.

I know this personally. I worked in the hospital through COVID and lost my sense of taste and smell. Mine never came back. After a few months, I had to sit with the reality that part of me might just be gone. Who am I now? How do I relate to food, to going out to restaurants, to the things I used to enjoy? That kind of identity loss deserves grief, too. It's important to give it the time of day rather than push through without acknowledging it.

One of many exercises I use for ambiguous loss and identity work is making a mask. On the outside: what do I present to the world related to this grief? On the inside: what am I holding privately? Exploring both sides and the overlap can be illuminating.

Anticipatory grief: when you know loss is coming

There's another form of grief that often goes unacknowledged: anticipatory grief. This is when we know something is going to change. It could be a terminal diagnosis, a divorce, a life that's about to be reinvented entirely. We're holding the heaviness of something that hasn't happened yet, and trying to figure out how to exist inside that weight.

Part of what helps — and I say this from personal experience as much as professional practice — is finding a genuine reframe when you're ready for it. Not a forced positivity, but a shift that you actually buy into. After losing my sense of taste and smell, I couldn't go to a restaurant for months without feeling grief the whole time. But eventually I came back to: What can I focus on? I found gratitude for the company I was with, for the ambiance, for being out in the world at all. That made a real difference.

The key word is genuine. You can't push someone to reframe before they're ready. But with time and support, it can happen. And when it does, it creates space for something like hope.

Art as a way back to yourself

Art can't change what happened. It can't undo a death, reverse a diagnosis, or put a family back together. But what it offers is something I've come to think of as a micro way to connect again, a way to feel a sense of control after everything has felt uncontrollable.

You choose the materials. You decide what to do with what you make. You sit with the feeling, let it move through you, and then you put it on paper, in clay, on canvas. You face it, and then you contain it.

And in doing that, over time, you start to integrate. You start to see the sun on the horizon. The grief doesn't disappear, but it finds its place within who you're becoming. That, to me, is what healing looks like.

Is it time to consider art therapy?

You don't have to be in crisis to benefit from art therapy. But there are some signs that working with an art therapist might be worth exploring.

If your grief feels boundless and you can't find the edges of it, that's a signal you may need a container. If you don't have a strong support system and you're holding everything alone, that weight can become unmanageable. If your loss is ambiguous and you're struggling to give it a name, art therapy can help make the invisible feel a little more real and workable.

The same is true if you're in anticipatory grief, bracing for something you know is coming and not sure how to carry it in the meantime. Or if a loss has shifted your sense of identity so significantly that you're asking who am I now?

You can absolutely do creative expression on your own. But if you find that the feelings keep flooding in without anywhere to go, or that grief is getting in the way of reconnecting with yourself and the people around you, reaching out to an art therapist is a meaningful next step. You don't have to sort through it alone.