If you are a therapist who works with grief, then chances are you know that grieving a loss is a natural process. And grief itself is not something to get rid of, or rush through. It is a normative human response to loss. But for some, grief can get complicated. Things like trauma, environmental stressors, or lack of support can impact the natural grieving process. In this post, I’m sharing three grief therapy activities that you can use to help your clients with emotional processing, regulation, and meaning-making as they grieve.

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Understanding the Grieving Process

Many clinicians are familiar with the five stages of grief introduced by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross:

• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance

The updated “seven stages of grief” is a helpful framework you can use as well.

It’s important to remember these stages are not linear. Clients may move back and forth between them or experience multiple stages simultaneously.

Grief itself is not pathological.

But it can get complicated. There are countless situations and experiences that affect the natural grieving process, including things like:

• Disenfranchised loss
• Cultural suppression of emotion
• Trauma layered onto grief
• Lack of emotional safety
• Family or societal pressure to “move on”

Providing psychoeducation about grief can normalize clients’ experiences — but it should be offered gently, not imposed by way of empty platitudes or rigid frameworks.

Why Creative Expression Is Powerful in Grief Work

Grief is often experienced on many levels – emotional, psychological, cognitive, and sensorimotor. And with it comes feelings, beliefs, thoughts, and sensations.

Clients may struggle to articulate the depth of their pain, especially when emotions feel overwhelming or contradictory.

That’s why it’s helpful to offer a variety of interventions: talk therapy, creativity-based interventions, journal therapy prompts, and art therapy directives, to name a few.

Creative interventions offer:

✔ Symbolic expression
✔ Emotional release
✔ Containment
✔ Nervous system regulation
✔ Meaning-making opportunities

Art-based activities allow clients to process grief in a way that feels safer than direct verbal confrontation.

Below are three creativity-based grief therapy activities you can use in session.

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3 Grief Therapy Activities to Support the Grieving Process

As a therapist, your role is not to “fix” grief — but to create a safe container where it can unfold. The grief therapy activities below will help you do just that.

1. The Heart Map Grief Activity

The Heart Map exercise invites clients to draw inside a large heart and visually represent where they are on their grief journey as well as their relationship to what was lost.

They may include:

• Colors representing emotions
• Symbols connected to memories
• Meaningful words or phrases
• Imagery that represents what was lost
• Dividing lines to show compartments of grief

This activity helps externalize grief and allows space for processing how your client is currently experiencing their grief.

Processing questions might include:

• What stands out in your drawing?
• Where does the grief feel most intense?
• Are there areas that feel lighter or more peaceful?
• Tell me more about this area here.

💡Therapist Tip: Avoid interpreting the artwork for the client. Allow them to assign meaning to their own symbols and images.

2. The Grief Mask Exercise

Many grieving individuals feel pressure to put on a brave face for the outside world. I’ve heard clients talk in sessions about being told how “strong” they are by loved ones. But often, that feedback doesn’t ring true because they don’t always want to be strong. And it can be exhausting for them to always show the world that strength.

The Grief Mask activity offers your client an opportunity to name that mask and explore the difference between:

• The external face shown to others
• The internal emotional experience

With this activity, clients can depict their experience of “grief masking” by drawing imagery on two masks where:

• One side represents the things they show to others regarding their loss
• The other side represents their ‘true’, inner grief experience

This intervention can help clients explore and process:

• Emotional suppression
• Social expectations
• Protective coping strategies
• Feelings of isolation
• More helpful ways of using masks versus when to ask for support

It also helps normalize the adaptive ways masking can sometimes serve your clients and how best to use it.

💡Therapist Tip: You can offer additional prompts to your client for them to continue to develop anything that comes up in their mask drawing by creating a real mask by using this paintable mask from Amazon.

3. Grief Mandala Drawing

Mandalas can provide structure and containment during intense emotional processing. That’s why mandalas are really useful for grief therapy.

Drawing inspiration from art therapy approaches discussed by Cathy Malchiodi, the grief mandala invites clients to:

• Create symbolic imagery within a circular boundary
• Use intentional lines, shapes, and color
• Reflect on a specific emotion related to loss
• Carve out a space to depict their grief journey
• Designate symbolic imagery to represent what was lost

The circular format often promotes grounding and reflection. It symbolically represents wholeness, even when life feels fractured.

Processing prompts might include:

• What emotion did you focus on while drawing?
• Did anything shift during the process?
• Where do you see tension or calm within the image?

💡Therapist Tip: You can also use the mandala drawing exercise to offer your client a space to create a visual tribute to a deceased loved one.

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Integrating Mindfulness and Guided Imagery

Because grief can activate intense physiological responses, pairing art-based interventions with emotion regulation tools is essential.

Consider incorporating:

• Brief grounding exercises
• Guided imagery for safe memory recall
• Breath-based mindfulness exercises
• Reflective journaling or meditation practices
• Bilateral stimulation exercises or music

These tools support nervous system stabilization before and after deeper grief exploration.

Do’s and Don’ts in Grief Therapy

When working with grieving clients, it’s important that you keep the following tips in mind:

• DON’T rush them toward acceptance
• DON’T pathologize natural grief responses
• DON’T assign meaning to artwork or interpret what’s in the art
• DON’T push meaning or narratives too early
• DON’T project your own meaning onto their experience
• DO validate their emotional experience
• DO provide psychoeducation around natural grief responses
• DO provide social support resources
• DO provide psychoeducational resources (i.e. books on grief)
• DO offer them journal prompts and creativity-based exercises in sessions
• DO offer a safe space for emotional expression and somatic discharge

Healing comes through pacing and processing — not pressure.

Supporting Clients in Moving Through Pain

One of the most important reminders in grief work is this:

Clients do not heal by avoiding pain – They heal by moving through it at their own pace.

When therapists create space for grief — without trying to help client get rid of it — clients can begin to:

• Integrate their loss
• Reconstruct identity
• Relocate their connection to what was lost
• Discover meaning over time

Grief is painful, but it is also adaptive and offers us a path forward for survival. And you have the honor and privilege of helping them move through it.

Looking for Structured Grief Therapy Worksheets?

Grief work is so important, but it isn’t easy. And the ready-to-use worksheets in my Grief Journal & Workbook can help you provide structured support to your clients.

This grief journal and workbook features the grief therapy activities I talked about in this post, as well as 50 pages of resources that include:

• Psychoeducation on Grief and Loss
• Emotional expression prompts
• Creative expression prompts
• Writing prompts
• Meaning-making reflections
• Exercises for memorialization and designing tributes

This printable workbook is designed for therapists who want structured, creative grief counseling tools they can use immediately in session.

👉 You can download the Grief Journal & Workbook here:
https://creativetherapyideas.com/product/grief-journal-and-workbook-pdf/

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