Arjun Iyer

About

There is a widespread belief that therapy in this area means being encouraged to let go, and a great many people avoid it for exactly that reason. They are not ready to let go and they do not want to be talked into it. Nobody will be. Mourning is not a process of detachment, whatever the older literature suggested, and the aim here is not to reduce the significance of someone who mattered enormously. We work on carrying rather than releasing. What changes is how much of your life the carrying requires, not whether the person continues to occupy a permanent place in it. I have sat with enough people through this to have lost any interest in tidy resolutions. They rarely survive contact with an actual bereaved person. If you have been avoiding this because you thought you would be asked to move on, that is not what happens here.