Room beside the missing

The goal was never to get rid of the grief.

I know that might sound strange, coming from someone who works with grief. But it’s the truth. The grief is there for a reason. It shows how much something or someone meant to you. That charge, however heavy it weighs, is proof of love. And love is not something you need to work away.

But something is allowed to stand beside it.

The image I often use is that of a room. In the beginning, the grief fills the entire room. There’s no space for anything else. The missing is everywhere, in every corner, at every moment. And that’s normal. That belongs to the beginning.

What can happen over time, if the grief is allowed to move, is that the room gets bigger. The grief doesn’t get smaller. The room gets bigger. Room appears beside the missing. Room for a morning that feels light. For a laugh that isn’t immediately followed by guilt. For a future that can be imagined again.

But when the grief gets stuck, the room doesn’t grow. The grief stays the same size, and the room stays the same size. There’s no space for anything else, however long it lasts. That is the moment when it helps to ask someone in.

In my work with IEMT and MOM, I don’t try to shrink the grief. I try to make the room bigger. The emotional charge that’s stuck is allowed to soften. The identity belief that keeps you trapped (“I’m not allowed to be happy”, “I’ll never get over this”) is allowed to let go. Not so the grief disappears, but so something can stand beside it again.

Sometimes it’s MOM that opens that door. When someone says: “It feels like a wall I can’t get rid of”, we explore that wall. How high is it? What’s it made of? What would it be like if you walked around it instead of trying to climb over it? By working with the metaphor, something often shifts in how you relate to the stuckness, sometimes faster than you’d expect.

IEMT helps with the charge. MOM helps with the pattern. Together they create the conditions for the room to grow. Not by taking something away, but by allowing something that was frozen to thaw.

That’s what ‘moving again’ means. It doesn’t mean ‘moving on’ in the sense of leaving the loss behind. It means moving forward with the loss. Giving it a place in your life, not as the only thing there is, but as part of a bigger whole. The missing and the living. The memory and the future. The love for what was and the openness for what comes.

That’s not a betrayal of what you lost. It’s the opposite. It’s saying: what I lost was so valuable that I’m still allowed to live. Especially now.

Some people feel that shift as a relief. Others feel it as a quiet calm — something they haven’t felt in a long time. And some feel it as fear, because it’s unfamiliar. Who am I if the grief no longer fills everything? What do I do with that room? All those responses are good. They all mean something is moving.

Sometimes the room shows up in unexpected places. In the ability to sit in silence without it feeling threatening. In looking at a photo with tenderness rather than with a fist in your chest. In discovering that you can hold the loss and still feel alive — not despite the loss, but with it. These moments are quiet, and easy to miss. But they matter deeply.

There’s no finish line. There’s no moment when you’re ‘done’ grieving. But there’s a difference between grief that fills your life and grief that has a place in your life. That difference isn’t big in distance — but it’s everything in experience.

You don’t have to do it alone. And you don’t have to wait until you’re ‘ready’ — because that moment rarely comes on its own. Sometimes the first step is simply: letting someone look with you.

Would you like to discover whether room beside the missing is possible? Book a conversation — calm, no obligation, on your terms.