Continuing Bonds, Spiritual Experience, and Grief: Clinical Considerations for Helping Professionals
Spiritual Experience in Grief: What Professionals Need to Know
A significant proportion of bereaved individuals report experiences they interpret as contact or communication from the person who died — sensing a presence, receiving what feels like a sign, dreaming vividly of the deceased, or noticing coincidences that carry personal meaning. Research estimates that these experiences are reported by anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of bereaved individuals, depending on the population and the timeframe studied. They are not rare. They are not pathological. And they are frequently not discussed in clinical or support contexts because helping professionals are uncertain how to respond to them.
For grief-informed professionals, the clinical question is not whether these experiences are objectively real. The clinical question is what they mean to the bereaved person, what function they are serving in the grief process, and how to engage with them in ways that support rather than dismiss or overinflate. Continuing bonds theory — the well-supported framework that maintaining an ongoing internal relationship with the deceased is a normative and often adaptive aspect of grief — provides a useful clinical foundation for this conversation.
In this episode of the GRIEF Ladies podcast, intuitive medium Deb DeCelle joins hosts Kelly Daugherty and Rox to discuss the experience of receiving signs from loved ones after death, the role of meditation and gratitude in supporting awareness and connection, and how maintaining a sense of ongoing relationship can support bereavement. The conversation is approached here not as an endorsement of any particular spiritual framework, but as a clinically relevant exploration of experiences that bereaved individuals have regularly and that professionals need tools to engage with thoughtfully.
What This Episode Covers
The conversation addresses several areas with relevance to professionals supporting bereaved individuals:
What experiences bereaved individuals commonly interpret as signs or contact from the deceased, and why these experiences are so prevalent
How meditation and contemplative practices can support grief by creating regulated space for reflection and internal connection
The clinical relevance of doubt and skepticism — both in bereaved individuals processing their own experiences and in the professionals supporting them
Continuing bonds as a framework for understanding ongoing connection after death
How gratitude and attentional practices can support a bereaved person's capacity to notice meaning in their experience
Clinical and Systemic Implications
Spiritual and post-death contact experiences sit in a clinical space that is genuinely complex. They are common, they are meaningful to the people who have them, and they are poorly addressed in most professional training. Several implications are worth naming directly.
Dismissing or pathologizing spiritual experiences in grief causes clinical harm. When a bereaved client shares an experience they found meaningful — a dream, a sensation of presence, a moment that felt like communication — and the professional responds with skepticism, clinical distance, or redirection, the message received is that this part of their grief is not welcome in the room. For many bereaved individuals, these experiences are among the most significant and sustaining aspects of their grief process. Dismissing them does not neutralize them — it simply ensures the client will not share them again, and will process them without support.
Overclaiming is also a clinical risk. Professionals who enthusiastically affirm spiritual experiences without attending to the client's own uncertainty, doubt, or ambivalence about them are also missing the mark. Some bereaved individuals have complicated relationships with spiritual belief. Others feel pressure to interpret experiences in ways that fit a particular framework — religious, secular, or otherwise — that may not actually reflect their experience. Grief-informed care in this area means following the client's lead rather than imposing a framework, in either direction.
Continuing bonds theory provides a clinically neutral foundation. For professionals who are uncomfortable with explicitly spiritual language, continuing bonds theory offers a framework that is empirically supported, clinically useful, and does not require endorsing any particular metaphysical position. The question of whether the deceased is objectively present is separate from the clinical question of whether maintaining a sense of ongoing relationship supports the bereaved person's functioning and grief integration — and research suggests that for many people, it does.
Meditation and contemplative practices carry specific relevance in grief contexts. Beyond their general regulatory function, meditation and reflective practices create structured space for bereaved individuals to attend to their internal experience — including experiences of memory, connection, and meaning-making related to the deceased. For clients who feel disconnected from the person who died, or who are struggling to access continuing bonds in more active ways, contemplative practices can provide a gentle, low-pressure entry point.
Professionals' own discomfort with death and spiritual experience shapes their practice. Clinicians, educators, and healthcare providers who have not examined their own relationship to death, afterlife belief, and spiritual experience are more likely to respond to clients' experiences in ways that reflect their own unexamined discomfort rather than the client's clinical needs. Grief education that includes explicit attention to professional self-awareness in this area produces more responsive, less reactive support.
Cultural humility is essential in this clinical territory. Beliefs about connection with the deceased after death vary enormously across cultural, religious, and spiritual traditions. What one tradition understands as pathological rumination, another understands as appropriate ancestor relationship. Grief-informed professionals need sufficient cultural humility to assess the meaning of a client's experiences within their own framework rather than imposing an external one.
Practical Applications for Helping Professionals
1. Create explicit clinical space for spiritual and post-death contact experiences. In bereavement assessment and ongoing support, invite clients to share experiences they may not have raised because they expected skepticism or dismissal. A direct, neutral question — "Many people have experiences after a loss that feel like connection with the person who died. Has anything like that happened for you?" — communicates openness without pressure and often elicits material that is central to the client's grief experience.
2. Follow the client's framework, not your own. Whether a client interprets their experiences through a religious framework, a secular one, or holds genuine uncertainty about what they mean, the professional's role is to engage with the client's framework rather than offer an alternative. This requires active monitoring of the impulse to either affirm or correct — both of which redirect the clinical conversation away from the client's actual experience.
3. Use continuing bonds language as a clinically accessible bridge. For professionals who are uncertain how to engage with explicitly spiritual material, continuing bonds language — maintaining an ongoing internal relationship with the deceased — provides a framework that is clinically grounded, empirically supported, and does not require any position on metaphysical questions. Asking clients how they maintain their relationship with the person who died, what they carry from that relationship, and how they experience the deceased's continued presence in their life opens clinically rich territory without requiring spiritual endorsement.
4. Assess the function of spiritual experiences within the grief process. Rather than evaluating whether a client's experiences are real or accurate, assess what function they are serving. Are they providing comfort and connection? Supporting ongoing functioning? Creating meaning? Or are they functioning as avoidance — a way of not engaging with the reality of the loss? The function is the clinical variable. The metaphysical question is not.
5. Address doubt and ambivalence without resolving it prematurely. Many bereaved individuals have complicated, ambivalent relationships with their own spiritual experiences — finding them comforting in one moment and destabilizing in another, wanting to believe and feeling foolish for wanting to. This ambivalence is clinically meaningful and worth exploring rather than resolving. Sitting with uncertainty alongside a client, without rushing to a position, is a significant clinical skill in this territory.
6. Incorporate contemplative practices with attention to their specific grief-related function. When introducing meditation or contemplative practices to bereaved clients, frame them explicitly in relation to the grief process — as a way of creating space to be with memory, to attend to inner experience, to allow whatever arises without pressure to direct or manage it. This framing is more clinically accurate than presenting these practices as primarily relaxation tools, and it is more likely to engage clients who are in acute grief and for whom relaxation feels inaccessible or beside the point.
About the Guest: Deb DeCelle
Deb DeCelle is an intuitive medium, trauma-informed mentor, and bestselling author whose work focuses on grief, spiritual connection, and personal growth. She brings a compassionate, experience-grounded approach to the intersection of loss and ongoing connection, supporting bereaved individuals in navigating spiritual experience as part of their grief process. Deb's work blends intuitive insight with trauma-informed awareness in service of meaningful, individualized support.
Resources from the Center for Informed Grief
The Center for Informed Grief provides training and professional development for therapists, educators, healthcare providers, and organizational leaders working with bereaved individuals. Our programs address grief-informed practice across its full complexity — including continuing bonds, spiritual experience in bereavement, cultural humility in grief support, and building professional self-awareness around death and loss.
To learn more about upcoming trainings, workshops, or consultation opportunities, visit the Center for Informed Grief.
