Two clinicians, one song, and a walk back to the car after a show that neither of us will forget.
Earlier this year, George and Matt stepped outside the office to do something they spend a lot of time encouraging their clients to do: practice self-care. That meant heading to the Fillmore in Philadelphia to see Steven Wilson Jr. perform live.
The crowd was medium-sized, but Wilson's performance was so captivating, so intimate in its energy, that the room felt small. The energy that night was hard to describe except to say it carried something: hope, maybe, and a deep compassion for how genuinely hard loss can be.
After the show, they walked back to the car together talking about what a performance it had been, and how grateful they were to have known each other as long as they have. George and Matt have been friends since living together at Stockton College. Decades later they are still close friends and now colleagues at NPS, which is the kind of thing that does not happen by accident.
Here is where it gets a little funny. Both of them had been independently working on a blog series about songs that hold meaning for clinicians. And when they compared notes, they had both, without talking to each other, started writing about the same song: Steven Wilson Jr.'s "Grief Is Only Love."
They both started laughing. It was not a huge surprise given how long they have known each other. But it felt like a sign that this one was worth writing together.
The reframe inside the lyric
The central lyric of the song offers one of the most elegant cognitive reframes either of us has encountered outside of a clinical setting. The idea that grief is simply love that has lost its destination transforms the experience of loss from something that is happening to you into something that is an extension of something beautiful you already carry.
Most clients who are grieving struggle enormously with how they are "supposed" to feel. They second-guess their sadness, their relief, their numbness, their bursts of laughter in the middle of hard days. This reframe normalizes all of it. It says: what you are feeling is not a malfunction. It is love with nowhere to go. Under the pain, there is connection. There is something that mattered deeply. The grief is proof of that.
From a CBT perspective, that is a significant cognitive shift. It does not minimize the pain. It recontextualizes it in a way that can reduce the secondary suffering that comes from fighting what you feel.
Guidance from those we have lost
Another line in the song speaks to the comforting belief that the people we lose are still with us in some form, guiding us forward. Regardless of spiritual or religious background, this is often the thought that brings the most hope to people in grief. The idea that someone's presence does not simply disappear, that it lives on in us and around us, provides a kind of reassurance that even the most evidence-based therapeutic approach can struggle to replicate.
We have both seen this in clinical work and in organizational grief trainings. When someone loses a colleague, a teammate, or a person who shaped who they are, what they often need most is not a strategy. They need permission to believe that person is still with them somehow. That belief, whatever form it takes, is protective.
An ACT lens on grief
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy offers a framework that fits grief particularly well, and this song speaks directly to three of its core processes.
The lines about hanging onto the hurting and accepting what is out of our control speak directly to one of the hardest things about grief: the resistance. The more we push against grief, the harder it becomes. We try to tell ourselves we should be further along, that we should be stronger, that we should be able to function. ACT invites us to drop the struggle and let the feeling be what it is. Not forever. Just right now.
Grief is weird
We say this to clients often, and we mean it. Grief does not follow a script. The stage model has its uses, but the stages are better understood as parts of a process rather than a linear sequence you move through and complete. Grief can look like sadness. It can look like relief. It can look like laughing at something absurd in the middle of a hard week. Sometimes it is such a layered mix of emotion that it is nearly impossible to identify what you are actually feeling, which is exactly why it needs time and space rather than analysis and solutions.
When organizations come to us after a tragic loss, the most important thing staff need is not a plan or a resource list. They need a space to just be. To sit with what happened. To feel whatever they feel without being redirected toward productivity or recovery on someone else's timeline. Swooping in with strategies too soon does not help. Presence does.
Music, at its best, provides that presence. A song like this one does not tell you how to grieve. It just sits with you while you do.
Frequently asked questions
We did not plan to write this post together. We just both ended up in the same place, drawn to the same song, for the same reasons. That probably says something about grief too: the things that move us tend to find us when we are ready for them.
If you or someone you know is navigating loss and could use support, our team at Navesink Psychological Services is here.
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