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Key points
- There is a lack of grief and death literacy occurring across the modern world.
- It can be even harder to share about mystical experiences associated with death when grief itself is taboo.
- Openly discussing the intersections between grief, death, and mystical experiences can benefit many.
This post was co-authored with Jodi Gorham.
Conversations around grief and loss have often become socially awkward, as many people don’t know how to respond or what to even say. This lack of grief literacy is a societal issue, which reflects driving factors such as the medicalization of death and grief, the rising epidemic of loneliness, societal norms that are hostile to emotional experiences, and broader community fragmentation.1
As two therapists who specialize in traumatic loss and grief, we have witnessed many individuals and families who attempt to deny the reality of grief as it is not viewed as socially acceptable. The suppression of grief compounds a person’s natural and adaptive response to loss, which results in even more stress for a person during an already overwhelming time.2 Unfortunately, death continues to be an avoided and isolating experience within many public and private spaces in the West.
The difficulty of openly discussing death-related loss can become even more complex when people have mystical experiences, such as after-death communications (ADCs). ADCs are when people genuinely feel the presence of a deceased person, which research shows is quite ordinary across cross-cultural populations and is therapeutic for many.3 While some scholars refer to these as “extraordinary experiences,” it has become clear to us as clinicians that these are quite ordinary experiences. Personally, we have felt deeply privileged to bear witness to many after-death communications that include people sensing their person’s physical closeness.
Examples include hearing a deceased loved one’s voice, smelling their perfume, observing the person from the corner of their eye, or experiencing psychosomatic sensations like goosebumps, a warming in their heart, or a loving hand on their shoulder. Individuals who are grieving can also receive messages through cardinals, dragonflies, or other animals, find dimes in mysterious places, experience electrical short-circuiting with technology, or witness repetitive numbers such as 11:11.
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Sometimes, grieving people will also actively seek to induce after-death communication experiences with the help of a psychic medium, spiritual practices involving a pendulum, or even through technology such as cellphone apps, which ostensibly claim to be able to contact the deceased.
Indigenous ways of knowing the world and other spiritual beliefs and traditions normalize and welcome these experiences. However, some grieving persons who have these experiences can experience a lot of tension between their “hearts” versus their “logical minds” after experiencing an after-death communication.
Here are a few important things to know:
You are not going “crazy.”
Psychological research confirms that after-death communications are a normative and statistically common experience after a death-related loss.4 How people make sense of these experiences is incredibly diverse. These experiences are not representative of any underlying mental illness, abnormality, or psychopathology. Grief therapists frequently understand ADCs as a continuing bond, which demonstrates how we maintain relationships with the deceased and how grief truly has no prescribed timeline.
Create or join a brave space that honors grief literacy in your community.
Both grief and after-death communication experiences benefit from brave spaces. Brave spaces encourage dialogue on vulnerable topics. These spaces are centered around how all experiences and different types of knowledge can be honored. They involve us learning to be comfortable in the uncomfortable and unlearning the need to fix something or someone. When we co-create communal spaces embedded in deep listening and compassion, these spaces can facilitate constructive dialogue that even allows contrasting views.
Give yourself and others permission to have whatever experience emerges in life.
Most after-death communications are spontaneous and unexpected. If you have one, give yourself permission to experience a range of emotions and take time to reflect on how this experience has impacted you. Other people can also support ADC experiencers by allowing people to disclose ADCs and ask questions to explore the meaning of this experience for the person who is grieving. Letting people know these are surprisingly common experiences is often helpful in removing self-doubt, fear of ridicule, or shame.
People’s bodies die; love does not.
In the wake of expected or unexpected death loss, attachment bonds can also feel lost. Grief invites us to engage with a new developmental task: to relearn how to love someone who is now physically gone. One of the ways to walk forward on our grief paths is to find ways to nurture and continue love in the absence of a person’s physical presence.
The clinical literature has established how maintaining connection to the deceased in the absence of a physical presence is often meaningful, supportive, and adaptive.5 Both external connections (objects, tattoos, pictures, places, etc.) and more internal psychological connections to the deceased can be therapeutic. After death communications are just one way that love and relationships continue to be nurtured.
Explore the mystery of grief and death.
After-death communications are not the only mystical experience associated with grief or death. Other common experiences include near-death experiences, dying and deathbed visions from the terminally ill, or animals like cats and dogs who can accurately predict death within end-of-life care settings. Jodi, the co-author of this article, personally witnessed her daughter’s soul leave her body when she died in the hospital. Mark has experienced several after-death communications, both in his personal life and even within clinical settings with bereaved persons. This also highlights how it is not unusual for mystical experiences to be shared and witnessed by numerous people.
Hearing experiences like this from licensed professionals opens the windows of wonder, helps remove stigma, invites greater curiosity, and honors how we can authentically continue our relationships with the deceased. Orienting ourselves to engage with mystery and acknowledging something deeper than our rational minds can be a liberating experience.
Trust the heart.
Grief is a multidimensional experience that impacts our physiology, psychology, social-cultural life, and even our sense of spirituality. Clearly, grief is a disorienting experience that splits our hearts wide open and involves so much pain, heartache, and confusion. The grieving process challenges our fundamental assumptions about ourselves or the world, and it can be even more mind-boggling when mystical experiences occur.
However, when we learn to lean into our feelings and sensory world more deeply and decide to embrace our grief with greater intentionality, we can allow for something deeper to find expression. Grief invites us to learn how to trust our hearts, and it is here where people can experience connection, wonder, and even a sense of vitality in a time of traumatic loss.
This article was co-authored with Jodi Gorham, CYC, BSW, MSW, RSW, Founder & Managing Director, J.A.G. Village.
Jodi Gorham is a proud Metis woman, a Registered Social Worker, a Child and Youth Counselor, and a Faculty Member in the Grief Education Program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Jodi also teaches at Fleming College, in the School of Justice and Community, as well as in the School of Indigenous Studies, in addition to being a Circle Facilitator and a Reiki Master. She is a wife and mother of two children, Davis, who she gets to hold in her arms, and Jorja, who she now holds in her heart.
References
1. Breen, L. J., Kawashima, D., Joy, K., Cadell, S., Roth, D., Chow, A., & Macdonald, M. E. (2022). Grief literacy: A call to action for compassionate communities. Death Studies, 46(2), 425–433.
2. Shelvock, M., Kinsella, E., & Harris, D. (2022). Beyond the corporatization of death systems: Towards green death practices. Illness, Crisis, and Loss, 30(4), 640–658.
3. Shelvock, M. (2023) Can we “see” dead people? Psychology Today.
4. Barušs, I. (2023). Death as an altered state of consciousness: A scientific approach. American Psychological Association.
5. Kosminsky, P. S., & Jordan, J. R. (2023). Attachment-informed grief therapy: The clinician’s guide to foundations and applications (2nd edition). Routledge.
