Navigating Loss: How Massage Therapy Can Help Process Grief

Over the last several years, we’ve all had new and often extreme brushes with grief—but we all operate in a culture that doesn’t teach us how to grieve, or give us the tools to do so. Jess Larsen Brennan has been a birth and end-of-life doula for more than 15 years, and is also a licensed massage therapist specializing in grief massage. We sat down with her to learn more about what grief massage actually is, and how she approaches grief and bereavement in her life and practice.   

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Lauren Diethelm: Alright, so to start, let’s talk about you a little bit. What drew you to massage therapy? How did you find out about grief massage?

Jess Larsen Brennan: I’ve actually been a doula for basically all of my career. I was a birth doula for 15 years, I’ve assisted home birth with midwives, and I’ve worked in birth advocacy and research and policy. 

Then around seven years ago, I went through a divorce—and I also had someone in my family die at the same time, and we sold our house, and I had a three-year-old, and, and, and. You get the idea. There was a lot going on at that time. I also lost part of my career then. I knew that as a single mom, I wouldn’t be able to attend births, which was my love. 

The way grief often occurs is there’s all these ripple effects. It’s never just one thing. There’s the primary loss, but then there’s all these adjacent losses that often come, whether it’s the loss of friendships or social connections. In my case, my primary loss was my partnership and my family, but I had ripple effects through the rest of my life and career too. 

So when I was going through that, I found what helped me most was more of a doula approach. But there’s no such thing as a divorce doula, so I would go for a massage. I really liked the massage therapist I had then, but I’d be like, “Well, this hurts, and I’m having all this weird digestive pain, and I’m not sleeping great, and I can’t focus, and I had a panic attack,” and she kind of had to make me take a deep breath before getting me on the table. She was really mindful of her scope of practice, and everything I was saying was a bit beyond that. But at the same time, I would go to my therapist, and she couldn’t touch me—which I felt like I needed at that time too.

The model of care that I knew was a doula model of care, and while that’s definitely not the same as seeing a licensed mental health professional, in some ways that doula model is able to start to bridge that gap. That combination of being able to provide physical contact while also being there to listen was the model of care I was really searching for and couldn’t quite find.  

So as I moved out of that part of my life and started rebuilding, one of my needs was to have a way to work that didn’t require me to be on call, or attend births in the middle of the night for who knows how long. I had always been curious about massage, because I’m a toucher. In massage school, we talk a lot about our touch history, because that can be really fraught for people. We have to think about things like, what has touch meant to me? What are the impactful memories I have around this? Is it a primary means of communication? For me, touch has really been a love language. In birth, I’ve always been one of those doulas who scoops people up and literally holds them as the contractions come and go. 

All of this really made massage a very clear next step for me. I also have worked a little bit with author and grief researcher Megan Devine, and her approach to grief is that it’s this very normal, human response to losing something that we’ve loved. It takes a long time for our brains to adapt to the work of living in a world that doesn’t contain that thing we loved.

A lot of what we inherently absorb around grief in our culture doesn’t prepare us for that. So we’re left phenomenally lacking in loss literacy and grief readiness, or how to support other people going through loss, or what to do when that inevitably happens to us. Because we live in a world where everything we love is impermanent, and we all will go through these invitations of loss where our lives are changed in ways that we didn’t ask for, and we’re not equipped with the tools or framework to adapt around that. 

So this is a very long and meandering way of answering your question, but I knew when I went to massage school that I was going for death and grief. I knew that was what I wanted to focus on, and I knew I wanted to massage people who were going through something. A lot of massage therapists explicitly name grief in their practice, and I do too, but I also explicitly talk about grief around things that aren’t bereavement. I talk about grief as a natural consequence of lots of life experiences that involve giving up something we loved and wanted to keep, or things we never got to have in the first place. 

That’s a really interesting distinction, because I think a lot of people would use grief and bereavement interchangeably. I don’t know if many people would think to make a distinction between those two. 

That’s right. But when we develop a skill set around brief readiness and loss literacy that encompasses more than just somebody we love dying, then we’re better prepared when a pet dies, or we lose a job we love, or we’re getting ready to retire from a career we had for 15 years that has come to identify us. 

Any time any of this happens we start to be like, what’s all this stuff I’m feeling? What do I eat, how do I sleep? And grief as a human experience is so messy anyway—it’s so dynamic and complicated that it makes sense that we would go through all those wild emotions any time we’re giving up something that we love. 

Do you find that a lot of people come to you with an experience that they wouldn’t classify as grief themselves, but that you would name as grief? Do people have a hard time identifying themselves in that way?

Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of those folks would probably come to me because someone gave them a gift certificate, and they’re just using that up. Which makes sense to me, because if you go to my website it’s very much grief, grief, grief—so if you don’t identify that way, you’re pretty likely to keep looking.

I often tell people look, it’s not for me to define what you’re going through. I just know how to listen, and I care. And then we’re going to get you on the table and we’ll have a 90 minute massage. Functionally that’s really helpful, because you shift from the sympathetic nervous system responses that’s implicated so much in grief and loss into a nervous system framework, which is much more supportive of healing and peace of mind. 

So yes, sometimes people don’t self-identify as grieving, and maybe they never will. I might ask a question like, “Does this feel like grief to you?” And maybe they’ll say, “No, it just all feels like too much right now,” and that helps me see my role in that. It’s often just to affirm and create space for active listening, and just let people be exactly who they are without feeling the need to fix them or come up with a solution. 

But, sometimes people come directly asking for help, and in those situations I’m just so thankful for resources. I have a really solid network of licensed mental health providers in my area that I know well and trust, so when people do come asking for something I can’t provide, I can confidently refer them to someone who can help in that way. 

An important distinction of grief massage compared to other kinds of massage is that we’re not actually trying to make your pain go away. That’s what distinguishes us from a lot of other modalities, where they are designed to relieve physical pain and uncomfortable sensation, and that’s a lot of what I learned in massage school. But now, I’m working with a population of people who are at a point in their lives where a massage isn’t actually going to fix shit.

It’ll make you feel physically better for a little bit, and it may help you sleep better over time, but your grief will still be there. The research is clear that stress and anxiety, body aches, and depression are all positively impacted by regular bodywork, so in some ways we can address the symptoms and related experiences of grief, but I’m not ever going to promise or expect that massage is going to solve the issue that really hurts. 

Well, right—it’s not really a super solvable issue, is it? Grief is something that you learn to just sit with, and that’s about all you can do. 

Yes, totally. There’s this children’s book by Cori Doerrfeld called The Rabbit Listened that I read in every course I teach or every group I speak to, and the idea is that being with somebody in their pain helps tremendously. So it’s not solving anything, but being with somebody in their time of grief makes a difference. Providing hands-on relaxation support, careful listening, and unconditional positive regard for those two hours or however long really does shift the experience of grief in a novel way—even though it doesn’t change the fact that they suffered a loss. And is there any more human work than that?

I know—I’m kind of sitting here thinking there’s no response to that. It’s a really profound thing, to have that ultimate connection with someone. But I think our culture is set up in a way where we see someone in pain and feel like we have to fix it, and that’s not really how it works. 

But I think that’s such a human response. If we see someone we care about, of course we want to make that pain go away—but it can be really hard to know what to say in those moments. We have a lot of impulses to tell people to look on the bright side, or to try to correct their stories, but really all we have to do is agree that it’s as bad as they say it is—and that takes so much of the burden off. Painful times are exacerbated by our cultural lack of grief literacy and welfare. I wish they taught us this in high school. 

Oh my god, that’d be so helpful. We’d be living in a much different world if they did. 

Right? Like money management, how to change a tire, and how to write a sincere card to someone who’s mom died.

Yeah, how to be sad. 

Yes! How to sit with it. How do you sit with sadness yourself, and then how to be able to extend that field of caring to the community around you, and how to not ghost people because you don’t know what to say.  

I know people who that’s happened to. They lost their mom and then a couple months later their whole community just kind of dropped off the earth, but I think just because they didn’t know what to say. 

Yeah, that’s really common. I always imagine a pebble dropping in water, and then there are ripples out from the immediate impact. At the point of impact, where the pebble drops, there’s so much support. All kinds of people are there for you then. But then there’s months two, three, four, where everyone’s gone home, but you’re still living with the loss every day. You’re still waking up and it’s quiet in your house. That’s when people really need the support, and so I actually get a lot of people coming in to use gift cards they’ve been given like six months after their loss—because that’s when they start feeling the lack. 

That makes so much sense to me. When people come in, do you ask them anything about why they’re here or what they’ve experienced? How much information do you need before you start the massage?

I usually start with “What brings you in today?” And sometimes they say, you know, “Oh, my neck, I’m stressed out now and I’m feeling it there,” and so then I ask if they can move it around and we talk about it and we go from there. 

Other times, I’ll lean in and really convey with my body language that I’m invested and I’ll say, so what brought you in? And I would say probably like thirty percent of the time, people just tear up immediately. I never press for any more information, and it’s not on my intake forms or anything like that. But I do feel like it’s important to let people disclose, if they want to, why they came to me. 

Can you talk about what you do if people do start telling you things you feel are outside your scope of practice? Do you work a lot with therapists in your area?

I see my role in these moments as really just doing active listening, which is something I’ve had a lot of training in as a doula. I’m really just being present and listening and asking clarifying questions. If it’s clear that someone is really struggling, I’ll often ask them something like, “Do you have other support around this?” And if they say “Well, kind of, but not so much,” then I’ll let them know if they’re interested, that I have a number of people close by in our area who I could connect them with for more support. Therapists are my people. I have a lot of friends and colleagues who are therapists, so chances are if I don’t know someone who specializes in what they’re dealing with, I have a network that can help me identify someone who could be a good fit.

Do you find that you have people who are seeing you and a therapist simultaneously? I guess they might not tell you that, but in general do these two treatments work well in tandem with each other?

Absolutely. Bodywork and licensed mental health care would go beautifully together. I have a number of clients who were referred to me by their therapists, and some of them have signed the paperwork so that me and their therapist can talk to each other. So sometimes a therapist might tell me, you know, if this person brings this up, let them know we can discuss it the next time we see each other, or things like that. 

But yeah, I think anything that allows the body and the stress and the overwhelm can only be helpful in the therapeutic context.

Okay, last question—I’ve been wondering what it’s like for you to hold all this emotion and pain for other people, and what the impact has been on you. Or if you even feel like there’s an impact, or if this feels like naturally who you want to be. 

Yeah. I think I’m a sacred witness to the full human experience, and that’s something I regard as an unimaginable privilege. But I do know that a lot of that is about boundaries, and how essential and healthy those are, and setting those boundaries is on me. Where that comes up most often for me is in time management, actually. If I’m sitting down with someone and I’ve told them all of you is welcome here, and they’re in the middle of talking about a loss they’ve gone through, I can’t interrupt them and be like “Okay, we’re done with that, time for a massage now, I’ve got someone else coming in.” 

So I have to be spacious and flexible in terms of my time, and that can be challenging. I’ve had plenty of days where I’m sitting with somebody and we don’t even have time for a massage. So then I have to reschedule them to come back to actually do the bodywork, and I don’t necessarily want to charge them for that, I don’t want them to pay double. So it’s sometimes challenging to balance the real needs of running a business with this wild and unpredictable part of life.

But personally, I luckily have an ability to leave my job at my office and honor and bring closure to it. And I think ritual helps with that. When somebody leaves, I have this little process I do where I say, thank you for this. I’m energetically sending your stuff and giving it back to you with every blessing, and I’m doing this sort of mental meditation to give it back to my clients after they’ve left. 

So when I close up my door and drive home to my family, I can be there with them. I think birth was a great training for that. What’s mine and what’s not mine has to be very clear—and I actually think that makes the time and space I am with my clients so much more special. This time and space we’re in together is only going to occur one time, so let’s really make it count. And that also helps me be more present with them when they’re on the table, I’m really bringing my full self to that session.