When someone we love dies by suicide, the world stops making sense. The grief we carry is unlike any other, filled with questions that may never have answers and a pain that can feel impossible to bear. But healing, though it may seem unreachable in those early dark days, is possible.
Dr. John “Jack” Jordan, a clinical psychologist who has spent over forty years working with suicide loss survivors, has identified seven key tasks that many of us move through as we gradually rebuild our lives. These aren’t rigid steps or a checklist to complete. They’re gentle guideposts that can help us understand what we’re experiencing and where we might be headed.
If you’re reading this and your loss is recent, please know: you don’t have to do anything right now except survive this moment. These tasks unfold naturally over time, at your own pace. There’s no timeline, no “right” way to grieve.
The following is a layperson summary of the work by Dr Jordan. If you’d like to read Dr. Jordan’s original research article, you can find it here: Lessons Learned: Forty Years of Clinical Work With Suicide Loss Survivors https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7201040/pdf/fpsyg-11-00766.pdf This is a great article to share with your grief counselor.
AFSP maintains a list of grief counselors who have taken specialized suicide bereavement training: https://afsp.org/suicide-bereavement-trained-clinicians/ Many of these grief counselors have taken the AFSP class that was taught by Dr Jordan.
The Seven Tasks of Healing
1. Finding Safety Again: Containment of the Trauma
The shock of losing someone to suicide can leave us feeling physically and emotionally unsafe. You might experience intrusive images, flashbacks, nightmares, or a persistent sense that the ground beneath you isn’t solid anymore. Some survivors develop symptoms of PTSD.
This first task is about gently reclaiming a sense of safety in your body and your world. It might involve grounding techniques, breathing exercises, or working with a trauma-informed therapist who understands suicide loss. Approaches like EMDR can help those overwhelming memories become less consuming.
The goal isn’t to forget or to stop grieving. It’s to help you face your grief without feeling constantly retraumatized.
2. Making Sense of What Happened: Repairing Your Assumptive World
We all carry unspoken beliefs about how life works: people we love will be here tomorrow, we can protect those we care about, the world is fundamentally safe. Suicide shatters these assumptions.
This task involves rebuilding your understanding of the world in a way that makes room for what happened. It means creating a compassionate narrative that accepts complexity and mystery, resisting the urge to blame yourself or search endlessly for simple explanations that don’t exist.
It’s about learning to live with uncertainty while still finding meaning and purpose in a world that has been forever changed.
3. Learning to Regulate Your Grief: Self-Dosing and Creating Sanctuary
In the beginning, grief crashes over us in waves we can’t control. “Self-dosing” is the gradual process of learning when to lean into your grief and when to step back from it.
This means giving yourself permission to feel deeply when it’s right, but also creating moments of respite: times when you can set the grief aside temporarily without feeling guilty. It might be watching something that makes you laugh, taking a walk in nature, or allowing yourself to enjoy a meal with a friend.
Over time, you develop the ability to move between grief and relief, sorrow and momentary peace. You learn that experiencing joy doesn’t dishonor your loved one’s memory.
4. Navigating Changed Relationships: Developing Social Management Skills
After a suicide loss, relationships can shift in painful ways. Some people may not know what to say, so they say nothing. Others might offer well-meaning but hurtful platitudes. You may feel isolated or misunderstood by those who haven’t experienced this type of loss.
This task is about learning to communicate your needs, set boundaries, and identify the people who can truly support you. It might mean finding a suicide loss support group where you don’t have to explain yourself, or learning how to gently correct someone who says something insensitive.
It’s also about accepting that some relationships may change or fade, while new, deeper connections form with those who can hold space for your grief.
5. Transforming Your Connection: Repairing Your Relationship with the Deceased
Suicide often leaves us with complicated, unresolved feelings toward the person who died. You might feel abandoned, angry, guilty, or confused—sometimes all at once. The person isn’t here to explain, to apologize, or to reassure you.
This task involves transforming your external relationship into an internal one that you can carry forward. You might write letters they’ll never read, speak to their photo, visit places that were meaningful to them, or find rituals that help you feel connected.
It’s not about saying goodbye. It’s about finding a new way to carry them with you, one that acknowledges both your love and your complex feelings.
6. Honoring the Whole Person: Building a Durable Biography
When suicide is how someone dies, it can become the only thing people remember or talk about. Their entire life gets reduced to their final act.
Building a durable biography means intentionally remembering and sharing stories about who they were before that terrible day. What made them laugh? What were they passionate about? What quirks and qualities made them uniquely themselves?
This task helps you—and others—remember the fullness of their life. They were so much more than how they died. Their life mattered. Their story deserves to be told completely.
7. Choosing Life Again: Reinvesting in Living
Perhaps the most difficult task: finding reasons to keep living when someone you loved couldn’t. You might question your own purpose, feel guilty for experiencing moments of happiness, or wonder if life will ever feel meaningful again.
Reinvesting in living doesn’t mean “moving on” or forgetting. It means gradually, gently, discovering things that matter to you again. It might start small: a garden you tend, a creative project, a cause you care about, a relationship you nurture.
It’s about building a life that honors both your loved one’s memory and your own journey forward. You’re not replacing them or leaving them behind. You’re learning to carry them with you as you continue living.
You Don’t Walk This Path Alone
These seven tasks aren’t meant to overwhelm you or suggest there’s a “right” way to grieve. They’re simply a map drawn by someone who has walked alongside many survivors and witnessed the journey of healing.
You didn’t choose this path. You’re navigating it with incredible courage, even on the days when you don’t feel brave at all.
Please remember: you don’t have to do any of this alone. Reaching out (whether to a therapist who specializes in suicide loss, a support group of fellow survivors, a trusted friend, or a crisis counselor) can bring light into the darkness.
Your grief honors your love. Your healing honors their memory.
You’re not alone.
Other Posts You May Also Find Helpful
- When Love Becomes Watching: Understanding Hypervigilance After Suicide Loss – Managing the trauma responses and heightened anxiety that often follow suicide loss.
- When the World Keeps Turning: Navigating Social Connections After Suicide Loss – Understanding how relationships change and learning to communicate your needs after loss.
- Ritual and Remembrance – Creating meaningful ways to stay connected to the person you lost while moving forward.
- What Does Healing Look Like – Understanding that healing is not linear and recognizing the progress you’re making along your journey.
- Moving Beyond Guilt: A Path Toward Healing – Working through the guilt and self-blame that complicate the healing journey.
- Finding Your People: The Healing Power of Support Groups – Finding spaces where you don’t have to explain yourself and can heal in community.
- Life After Loss: Honoring Our Stories and Our Loved Ones – Keeping their full story alive and honoring who they were beyond how they died.
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