Neurodivergent people experience grief differently, and they need support that reflects that.

For the next month, take £20 off the course price with the code: NDGRIEF2026
Most grief training tells you what to do.
This course shows you.
Quick question: did your grief training teach you what to do when someone genuinely can't identify what they're feeling?
Not "won't." Can't.
Most supporters are taught to sit patiently with silence, trusting the feelings will eventually become easier to describe.
But for many autistic people, that approach doesn’t help. They’re not searching for words they’ll eventually find. The words genuinely aren’t there.
This is alexithymia: when emotional experience exists, but the language to describe it doesn't. It's a spectrum - some people struggle a bit with naming what they're feeling, others can't access emotional language at all. And around half of autistic people experience it.
Without understanding this, even skilled supporters can completely miss what’s happening. They wait for feelings to be named, or they keep asking questions that require emotional language the person doesn’t have access to.
In this excerpt from one of the eleven role play videos in our course, The Neurodivergent Experience of Grief & Loss, watch what changes when a supporter recognises alexithymia and adapts their approach in real time.
You’ll see:
• What alexithymia can look like in grief
• The specific questions that work when “how do you feel?” doesn’t
• How to validate someone’s individual experience of grief
Course Outline:
Meet the instructors
Trudie Bamford is a trainer and therapist with extensive experience of supporting people after loss, with specialist experience of working with traumatic grief, such as after suicide or alcohol or drug misuse. She studied humanistic integrative psychotherapy with University of Wales TSD. Trudie researches, writes and creates much of the content we produce for our training products. She is a freelance trainer, delivering education for organisations on topics ranging from neurodivergence & grief to traumatic loss.

