Embracing Grief and Navigating Emotional Fatigue- Tools for healing — and what losing my father taught me about putting the weight down.

By Keiran Meht · BACP Accredited Psychotherapist.

Grief is a natural and deeply personal experience. It rarely arrives as a single feeling, but as a tide of them — sadness, anger, confusion, and at times a strange numbness. When they all hit at once, it can become overwhelming. This is the story of my own experience: of supporting a loved one, of emotional fatigue and burnout, and of moving through grief while working three jobs, trying to be there for everyone, and managing my own long-term health condition. The narrative I had quietly attached myself to was this: “To be a man is to work hard and be there for others, to provide and to fulfil my purpose.”

A rising tide

In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I was fortunate to keep working. My role moved to my own home, and as an introvert this had little negative impact on my wellbeing. Through my counselling work — around forty clients a week — I noticed three recurring clusters of difficulty: isolation, relationship challenges, and grief and loss.

What struck me most came after the lockdowns ended in 2021. A growing proportion of clients were seeking support for coping with a cancer diagnosis, or for supporting a loved one who had been diagnosed. The national picture reflects what I was seeing in the room. Macmillan estimates that the number of people living with cancer in the UK has risen from around three million in 2020 to almost 3.5 million in 2025 — nearly half a million more people in just five years (Macmillan Cancer Support, 2025).

When it came home

I never thought it would happen in my family, and especially not to my father. In October 2023, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. For fifteen years I have worked in primary care and run a private practice, supporting many clients through exactly this — a diagnosis of their own, or the slow vigil of caring for someone they love. Now it was my turn.

On 28 January this year, my father and his three children sat together in a consultant’s appointment. We were told the cancer had spread again, and that because of how frail he had become, further treatment would only hasten his death. Hearing those words left me devastated and angry, and triggered something primal in me — a state of ‘fight’. Looking at my father, frail and vulnerable, I wanted to protect him and could not. I did not know how. Feeling helpless and powerless, I set my own feelings aside to be there for the man who raised me, and for my siblings. My father passed on 20 March, after fighting the disease for thirty months.

As children, our parents had taught us the importance of being together — of showing up for one another through the calm, the good, and the hardest seasons of life. We were raised on a set of core values: compassion, love, truth, humility, and contentment. It was these values that held our family together through every trial we faced. From 28 January, we chose as a family to serve our father. He wanted to live the final part of his life at home, cared for by his own children, with my mother a pivotal presence in supporting both him and the three of us.

Giving care, not taking care.

My father was a proud man. He did not want strangers to look after him; he wanted the care and support of his loved ones. And I came to see that ‘taking care’ of someone and ‘giving care’ are very different things. Taking care is rooted in giving a person what you think they need. Giving care is rooted in surrendering to how that person wishes to be supported.

The philosophy of giving care echoes the work of Carl Rogers (1942, 1957, 1959). Rogers held that the therapist’s role is to be non-judgemental and to offer unconditional positive regard; to surrender to another’s experience and meet it without assumption — to be congruent; and to offer understanding and compassion, which he called empathy. In doing so we establish non-directivity, honouring every person’s potential to move toward growth — what Rogers named the actualising tendency.

The slow creep of burnout

I had begun to burn out in November 2025, though I did not recognise it at the time. I was giving everything I had to my work as a psychotherapist, in exactly the way my father had taught me: “Work hard — it is when you work hard that the meal in front of you tastes incredible.” He was proud of me. Having lived with a long-term condition myself, the fact that I could still work sixty-hour weeks meant a great deal to him. “You need to rest,” he would say. “You work too hard.” To hear those words from an Indian Punjabi father is perhaps the highest reward a son can know.

My work was a core part of who I am and of what my father valued, and that became the very thing that drove me on — at the cost of noticing how I felt. I overcompensated. The stress crept in slowly. I grew more fatigued, sleeping on average four hours a night while working ten hours a day, six days a week, training at the gym six days a week, journalling sporadically, praying and meditating daily — sometimes twice — and eating whenever I could. Looking back, I had slipped into pure survival. At the time I did not realise I was using these tools as armour, to shield myself from everything I was facing.

Hitting rock bottom

In January, when my father was told he was at the end of his life, my survival instinct went into overdrive. Now I was doing everything I had been doing before, and caring for him as well. I became overwhelmed. I hit what felt like rock bottom — lethargic, exhausted, emotionally numb and overwhelmed all at once, pressing the feelings down as though holding a line in a fight. I remember telling myself: “I can’t let the feelings take over. How will I manage everything if I break?”

Putting the weight down

Three weeks in, I met with my manager and finally spoke about what was happening — that my father was approaching palliative care. Saying it out loud brought relief. I cried, a lot. It simply happened. Looking back, I am grateful that my manager and my supervisor gave me a space that felt safe enough to let it all out. I no longer had to hide it. I had thought I was being strong by carrying it alone.

I came to understand that strength takes many forms, and one of them is sharing — the very thing I so often suggest to clients, yet had struggled to do myself. I was taught that “it’s a man’s job to carry the weight.” I had forgotten that it is just as important to put the weight down. I accessed counselling of my own, to talk about what I was living through, and it was there that I came to understand what it means to live life on life’s terms.

Becoming the driver, not the passenger

I took fourteen days off work. I set myself two priorities: to support my father in the way he wanted, and to keep sharing what I felt as the feelings arose. I learned that even as a psychotherapist, I did not have to be perfect in being there for him. I did not have to be the calm, stable one. I gave myself permission to feel, and to let those feelings flow.

I no longer wanted to be a passenger to my thoughts and feelings, nor to let them take control of me. I chose to become the driver — not by forcing them away, but by becoming a facilitator to them: holding each one, then allowing it to pass through me with acceptance. The hurt, the anger, the fear, the sadness, the powerlessness and the hopelessness were all, in the end, gentle reminders of what it means to be human.

Tools, not techniques

I often suggest on-the-spot journalling to clients who feel swamped by thought and feeling, so I began to do it myself — writing things down, typing into my phone, and when words would not come, leaving voice memos. It was an organic process, and it felt acceptable simply to be where I was: present in the here and now. Joseph (2016) has written extensively on what it means to be genuine, and on the richness that comes from living authentically — work that sits close to mindfulness and emotional intelligence.

One of my greatest learnings is this: journalling, exercise, meditation, reading, positive affirmation, listening to music — these are not techniques. They are something every human being deserves to use in whatever way best serves their own potential. We so often prize the outcome over the process, and the result over the journey. Looked at closely, these tools are really ways of living out compassion, love, truth, humility, and contentment.

A word from Meht Psychotherapy

In today’s fast-paced world, emotional fatigue and burnout are increasingly common, leaving many of us feeling overwhelmed and disconnected from our own feelings. At Meht Psychotherapy, we believe that embracing our emotions, rather than suppressing them, is essential to healing and growth.

Recognising and naming what we feel is the first step in managing grief and emotional exhaustion. Mindful practices such as journalling and gentle meditation can help us stay present with our feelings and soften the impact of burnout. Sometimes, simply allowing ourselves to sit with an emotion — without judgement — is an act of courage and self-compassion.

Support matters too: seeking therapy, talking openly with people we trust, and keeping up small acts of self-care all foster connection and create space to process difficult emotions. It is entirely normal to feel a wide range of things in the face of loss or stress, and there is no ‘right’ way to grieve.

By embracing the full spectrum of our emotions and drawing on supportive tools, we can move, step by step, toward acceptance and resilience. If you are struggling with grief, emotional fatigue, or burnout, please reach out for help. Healing is possible when we honour our feelings and allow ourselves the grace to heal — one step at a time.

References

Macmillan Cancer Support (2025) Change is needed as the number of people with cancer in the UK reaches almost 3.5 million. Available at: macmillan.org.uk (Accessed: June 2026).

Rogers, C.R. (1942) Counseling and Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Rogers, C.R. (1957) ‘The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change’, Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), pp. 95–103.

Rogers, C.R. (1959) ‘A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships, as developed in the client-centred framework’, in Koch, S. (ed.) Psychology: A Study of a Science, Vol. 3. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Joseph, S. (2016) Authentic: How to Be Yourself and Why It Matters. London: Piatkus.

Keiran Meht is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist with 15 years’ experience supporting clients through adversity, trauma, and loss. Sessions are delivered online and by telephone across the UK, and through MindWell Hub.