The Bond That Never Dies: What Continuing Bonds Theory Teaches Us About Grief

A few months after my fourth son Benjamin died, something happened that I didn’t tell anyone about for years.

I could feel him with me.

Not in a dramatic or supernatural way — but in the quiet, certain way you can sense another person in a room even when you can’t see them. A presence. A warmth. Some unmistakable warmth and sweetness, like him.

I didn’t tell anyone because I was afraid of what it meant. I already felt profoundly isolated in my grief, set apart from the world of people who never felt this kind of devastation. The last thing I could afford was for the people around me to think I was losing my mind.

I was also afraid of being judged spiritually — that what I was experiencing might not line up with the right theology, that someone would tell me I was wrong to feel what I felt, and that the judgment of my community would add yet another layer of guilt to a grief that was already crushing. So I kept this feeling of connection to myself for years, almost decades really — not knowing that what I was experiencing had a name, a research base, and a growing body of clinical evidence behind it.

It’s called continuing bonds theory. And it changed everything about how I understand grief — both my own and my clients’.

The Model We Were Given Was Wrong

For decades, the dominant framework for understanding grief was the stage model — most famously associated with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose 1969 book On Death and Dying introduced the world to five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Her work was seminal at the time because it brought the pain of grief to the public square and millions of people began to feel that what they were experiencing was important.

However, what most people don’t know is that Kübler-Ross developed these stages from interviews with terminally ill patients — people facing their own deaths — not from bereaved people navigating the loss of someone they loved. The stages were never designed for grief. They were never validated on grieving populations and were never intended as a universal or sequential checklist for the bereaved. And yet they became the dominant cultural and clinical framework for how we expect people to move through loss.

The consequences of this mismatch have been significant. When grieving people don’t move through neat, predictable stages — when they don’t “reach acceptance” on any recognizable schedule — they often conclude that something is wrong with them. That they are stuck. That they are grieving incorrectly.

I have sat with countless clients who came to therapy carrying this additional burden — the shame of feeling like they were failing at grief — on top of the grief itself. It is an unnecessary weight, and it is one we can put down.

A Different Way of Understanding

In 1996, researchers Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman published a landmark work that challenged everything the field thought it knew about grief. Their book, Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, proposed a radically different framework: that healthy grief does not require severing the connection to the person who died. That the goal is not detachment, letting go, or moving on. That the relationship continues. It is transformed, yes, but it is nevertheless real and ongoing.

This was a paradigm shift. The old model, rooted in Freudian ideas about withdrawing emotional energy from the deceased in order to reinvest it in the living, had told us that holding on was pathological.

Continuing bonds theory said something different: that maintaining an inner connection to the person we’ve lost is not only normal but potentially adaptive — a source of comfort, identity, and ongoing meaning.

The research has continued to grow since 1996. We now know that many bereaved people naturally maintain continuing bonds, through internal conversations with the deceased, through signs, through sensing their presence, through carrying forward their values and stories, through ritual and memory. And we know that for many people, this ongoing connection is not a sign of complicated grief. It is a sign of love.

Grief is an expression of love.

What Cultures Have Always Known

Long before grief researchers gave this a clinical name, cultures around the world had built it into the architecture of communal life.

In Mexican tradition, Día de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead — involves building ofrendas, elaborate altars adorned with photographs, marigolds, food, and objects beloved by those who have died. Families gather not to mourn in the way Western culture understands mourning, but to welcome their loved ones back, to continue the relationship across the boundary of death, to speak to them and honor them and keep them present in the fabric of family life.

During the Palestinian tradition of The Forty-Day Mourning Period (Al-Arba'een), extended family and community members gather to recount the life and qualities of the deceased with shared mourning, storytelling, and mutual support.

In Jewish tradition, the yahrzeit candle is lit annually on the anniversary of a loved one’s death to keep the flame of connection alive year after year, generation after generation.

For the Irish, it was once common to leave an empty place at the table for those who had died, acknowledging that the absent person still belonged at the family gathering.

Across many Asian cultures, ancestor veneration practices maintain active relationships with those who have died through offerings, prayer, and ongoing communication to honor the idea that the dead remain part of the living community.

These are not primitive superstitions. These are sophisticated cultural technologies for what grief researchers would later call continuing bonds — ways of holding love across the boundary of death and keep the relationship alive in transformed form. Western clinical culture largely abandoned these practices and replaced them with a model of closure and letting go. Continuing bonds theory is, in some ways, a return to what many cultures never forgot.

What I Know From the Inside

When I finally learned about continuing bonds theory — years after Benjamin died, during my graduate training — I wept with relief.

What I had been experiencing in the months after his death was not a sign that I was losing my mind. It was not pathological. It was not something to hide. It was “demonic” or wrong theology. It wasn’t “not letting him go”.

It was a natural expression of an ongoing bond — the continuation of a love that did not end when his life did.

It took me years to feel safe saying out loud that I still feel connected to Benjamin. That I talk to him. That I see “signs” that help me feel him with me. That I feel his presence in my work, in my life, in my family’s lives, in the way I show up for the parents who sit across from me carrying the same unbearable weight I once carried. The fear of being judged, of being seen as unstable or unable to “move on,” kept that experience locked inside me long past the point when it could have been a source of comfort.

I tell my clients this story — carefully, and at the right moment — because I want them to know they are not alone and they are not broken. The connection they feel is real. It has a name and is supported by deep research. And it can be tended, honored, and explored rather than suppressed.

How We Work With This Together

When a new client comes to me carrying grief, one of the most important things I do early in our work together is provide psychoeducation about the evidence behind continuing bonds theory. I want them to understand — from a clinical, evidence-based foundation — that the goal of grief therapy is not to sever their connection to the person they’ve lost. It is to help them find a new way of being in relationship with that person and one that can coexist with a full, meaningful life.

We then begin to gently explore their own experience of continuing bonds. Do they sense the presence of the person they’ve lost? Do they speak to them? Do they see “signs”? Do they carry forward their values or stories in their daily lives? Do they find comfort in ritual — visiting a grave, lighting a candle, setting a place at the table?

For many clients, this conversation is the first time anyone has asked them about this dimension of their grief — and the first time they have felt safe answering honestly. The relief that comes from being witnessed in this experience, from having it named and validated rather than pathologized, can be profound.

This is not about encouraging magical thinking. It is about honoring the full reality of grief, like many cultures have done before us — and acknowledging the ways that Western clinical culture has not always known how to hold the experience of grief. Your bond with the person you’ve lost does not end at death. It continues, transforms, and can remain a source of meaning, identity, and love for the rest of your life.

You are not losing your mind. You are loving someone who died. And that love has nowhere to go but forward — into your life, family, work, and into the way you move through the world.

That is the continuing bond. And it is one of the most human things there is.

Lisa Martinez, LPC, NCC, CCTP, E-RYT 500 is the founder of Emerging Paths Counseling and Wellness, a virtual therapy practice serving clients across Texas. Learn more at emergingpathscw.com.