Why does my grief not look like anyone else’s?

What does grief actually do to you?

Grief breaks the attachment and leaves the attachment itself still working. The reaching carries on at its old hours. You turn to tell them something, the sentence has nowhere to land, and the early weeks are largely made of that one event happening again.

• What you feel. Sadness, and alongside it relief, irritation with the person who died, and stretches of flat nothing that frighten my clients more than the crying does.
• What the body does. The chest and throat tighten, appetite turns strange, sleep changes shape. A body organised around another person keeps producing its half of the pattern.
• What you then make of it. Reading goes, conversations slide away, a fortnight feels like a week, and from that you conclude something is wrong with you.
• What you want from the people around you. You want to be asked about it and you want nobody to mention it, sometimes within the same hour, and they guess wrong either way.
• How hard it lands. That follows how much of your daily life was built around what you lost, which is my clinical judgement, and not how anyone else ranks the loss.

Why does grief not arrive in a set order?

Nothing sound supports the idea that grief moves through a fixed order, and expecting one adds shame to a loss¹. The familiar list of stages came out of conversations with dying patients, offered as a description of what was heard rather than a route people travel. A review of the evidence behind it found no empirical support, no conceptual clarity and no explanatory power, and concluded it should be set aside by everyone concerned, bereaved people included¹.

The cost of the idea is specific. You feel the wrong thing at the wrong moment and decide your grief is defective, or you reach something like acceptance, treat the matter as closed, and read the next wave in a supermarket car park as going backwards. What I see instead is movement between facing the loss and running a life that has to carry on, and that movement is the work.

Can you grieve something that is not a death?

Yes, and the losses nobody holds a funeral for are the hardest to grieve, because nothing around them gives you permission. A death comes with a ceremony, a word for what you now are, and people who bring food. Each of the losses below is grief in the full sense and arrives with none of that, which is my clinical judgement.

• The end of a marriage. The person is alive, answering messages, and sometimes still in the kitchen.
• A move to another country. You lose the language you were funny in and the friends who remembered you at 19.
• Health or work. An injury takes away a future built around a body that worked, and an ended career takes with it the thing that told you who you were.
• Estrangement. A parent, a child or a sibling is somewhere in the world and absent from your life.
• The life you expected. Grieving a version of the future is still grief, and the one my clients are most ashamed to name.

Grieving far from everyone who knew the person is its own difficulty, and grief comes out in the language it was formed in. There is more on identity crisis, homesickness and therapy in your second language.

When has grief stopped moving?

Grief that has stopped moving is not grief that has lasted a long time. It is grief that has taken over the running of a life.

What my clients describe at that point is consistent. The longing stays at full strength and fills the day, and the death stays unaccepted, as though agreeing it happened would be a betrayal. Ordinary things stop: work, friendships, meals, leaving the flat. Some describe numbness rather than pain, which is harder to put into words and easier for those around them to mistake for coping.

I am a psychotherapist and nothing here is a diagnosis, and nobody can tell you from outside how long any of this should take. Where grief has stayed at that strength and closed a life down, individual work with a therapist is the next step rather than something to sit out alone. There is more in when grief does not get easier.

How do you live alongside grief and loss?

What helps is small, repeatable and unimpressive, and it starts by dropping the expectations that do the most harm.

• Stop trying to get it right. There is no correct way and no schedule, so laughing at the funeral betrays nobody and coming apart months later is not a relapse.
• Look after the body first. Sleep and eat at roughly the same hours, get outdoors daily, and watch the drinking, which postpones grief rather than easing it.
• Decide what you will not decide this year. Selling a house, leaving a job or moving country are better left until the part of you that weighs consequences is working again. That is a suggestion rather than a rule, and your circumstances might not allow it.
• Keep the relationship going. Nothing requires you to let go. Talk to them, keep their handwriting, cook what they cooked.
• Tell one person exactly what you need. Almost nobody guesses right. Say it plainly, and ask them to check on you again long after everyone else has stopped asking.
• Expect different speeds in a couple. One of you wants to talk about it and the other wants a week where nobody mentions it, and neither of you is cold. The paperwork lands on one of you far more than the other, and that is worth saying out loud rather than scoring.

Where grief is severe, psychological help has a measurable effect, larger for one-to-one work than for groups and for those whose symptoms were high to begin with². The trials behind that vary considerably in quality, so take it as support for one-to-one work being worth the effort rather than as a prescription.

Most grief needs time and people willing to hear about it more than twice, and no therapist at all. These steps are not enough when the loss has taken your sense of who you are with it, when nobody is left who will let you talk about it, or when the numbness has become the whole of your experience. That is the point to bring it into individual psychotherapy, and the free 30-minute call is a sensible way to find out whether this work suits you.

Questions people ask

Is it too soon to start therapy after a loss?

No rule says you have to wait, though in the early weeks most people need the people around them more than a therapist. Come when the grief has nowhere to go, or when you want an hour a week where you manage nobody else.

What happens in a first session about grief?

You tell me who you lost and what your days look like now, and we work out whether this is the right place for it. I ask about sleep, eating, who you still talk to and what you have stopped doing.

Will talking about the loss make it worse?

Talking about it raises the feeling while you are in the room and lowers what carrying it costs you outside. We go at a pace you set, and you keep the right to stop any subject.

Should I look for grief counselling or ordinary psychotherapy?

The form matters less than finding a therapist who will stay with the subject as long as it takes. Where the loss has unsettled who you are, longer psychotherapy suits it better than a short course.

Can my partner and I come together when we are grieving the same loss?

Yes, and most couples who come to me about a loss are grieving at different speeds rather than failing as a couple. Some do both, their own sessions alongside a few couples sessions.

Your grief is your own, and in grief therapy I make room for it exactly as it is, however it shows up.

Sources

1. Stroebe, M., Schut, H. and Boerner, K., Cautioning health-care professionals: bereaved people are misguided through the stages of grief, Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 2017
2. Johannsen, M. et al., Psychological interventions for grief in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials, Journal of Affective Disorders, 2019

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.