Bereavement and Loss
Grief is one of the most profound and disorienting experiences a person can go through. It's also completely normal. When someone we love dies, or when we experience any significant loss, grief is the natural and necessary process of adjusting to a world that has fundamentally changed. It's not something that goes wrong in us; it's something that happens because we loved.
And it's not only the death of a loved one that triggers grief. The same depth of feeling can arise after separation or divorce, the loss of a job or home, serious illness, the end of a significant relationship, or a major life change that involves leaving behind something or someone important. Immigration, for example, can involve multiple layered losses: home, community, culture, language, and a sense of self. Whatever the cause, the feelings of grief deserve to be taken seriously.
What Grief Can Feel Like
Grief rarely follows a tidy path. You might feel shock, numbness, and disbelief. You might feel intense sadness, anger, guilt, or relief, sometimes all in the same afternoon. Physically, grief can affect your sleep, your appetite, your concentration, and your energy. It can feel all-encompassing, and it can feel very lonely even when people around you are doing their best to help.
You may have heard of stages of grief. These models can be useful as a rough guide, but the honest truth is that most people don't move through grief in a neat sequence. It's more like waves, sometimes unpredictable, sometimes subsiding for a while before returning. Every person's experience is unique, even if we can recognise certain patterns.
Complicated and Disenfranchised Grief
Sometimes grief becomes 'stuck'. This can happen when the feelings are so overwhelming that they can't be processed, or when the loss connects with earlier losses and bereavements that weren't fully mourned at the time. This is sometimes called complicated or complex grief, and it can look very similar to depression. One useful distinction: grief tends to come in waves, whereas depression tends to be more constant and pervasive.
Disenfranchised grief is grief that others don't easily recognise or validate. The death of a pet, the loss of someone you weren't in an officially acknowledged relationship with, a miscarriage, or the death of a celebrity who genuinely mattered to you, these are all real losses. What matters is the strength of the bond and the depth of the feeling, not what other people think you should or shouldn't be grieving.
Moving Forward, Not Moving On
People sometimes worry that coming to terms with a loss means forgetting the person, or somehow being disloyal to them. It doesn't. One of the most helpful ideas in bereavement work is the concept of continuing bonds. Rather than thinking of grief as a process that ends with 'letting go', continuing bonds theory recognises that we don't have to sever our connection with the person we've lost. We can find ways to carry them with us, in our memories, our values, the things they loved, the way they made us feel. Many bereaved people find real comfort in this.
Alongside this, grief researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut have described what they call a dual process of mourning. On some days, you're fully in the grief, feeling it, sitting with it, letting it move through you. On other days, you're getting on with things, making plans, even enjoying yourself. Both are right. Both are part of healing. There's no correct ratio, and moving between the two isn't a sign that you're doing grief wrong. It's a sign that you're human.
In therapy, we can work together to find a pace and an approach that feels right for you. That might include thinking about how you balance time spent with your grief and time spent in the rest of your life, or finding ways to stay meaningfully connected to the person you've lost.