You're Not Grieving Wrong

There is no such thing as five stages of grief. Not in the way most of us were taught, anyway.

The stages that show up on greeting cards and in well-meaning advice were never built for people grieving a loss. They came from a psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. In the 1960s, she sat with dying patients and listened as they came to terms with their own approaching deaths. Her work was tender and humane for its time. It gave doctors a way to see the person in the hospital bed as someone with a whole inner life. A map for the bereaved, however, was never what she set out to make.

Somewhere along the way, the culture borrowed those stages and flattened them into a checklist. It handed them to grieving people as though grief were a hallway you walk from denial to acceptance, one door at a time. Implying that you were doing it wrong if your grief refused to follow the route. Maybe you have wondered why anger circled back months after you thought you were through it. Or why acceptance arrived, then slipped away again. That is why.

If you are afraid of the grief itself, of how much it hurts, of the way it grips your chest or steals your breath, know that these are waves moving through your body, and a wave does not stay at its peak. It rises, and it crests, and it passes, and then it gathers again. The intensity you feel right now is not where you will live forever. It is simply how grief moves through the body.

Grief moves in waves.

There are days that drag you down and other days on which you can breathe and even laugh; both types of days are part of your grieving.

Researchers who study grief have found that this back-and-forth is part of healing. When you are able to function or feel joy, it does not mean you are forgetting the person you lost. Laughing or enjoying a moment is a natural part of grieving.

Certain moments of grief never oscillates at all; in some cases it is all-consuming and enables you to carry out the day only by using up all your strength. That is also what happens when the loss is overwhelming, and it does not mean that you are failing. It is not necessary to meet that intensity with empty hands; there are ways of steadying yourself when it reaches its peak, consisting of small practices which can support you during the most difficult moments, and these can be learned.

For much of the last century, a culture built around productivity taught us that healthy grief meant letting go quickly and getting back to work. That is a recent idea, and a narrow one. Older and wiser traditions never asked us to stop communing with the people we lost. They kept speaking to them, kept setting a place for them, kept the relationship alive in daily life.

The bond does not end when a life does, it keeps going, and it slowly changes form. You might carry their voice with you, hear their humor come out of your own mouth, cook their recipe on their birthday, feel their steadiness when something hard is in front of you. Maybe you sense them through your faith, or in a place that still feels like theirs. However it comes, that connection is not something to grieve your way out of. It is something to carry forward and integrate into the life you are still living.

For the majority of human history people have grieved as a community; they would sit together and say the name aloud long after the funeral or the rituals had taken place. If part of what you feel is how alone you are in this, that loneliness is not a flaw in your grieving. It is your heart understanding that a loss of this kind was intended to be shared by more than just one pair of hands. At times this involves letting the people who care about you see how much you are suffering, even if you have become good at seeming all right. To be seen by someone, even if it is just one person, is one of the oldest forms of medicine.

If you are grieving someone you love, you do not have to do it alone. And you do not have to wait until you are falling apart to reach out. As a therapist who focuses on grief, I would be glad to walk with you.

Schedule a free consultation, and we will start wherever you are.