Understanding Grief & Loss
Loss changes more than our circumstances. When someone or something important disappears from our lives, the structure of everyday experience can change with it. Familiar routines may suddenly contain absences. Places, objects, music, or ordinary moments can take on unexpected emotional significance. A future once taken for granted may need to be imagined differently.
Grief is therefore not simply an emotion, and it does not necessarily unfold as a predictable sequence of stages. It can involve sadness, longing, anger, guilt, relief, numbness, confusion and even moments of humour or pleasure. These experiences can coexist or change rapidly. Someone may feel relatively steady one day and be overwhelmed by something seemingly insignificant the next.
The nature of the relationship or attachment also matters. Grieving someone with whom we had a complicated relationship can be very different from grieving an uncomplicated one. There may be unresolved conflict, ambivalence, things that were never said, or feelings that do not match what we believe grief is supposed to look like. Relief after a prolonged illness or difficult relationship can exist alongside love and sadness. These experiences are not mutually exclusive.
Loss can also affect our sense of identity. We understand ourselves partly through our relationships, responsibilities, bodies, work, communities and expectations for the future. Losing a partner can mean losing the experience of being someone’s partner. Changes in health can alter a person’s relationship with independence or capability. The end of a relationship may involve grieving not only the other person but the future imagined with them.
Some losses are also difficult for other people to recognise. Miscarriage, estrangement, infertility, the death of an animal, retirement, migration, loss of physical capacity, the ending of a friendship, or grieving someone from whom we were already separated may not always receive the social acknowledgement that accompanies other forms of loss. A person can consequently find themselves carrying something significant while feeling there is little space to speak about it.
Time does not necessarily remove these experiences. More often, the relationship to them changes. An anniversary, familiar place or unexpected reminder may bring grief close again years later without meaning that someone has somehow failed to “move on”.
Understanding grief therefore involves understanding what was lost, what that person or possibility represented, and how the person’s world has been reorganised by its absence.
How Therapy May Help
Therapy can provide a place where grief does not need to be resolved, performed correctly, or made easier for somebody else to tolerate. Sometimes simply having somewhere to speak openly about the person, relationship or life that has been lost can be important, particularly when other people have understandably begun returning to their own lives.
The work may involve making sense of the circumstances surrounding a loss and the feelings that followed. This can include sadness and longing, but also anger, guilt, regret, resentment, relief or unanswered questions. Where a death or loss occurred suddenly, violently or under distressing circumstances, grief may also become intertwined with trauma and require attention to both.
Therapy can help when someone feels caught between preserving what was important and living in the present. Moving forward does not require forgetting, relinquishing attachment or deciding that something no longer matters. Often the task is subtler: finding a different way to carry the relationship or experience while gradually allowing new relationships, roles, pleasures, and possibilities to coexist with it.
Practical changes may also need attention. Loss can disrupt sleep, routines, relationships, parenting, work, finances and social connection. A person may be learning how to do things previously shared with somebody else, making decisions they never expected to make alone, or negotiating relationships with family members who are grieving the same loss very differently.
Therapy can also provide support when grief begins to feel persistently overwhelming or when someone’s life has become increasingly constricted around the loss. Rather than assuming there is a timetable against which grief should be measured, the question becomes whether the person can gradually find enough psychological room for both the loss and an ongoing life.
