Grief: What Bereavement Actually Involves and Why It Takes as Long as It Takes

Grief tends to be spoken about as if it were a process with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A series of stages to be moved through, each one bringing you closer to something called recovery or acceptance. The reality of bereavement is considerably more unpredictable and far less linear. The expectation that grief should follow a predictable arc tends to compound the difficulty, rather than contain it.

When someone dies, what is lost is not only the person. It is the relationship, with all its particular texture and nuances (the specific ways of being together, the shared history, and the future that was assumed to include them). It is the role they played, the spaces they occupied, the version of yourself that existed in relation to them. And it is, sometimes, the conversations that were never had, the things that were left unsaid or unresolved, which death has now made permanently inaccessible. What is lost may also be the challenges of a relationship, the mistreatment or difficulties that were present in a relationship and these types of losses can feel more complicated to process.

The processing of these elements, tends to arrives all at once, and tends to continue arriving in waves, triggered by occasions, objects, those unexpected moment when you reach out to connect to someone who is no longer there.

 

Why grief does not follow a schedule

The idea that grief moves through predictable stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) was never intended as a linear model, but it has been widely understood as one, with the result that people who do not grieve in an orderly fashion often feel that they are doing it wrong. Grief is not orderly: it is non-linear, often contradictory, and deeply personal. Anger and love may coexist. Relief and devastation coexist. The person who is functioning well at work may fall apart completely at a supermarket checkout. All of this is normal.

The grief timeline cannot be prescribed. The cultural expectation that bereavement should be substantially processed within a year of navigated firsts, is not supported by most people’s experience. Significant losses tend to be carried for far longer than that: not necessarily as something that remains raw and overwhelming indefinitely, but as something that changes shape over time without ever completely resolving.

 

Complicated grief

For some people, grief does not follow even its irregular course but becomes stuck in ways that significantly impair daily functioning over an extended period. This is sometimes called prolonged grief or complicated grief, and it is more likely in circumstances where the death was sudden or traumatic, where the relationship was complex or ambivalent, or where the bereaved person lacked adequate support in the early period of loss. This is not a failure of grieving. It is a grief that perhaps needs more support than the passage of time provides.

 

What therapy can offer

Therapy for grief is not about moving someone through stages or helping them to reach acceptance on a particular timeline. It is about offering a space where the person who has died can be spoken about, where the complexity of the relationship can be acknowledged, and where the full range of what the bereaved person is carrying can explored without being managed or redirected.

If you have lost someone and found that the grief is harder, more complicated, or more persistent than you expected, or you simply have not yet had adequate space to grieve, therapy may have something to offer.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.