There comes a time when life, once ordinary and steady, suddenly stops making sense. You wake up and go through the motions — make coffee, answer messages, attend meetings — but everything feels slightly hollow, as if sound no longer echoes properly inside you. The world continues, but you no longer move with it.
Maybe someone you love has died.
Maybe something inside you has — a dream, a season, a version of yourself that you thought would last forever.
You look around and realize that you are living in the same place, but the colors have faded. You are no longer who you were before the loss, yet not quite someone new. This is the quiet middle of grief — the part that few talk about because it doesn’t photograph well, doesn’t fit in comforting advice or “stages.” It’s not a problem to be solved, but a landscape to be walked through.
For anyone standing here, unable to move, there is nothing wrong with you. This is what it means to be human when the heart has been cracked open.
Grief Is Not a Problem to Fix
We live in a culture that wants to tidy pain away — to optimize, recover, and return to productivity as fast as possible. But grief refuses such timelines. It does not obey logic or efficiency; it obeys love.
Grief is love with nowhere to go. It is the echo of attachment meeting reality. Psychologists describe it as an adaptiveprocess — one that gradually helps us reorient to life after loss (Stroebe & Schut, 1999). But adaptation doesn’t mean detachment; it means learning how to carry the love differently.
When we rush grief — when we drown it in distractions, self-improvement, or forced positivity — we don’t escape it. We only drive it underground. And what the psyche cannot process will find another way out: through exhaustion, irritability, depression, or the quiet sense that we are living half a life.
Avoided grief becomes stuck energy. Research in affective neuroscience suggests that emotions are physiological processes designed to move through the body; when suppressed, they can disrupt regulation and immune function (Pennebaker, 1997). To feel is not indulgence — it is completion.
To heal, we must allow the wave to rise, crest, and fall.
The Nature of the Wave
Grief comes in waves, not stages. The famous five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — were never meant to be a universal formula, but an observation of how dying patients processed their own mortality (Kübler-Ross, 1969). Yet these words remain because they capture something essential: the movement of emotion as it tries to find shape.
In truth, the experience of grief is more fluid. It is tidal — one moment calm, the next overwhelming, then strangely still again. This rhythm is not regression; it is the nervous system oscillating between survival and integration. As we turn toward the pain instead of away, the wave begins to complete its arc.
The psyche does its healing work in silence: through tears, dreams, long walks, long pauses. It reorganizes our inner world slowly, almost imperceptibly, until one day we realize that the loss is no longer the whole story.
That moment cannot be hurried, but it can be accompanied.
What It Means to Move Through Grief
Moving through grief is not a ritual of candles or a few minutes of reflection each night — though those can help. It is a deeper listening to what the psyche asks for, even when the requests seem unreasonable:
Hours of sitting quietly, doing little to nothing — but not numbing with screens.
Hours of walking in nature, as if rhythm alone could rock the heart back into alignment.
Looking through old photos, crying until the body softens.
Speaking aloud to the person or life that was lost, as if the air could still carry words.
Scaling back on work, routines, and obligations — especially in cases of complex or cumulative grief.
Reaching for a therapist, a support group, or simply a friend who can hold silence without trying to fix it.
This is the work of grief: not control, not speed, but attention.
To grieve is to stay present long enough for love to teach us what it meant.
The Many Faces of Grief: Losses We Don’t Name
Not all grief comes wrapped in tragedy. Some losses are invisible — so ordinary, so private, that we almost feel ashamed to mourn them. Yet they, too, leave us hollow.
There is grief for the body that no longer feels young or strong.
For the friendships that faded when life moved in different directions.
For a home or a city that once held our rhythm.
For the version of ourselves who was hopeful before exhaustion took over.
For the romantic intensity we chose not to pursue, to remain faithful to another kind of love.
For the years lost to caretaking, or to illness, or to being the responsible one.
Psychologists call these disenfranchised or ambiguous losses — the kinds that society doesn’t fully recognize or mourn (Doka, 1989; Boss, 1999). Because they are subtle, we often deny ourselves permission to grieve. We minimize, rationalize, move on — all the while feeling inexplicably sad or detached.
But the psyche knows when something has ended. It insists that we pause, honor, and integrate what is gone. Without mourning these invisible losses, we remain internally fragmented. “What we cannot mourn,” as one therapist said, “we are condemned to repeat.”
In giving language to what hurts — even privately — we begin to reclaim our coherence. We make room again for vitality.
If you’re moving through the quieter losses that accompany early motherhood, you may want to explore The Many Faces of Grief in Motherhood: Healing from Loss and CEN and download my free journaling workbook.
The Transformation Within Grief
When grief is allowed to complete its movement, it begins to change us. Slowly, imperceptibly, it transforms raw pain into depth — into the quiet understanding that everything we love will someday change form.
This transformation is not about “getting over it.” It’s about integration. Meaning-making — the process of weaving loss into one’s ongoing life story — is what allows emotional healing to occur (Neimeyer, 2001). Over time, we find ways to carry the absence with grace. The person, dream, or life we lost becomes part of the internal landscape that guides us.
Grief, then, is not the opposite of love; it is its continuation in another form. It deepens our capacity for empathy. It erodes judgment. It makes us gentler with others who suffer, and with ourselves.
Through grief, we learn that the world is fragile and therefore precious. The pain that once felt like destruction becomes a passage into greater aliveness.
If you are grieving a relationship that no longer feels right, explore this essay: When Attachment Healing Changes Our Relationships: Grieving, Growing, and Trusting the Process. It also includes a free companion journal to help you honour both the growth and the grief that come with transformation.
The Return of Light
One day — not dramatically, but quietly — you notice something has shifted.
The same world that once looked gray now holds faint color again.
The song that used to make you cry makes you breathe differently.
The morning light feels gentler.
The loss hasn’t vanished, but it has softened. It lives inside you now as something sacred, integrated.
This is the quiet gift of grief: it restores connection. It brings us back to what is real — not the world we wanted, but the one that remains, and still holds beauty.
If you are still in the dark middle, trust that this, too, belongs. Grief is not an interruption of life; it is life asking for your full attention. Let the stillness be your teacher. You do not have to rush. The light will find you again.
Each night ends in morning.
Each winter gives way to spring.
Sitting with grief is the quiet work that leads us back to light.
References
- Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press.
- Doka, K. J. (1989). Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington Books.
- Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. Macmillan.
- Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss. American Psychological Association.
- Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. Guilford Press.
- Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224.
Explore Further:
The Seasons of Grief: How Autumn Teaches Us to Let Go, Grow Roots, and Begin Again
The Many Faces of Grief in Motherhood: Healing from Loss and CEN (+Journaling Workbook)
The Grief Beneath the Anger: How Restlessness, Somatic Healing, and Nature Lead Us Home (+free PDF)
When Attachment Healing Changes Our Relationships: Grieving, Growing, and Trusting the Process
The Lives We Didn’t Live: The Psychology of Choice, Regret, and Self-Trust
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