Grief and Loss: Understanding What’s Happening and How Counseling Can Help
- Brielle Smith
- Jan 2
- 6 min read
Grief can feel disorienting. One moment you may feel grounded, and the next you might feel overwhelmed, numb, or untethered from yourself. Many people come to therapy wondering: Why does grief affect me this way? or Am I doing this wrong?
Grief is not a problem to solve, it’s a human response to loss that engages our emotions, nervous system, relationships, and sense of meaning. Understanding what’s happening beneath the surface can bring clarity, self-compassion, and relief.
Grief Is a Whole-Person Experience
Research consistently shows that grief affects multiple systems at once (Stroebe et al., 2007):
Emotionally: sadness, anger, guilt, relief, anxiety, longing, or emotional numbness
Cognitively: difficulty concentrating, intrusive memories, questioning beliefs or identity
Physically: fatigue, sleep disruption, appetite changes, body aches
Relationally: withdrawal, heightened sensitivity, shifts in how you connect with others
These responses are not signs of weakness. They reflect how deeply loss touches our attachment systems, the parts of us wired for connection and safety (Bowlby, 1980).
Different Ways Grief Can Show Up
Grief does not look the same for everyone. While there is no official “right” or “wrong” way to grieve, clinicians and researchers use certain terms to help describe common patterns people experience. These are not labels, but descriptions that can bring understanding and self-compassion.
Anticipatory Grief: This type of grief occurs before a loss, often when someone is facing serious illness, cognitive decline, or an expected separation. People may experience sadness, fear, anger, or guilt alongside moments of relief or gratitude. Anticipatory grief does not replace grief after the loss, it simply reflects the mind and heart beginning to adjust (Rando, 2000).
Delayed Grief: Sometimes grief doesn’t fully surface right away. People may feel emotionally numb or focused on “getting through” the immediate demands of life. Delayed grief can emerge weeks, months, or even years later, often when life slows down or another loss occurs. This response is common and adaptive, especially when survival has to come first (Bonanno, 2004).
Frozen or Inhibited Grief: Frozen grief refers to feeling stuck, disconnected, or unable to access emotions related to the loss. This can be the nervous system’s way of protecting itself when the loss feels overwhelming or unsafe to process. Over time, with enough support and safety, emotions often begin to thaw.
Traumatic Grief (Traumatic Loss): When a loss is sudden, violent, or frightening, grief may be intertwined with trauma responses such as intrusive memories, hypervigilance, or avoidance. In these cases, the body may remain in survival mode, making it harder to access mourning until safety and regulation are restored (Currier et al., 2006).
Complicated or Prolonged Grief: For some individuals, grief remains intense and persistent, interfering with daily life and relationships. Mental health professionals may refer to this as Prolonged Grief Disorder when symptoms continue beyond expected timeframes and cause significant distress (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). This doesn’t mean something is wrong with you, it means additional support may help.
These patterns remind us that grief is shaped by attachment, nervous system responses, life context, and meaning. Like many healing processes, it unfolds along a winding path, with pauses, detours, and unexpected openings.
Why Grief Feels So Unpredictable
Grief often unfolds in waves. One widely supported framework, the Dual Process Model of Grief, explains that people naturally oscillate between two modes (Stroebe & Schut, 1999):
Loss-oriented coping: feeling the pain, missing the person or what was lost, revisiting memories
Restoration-oriented coping: focusing on daily life, problem-solving, adapting to new roles
Moving between these states–even multiple times in a day–is healthy and adaptive. This back-and-forth can feel confusing, but it reflects the nervous system’s attempt to balance emotional processing with survival and functioning. Like many growth processes, grief is nonlinear, shaped by detours, pauses, and returns.
The Nervous System and Grief
Loss is stressful for the body. Research suggests grief can activate the body’s stress response, leading to heightened arousal (anxiety, restlessness) or shutdown (numbness, fatigue) (O’Connor, 2019). This is why grief can feel not just emotional, but physical.
A trauma-informed approach to grief recognizes that healing often involves listening to what the body is communicating, through slowing down, restoring a sense of safety, and building regulation before pushing for insight. This kind of attuned support can make grief feel more manageable over time.
Meaning, Identity, and Growth After Loss
Grief doesn’t only involve missing someone or something, it can disrupt how you understand yourself and the world. Research on meaning reconstruction shows that loss often challenges our assumptions, values, and sense of identity (Neimeyer, 2019).
Over time, many people find themselves asking:
Who am I now?
What still matters to me?
How do I carry this loss forward?
Growth does not mean minimizing pain or “finding a silver lining.” It often means integrating the loss into your life story in a way that allows for both grief and continued living. This process is deeply personal and unfolds differently for everyone.
When Grief Becomes Especially Difficult
Grief can feel heavier or last longer for many understandable reasons. Research shows that difficulty with grief is often shaped by context, not personal weakness. Grief may be more challenging when:
The loss was sudden, traumatic, or ambiguous, making it harder for the mind and nervous system to process what happened.
The relationship or role was central to your sense of safety or identity, such as a partner, caregiver role, or deeply attached bond.
There is a history of trauma or multiple past losses, which can strain coping resources.
Support feels limited or invalidating, leaving grief to be carried in isolation.
Life stressors continue alongside the loss, reducing the body’s capacity to rest and process emotions.
For some individuals, grief remains intense and consuming for a prolonged period. The DSM-5-TR identifies Prolonged Grief Disorder, characterized by persistent longing, emotional pain, and difficulty re-engaging with life beyond cultural or expected norms (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). Importantly, this diagnosis is not about pathologizing grief, it’s about recognizing when additional, specialized support can help restore connection, functioning, and hope.
How Counseling Supports the Grieving Process
Grief counseling is not about pushing you to “move on.” It’s about meeting you where you are and walking alongside you as you navigate unfamiliar terrain. Evidence-based grief therapy may involve:
Normalizing your grief responses through psychoeducation
Exploring attachment bonds and unresolved emotions
Developing coping strategies for waves of grief
Supporting nervous system regulation and emotional expression
Helping you reconstruct meaning and identity after loss
Effective grief therapy is relational, flexible, and tailored to you, not a one-size-fits-all approach (Worden, 2009). It makes room for complexity: the tears and the laughter, the logic and the emotion, the questions and the knowing.
You Don’t Have to Navigate This Alone
Grief can feel like wandering through a wilderness, uncertain, unfamiliar, and deeply human. With compassionate support, that path becomes less isolating. Therapy offers a grounded space for real talk, deep work, and gentle curiosity about what your grief is asking of you.
Healing doesn’t require rushing or fixing. It asks for presence, adaptability, and trust in your own wild wisdom. And while the path may twist and turn, you don’t have to walk it alone.
Interested in working with a grief and trauma specialist? Contact us at kate@coyotecounseling.org. We look forward to hearing from you.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). DSM-5-TR: Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787
Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28.
Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Loss, sadness and depression. Basic Books.
Currier, J. M., Neimeyer, R. A., & Berman, J. S. (2006). The effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions for bereaved persons. Psychological Bulletin, 132(5), 648–661.
Neimeyer, R. A. (2019). Meaning reconstruction in bereavement: Development of a research program. Death Studies, 43(2), 79–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2018.1456620
O’Connor, M. F. (2019). Grief: A brief history of research on how body, mind, and brain adapt. Psychosomatic Medicine, 81(8), 731– 738.
Rando, T. A. (2000). Clinical dimensions of anticipatory mourning. Research Press.
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–
Stroebe, M., Schut, H., & Boerner, K. (2007). Cautioning health-care professionals: Bereaved persons are misguided through the stages of grief. OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying, 54(4), 289–303.
Worden, J. W. (2009). Grief counseling and grief therapy: A handbook for the mental health practitioner (4th ed.). Springer Publishing.
