Grief is one of the most universal and most isolating human experiences. Every person who loves will grieve. And yet grief — particularly in professional and public contexts — is often met with discomfort, minimisation, and pressure to resolve quickly. The result is that many people grieve alone, without adequate support, and with a nagging sense that they are grieving wrongly.
Understanding what grief actually is — how it works, how long it takes, and what healthy grief looks like — is the foundation of grieving well and supporting others who grieve.
What Grief Is — and Is Not
Grief is the natural response to loss — the internal psychological process of adapting to a world in which something or someone significant is no longer present. It is not a disorder. It is not a sign of weakness. It is not something to be rushed through, fixed, or resolved. It is the necessary psychological work of reorganising a self and a life around an absence that was not there before.
Grief is most commonly associated with bereavement — the death of someone we love — but grief occurs in response to any significant loss: the end of a relationship, a diagnosis, the loss of a career, the loss of a hoped-for future, the loss of health or capacity. Any experience where something that mattered deeply is irreversibly gone can produce grief.
The Stages of Grief — and Their Limitations
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — are the most widely known model of grief in popular culture. They are also, as Kübler-Ross herself acknowledged in her later work, widely misapplied. The stages were originally described as experiences that dying patients reported, not as a universal linear progression that all grieving people move through in sequence.
Contemporary grief research — led by George Bonanno at Columbia and others — presents a more accurate picture: grief is not a linear process through defined stages but a highly variable, non-linear, deeply individual experience. Some people experience intense grief that gradually reduces over months. Others — the majority in Bonanno’s research — demonstrate resilience, experiencing grief without the sustained impairment that cultural narratives of grief often imply. Some experience delayed grief. Some experience oscillation — moving in and out of acute grief even years after loss.
There is no correct way to grieve. Comparing your grief to a model of what grief should look like adds an additional layer of distress to an already difficult experience.
The Dual Process Model
Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut’s dual process model of bereavement provides the most empirically supported contemporary framework for understanding grief. It proposes that healthy grief involves oscillation between two orientations: loss orientation (directly processing the pain of the loss, experiencing and expressing grief) and restoration orientation (attending to the tasks of ongoing life, adapting to changes, building a new normal).
Both orientations are necessary. Exclusive focus on loss without attending to ongoing life prevents the adaptation that recovery requires. Exclusive focus on restoration without processing the loss prevents the emotional integration that genuine healing involves. Healthy grief moves between both — sometimes within the same day — and the ratio of loss to restoration orientation gradually shifts over time toward more restoration as the acute phase of grief passes.
What Supports Grief
Research on grief outcomes consistently identifies several factors that support healthy grief: social connection and support (grief shared is not grief halved, but it is grief made more bearable), the freedom to express grief without pressure to resolve it quickly, the maintenance of basic self-care (sleep, nutrition, gentle movement), meaning-making — the gradual construction of a narrative that integrates the loss rather than simply surviving it — and, where professional support would help, the availability of grief-informed counselling or therapy.
Give yourself permission to grieve in the way that is true for you. There is no timeline. There is no correct emotional expression. Grief is the price of love, and it is worth paying.
This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. If grief is significantly impairing your daily functioning or wellbeing, please consult a qualified mental health professional.