At some point, usually around the three-month mark and sometimes sooner, nearly every grieving person I work with says some version of the same sentence:
“Shouldn’t I be over this by now?”
They say it apologetically, like they’re confessing to a failure. Someone at work gave them a look. A family member suggested they “get out more.” Or nobody said anything at all, and the silence itself became the message: time’s up, everyone else has moved on, why haven’t you?
So let me put the answer somewhere permanent: No. There is no “by now.” Grief doesn’t run on a clock, and whatever you’re feeling on whatever day you’re feeling it is not evidence that you’re doing it wrong.
The Five Stages Were Never a Checklist
Most people know the five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. What most people don’t know is that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed them by studying people facing their own deaths, not people mourning someone else’s. She spent her later years frustrated by how the stages had been turned into a tidy sequence that grieving people were expected to march through in order.
Real grief doesn’t move in stages. It moves in waves. You can feel acceptance on Tuesday and rage on Thursday and something that has no name at all on Saturday morning in the cereal aisle. Modern grief research describes something called oscillation, a natural pendulum swing between confronting the loss and taking a break from it. The break is not denial. The wave returning is not relapse. Both are the process working.
The Grief Nobody Sends Casseroles For
There’s a term in my field I wish everyone knew: disenfranchised grief. It’s grief that the world doesn’t recognize, so it never gets acknowledged, supported, or publicly mourned.
The end of a friendship. A miscarriage no one knew about. The death of an ex-spouse. A beloved pet. The parent you were estranged from, where you’re somehow grieving both the person and the relationship you never got to have. A diagnosis that ended the future you’d planned. Retirement from work that made you you. The child who is still alive but no longer speaks to you.
Nobody brings casseroles for these. There’s no funeral, no card aisle, no bereavement leave. And so people carry them silently, often not even granting themselves permission to call it grief.
Here’s my position, as a therapist who specializes in loss: if you lost something that mattered, your grief is legitimate. Full stop. The size of the loss is measured by what it meant to you, not by whether other people can see it.
When Grief Gets Stuck
Most grief, given room to breathe, moves. Slowly, unevenly, with setbacks, but it moves. Sometimes, though, it gets stuck. Clinicians call this prolonged grief, and it looks less like feeling sad a long time and more like life stopped and never restarted: months or years pass and the loss still consumes most of your inner life, you avoid anything that touches the memory (or can’t stop touching it), you feel like the part of you that could enjoy things was buried too.
Trauma can also tangle itself into grief, especially when a loss was sudden, violent, or witnessed. When that happens, the memory of how it happened can block access to the mourning of who was lost. This is one of the places where trauma-focused work like EMDR can quietly matter in grief therapy: not to erase anything, but to unstick the memory so grieving can actually begin.
If any of that sounds like where you are, that’s not weakness and it’s not a character flaw. It’s a nervous system that needed more support than it got.
What Grief Therapy Actually Is (and Isn’t)
People sometimes hesitate to bring grief to therapy because they assume the goal is to get over it, and something in them, rightly, refuses. Losing the grief can feel like losing the person twice.
So let me be clear about what grief work looks like in my office. It is not about forgetting, moving on, or reaching some finish line called closure. It’s about making enough room for the loss that it can exist inside your life without consuming it. Grief researchers call this continuing bonds, the healthy, lifelong ways we stay connected to what we’ve lost. The relationship doesn’t end. It changes form.
Sometimes that work is talking. Sometimes, honestly, words fail grief, and that’s where expressive approaches earn their place: writing the unsent letter, making something with your hands, finding a ritual that says what sentences can’t. There’s no one way through, and my job isn’t to hand you a map. It’s to walk alongside you while you find your own.
One Small Practice, for the Hard Days
I want to leave you with something you can actually use, so here is the practice I return to, personally and professionally, when a wave hits.
Stop. Sit down, or lie down, wherever you are. Put a hand somewhere comforting, your chest or your belly, and just breathe. Don’t try to breathe the grief away; that’s not the assignment. Let the wave be exactly as big as it is, and let your breath keep you company inside it. Thoughts will come. Let them come. You don’t have to push them away. Pushing, I’ve found, only gives them somewhere to push back.
Here’s what I trust about the breath, and I mean this almost literally: it has been with you every moment of your life, through everything you’ve already survived. You may have stopped noticing it, but it never once abandoned you. On the days when grief makes everything feel unreliable, that’s one thing that isn’t.
If You’re Grieving Right Now
Whatever you lost, however long ago, however visible or invisible to the people around you, I hope you’ll take this with you: you’re not behind schedule, because there is no schedule. You’re not grieving wrong, because the ways humans grieve are as varied as the ways humans love. It will not be perfect, because it never is. Grief is a perfectly imperfect process, just like the people doing it.
And if the waves have you under more than they let you up, you don’t have to white-knuckle it alone. Grief is carried better in company. That’s not a sales pitch. It’s one of the oldest true things about being human.