The Unexpected Places Grief Lives
It’s common knowledge that studying psychotherapy can be… intense. The process cracks you open. Whatever’s been tucked neatly under your defences tends to rise to the surface. I remember thinking, more than once, Why on earth did I sign up for this? awakening demons that had been sleeping just fine, thank you, behind carefully constructed walls.
I’ll never forget our grief and bereavement module. The lecturer asked us to reflect on our losses and, if we felt safe, to share them with the group. My peers spoke of their losses, sudden deaths, suicides and ruptured families. The grief in the room was heavy and real.
My mind went blank. I’ve never lost anyone, I thought. And yet, there was that lump in my throat. That quiet unease in my stomach. Because of course I had. Just not in ways the world names or notices. My life was marked by absences, of people who were alive but unavailable, of relationships that slipped away, of things that should’ve happened but didn’t. Childhood milestones missed. Promises broken. Emotional presence never given. And in that moment, I had to face something I’d long buried: my own unacknowledged grief.
There are many forms of loss, not all of them visible.
We grieve people who’ve died, of course, but also those who are still living.
Estranged parents.
Friends who faded.
Lovers who left while we were still fully in.
We grieve relationships that never had the chance to begin.
We grieve the lives we imagined and never lived.
We grieve our old selves, our lost years, our innocence.
Some griefs are loud and recognised, while others are quiet, pushed to the edges, too inconvenient or uncomfortable for the culture to hold.
Grief Isn’t Linear. It’s Messy.
In truth, no matter the reason for our grief, it often doesn’t look like the clean arcs we’re taught to expect. It’s not a breakthrough or a triumphant transformation, but something quieter and less visible.
It’s learning, slowly and often painfully, how to live alongside what cannot be undone.
The film Manchester by the Sea captures this with haunting precision. Grief doesn’t transform the main character in a neat arc, it just moves in, becomes part of him. He doesn’t “heal” in the way we might hope. Instead, he survives. And that, too, is a form of healing.
Grief rarely moves in a straight line. It doesn’t obey logic, or order, or any five-stage framework we try to map onto it. It tends to pull back just when we think it’s easing, and surge forward when we least expect it. It’s full of contradictions: a longing for closeness and a need for distance, moments of numbness followed by an overwhelming wave that crashes without warning.
Sometimes, it stays hidden for months, tucked away neatly into the routines of daily life, only to resurface in an instant, triggered by a song that used to hold meaning, a familiar scent, or a date on the calendar that no one else remembers but you.
And even then, we go on. We laugh in one moment and go quiet in the next. We function, we participate, we show up. And it’s not so much because we’ve moved on but because we’ve learned to live with the grief.
We All Move Through Grief Differently
We all move through grief in our own way, shaped by who we are, what we’ve lost, and what the world has allowed us to express. Some of us dissociate, numbing ourselves to survive. Others over-function, filling every hour with tasks and distractions, trying to outrun what hurts. Some grow quiet and inward, pulling themselves into silence, while others break open in ways that are loud, raw, and uncontained.
There is no single map for this territory, no right way to grieve.
What grief often needs is not a schedule to follow but the space to unfold in its own time. Often, there is no neat closure that ties the pain into something tidy or complete. Still, if met without expectation, its sharpness may soften over time and the weight may shift. And while the ache doesn’t disappear, our relationship to it changes. Usually, not all at once, but gradually, almost imperceptibly, a subtle reweaving of what remains with what is still possible.
What Grief Really Needs
As a therapist, but also as a human who’s grieved, I’ve learned this:
You don’t need to fix someone’s grief.
You don’t need to cheer them up.
You don’t need to explain it, soften it, or tie it up with meaning.
You just need to stay.
To take your shoes off and treat their sorrow like sacred ground.
To say: I can bear witness to your unbearable, and I will not look away.
This isn’t easy.
Everything in us wants to soften their pain, to do something.
But more often than not, what heals is not our doing, it’s our presence.
The steadiness of someone who doesn’t flinch.
So instead of trying to make grief make sense,
Let’s try to make space.
For the mess.
For the rage.
For the numbness.
For the slow, strange ways grief reshapes us.
Let’s stop asking people to be okay.
Let’s start asking if we can sit beside them
Exactly where they are.
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