A Few Things I Wish Everyone Knew About Grief by a Holistic Grief Educator and Grief Coach
Hi. I'm Pamela, and I've spent years of my life as a Holistic Grief Educator and Grief Coach sitting with people in the middle of the hardest thing they will ever go through. For years I’ve trained others in how to show up for grievers in conscious, compassionate ways. But I’ve also spent a good portion of my life coming to terms with how to best navigate my own numerous losses, trauma, and grief. So let me tell you the handful of things I wish everyone understood about grief before they ever needed to know them - both as a professional grief supporter and as a serial [albeit reluctant] griever. These are really good things to know before you join the club no one wants to be a member of, before you begin the journey of reinventing your life around your loss and find yourself looking for support and comfort in a culture that wants little, if anything, to do with dying, death, loss, and grief.
Grief exists because of love and connection. That's really the whole thing, if I had to boil it down to one sentence. If you didn't love, you wouldn't be grieving. If there had not been a connection, an attachment, you would not be missing and mourning them. So when you're in it — when it's overwhelming, when it doesn't make sense, when you can't explain to anyone why you're still crying in the car eleven months later — I want you to remember that what you're feeling is love with nowhere physical left to land. It's not a malfunction. It's proof that your heart, your mind, your spirit and body were connected to something that mattered.
Grief is not a problem to be fixed. Our modern, Western culture loves to fix things. We're very mind-oriented, very solution-focused, very "let's move past this quickly" as a society. But grief doesn't respond to that kind of pressure, and trying to force it to actually creates more suffering, not less. Especially when a griever is treated by [often well-meaning] others as a problem to be solved, not as a person in deep pain. You cannot think your way out of grief, and you're not supposed to. Grieving is actually the way you heal the pain of loss — it is the healing, not an obstacle standing in the way of it.
Grief is not “depression”. Grief and depression can look similar from the outside — the exhaustion, the sleep trouble, the trouble concentrating — but grief moves, in waves, expansion and contraction, like breathing, like a tide. It responds to the person you loved: a birthday, a song, an anniversary can bring it roaring back years later, and that's not regression, that's just how grief is stored. Depression tends to sit flat and doesn't move that way. And feeling numb doesn't mean you didn't love enough. More often, it means your nervous system is protecting you from more pain than it can process in one sitting. Grief is a very complex human response to loss, and even when grief becomes clinically impairing, understanding its unique emotional, relational, social, spiritual, and existential dimensions remains essential.*
Grief is not made up of linear stages. There is no five-step staircase in grief that you climb until you reach the top and call it "over." I know that model is pervasive in our culture, but it was actually built by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ incredible work and profoundly important research in hospitals speaking with hundreds of terminally ill patients, to describe how someone comes to terms with their own death, not how we mourn the loss of someone else. Grief moves in outward concentric circles like a stone dropped in a pond, it comes in waves and changes in spirals, not a straight line, and you are not doing it wrong just because it doesn't look tidy or meet some chronological order or expectation.
You don't have to “let go” to heal. For most of the last century in traditional grief counseling, we were told that healthy grieving meant detaching from the person we lost and “moving on”. I think that's backwards. Staying connected — talking to them, feeling their presence, honoring them, living out and celebrating [and keeping alive] the unique and beautiful aspects that were the hallmarks of their life — is, for most people, a source of real comfort and stability, not a sign of being stuck. Finding ways to shift your connection from the physical to the non physical - through ritual, communication, stories, expression, active imagination, purpose, memorials, and more - helps your grief evolve in a healthy way. Neuroscience is finally backing this up with real research into how the brain grieves**. The relationship changes shape. It doesn't have to end.
Grief touches every part of you, not just your emotions. Your body carries it and shouts to be heard with a laundry list of symptoms like exhaustion, insomnia, headaches, lethargy, and mysterious pains. Your brain is doing real, physical [exhausting] work to relearn a world that no longer includes someone it expected to find there. Your spirit and your sense of meaning get shaken - many people experience a true dark night of the soul where they question everything that kept order before the loss. Your nervous system reorganizes around a loss of connection that translated into emotional safety. Your mind works overtime to rationalize the loss and assign blame or guilt with endless rounds of “why?” and “if only” getting caught in whirlpools of the past. This is why grief can feel so disorienting — it's not one experience, it's several, all happening in you at once, on their own separate timelines and with their own perspectives and languages.
Grief must be seen and heard. And please, if you take only one thing from this: grief that isn't allowed to be seen doesn't disappear. The loss that got minimized, the relationship nobody validated, the pet everyone told you to just replace, the underlying trauma of compounded or back to back losses — all of that grief is real, and it deserves to be witnessed, not managed, minimized, or rushed, solved or bright-sided with statements like “they’re in a better place.” You deserve support that sees you, honors your grief and how changes you, that honors your Loved One and your connection with them, and honors your unique experience.
Grief doesn’t have to turn into a lesson or something “better” to be valid. You do not have to turn the worst things in your life into better things. Sometimes pain is pain. We’re all going to experience loss. Sometimes that becomes an experience that changes our lives, and helps us evolve or access deeper versions of ourselves, and sometimes it doesn’t. Adding pressure to rush to “evolve” is bright siding and doesn’t help grief. It skips over important aspects of grieving that deserve our full attention. There’s no fast track through grief routed through helping others. It takes what it takes. For some, grief cracks them open and changes them and leads them to find deeper meaning in life and perhaps a new purpose in serving others like the people I teach in my courses, for others, not. I sometimes see people eager to chase down others who need support with the new purpose that loss has brought to them. Offering support and compassion for others in loss is a beautiful and powerful thing, yet sometimes it can be a way of avoiding one’s own pain. Grief is most definitely a transformative experience. It changes us as only a dark night of the soul can. Grief and trauma evolve us - whether we want them to or not, but grieving and healing trauma do not need the pressure of having to become a butterfly while you are deep in it. Modern society rushes to fix or heal or assign meaning to every single experience - often without the benefit of enough lived experience to bring perspective. Time brings perspective. Feeling our feelings brings perspective. Being with our grief, embodying, it brings perspective. Perhaps your experience teaches you something or brings you to a place of helping others… and perhaps it does not. Your grief is still valid and does not need to be justified. The caterpillar is beautiful and perfect too. Go easy on yourself in your grief.
Your experience of grief is unique. You, your Loved One, and the connection that you had together has never existed in the history of the universe. Your loss and your grief are utterly unique. There are so many factors that contribute to your grief experience; your identity and life history, your relationship with your Loved One, the way you were raised, the society you grew up in, any belief systems, past experiences of trauma and loss, the way you relate to life and death, even your ancestors, experience of loss and trauma - all of these things inform your grief. You have a unique thumbprint that is your grief. Finding the right kind of support that resonates with you and that sees and honors you and your grief is essential. Find what works for you. Some people do well in support groups, some do not. Gentler forms of grief support in group now exist in the form of sound baths, yoga classes, guided meditations, ceremony and celebration, nature and support animal therapy, food gatherings, creative art workshops; support doesn’t have to be the circle of metal chairs where everyone shares a different story. As an empathic, highly sensitive, trauma survivor, traditional support groups were a poor fit for me. I was so bombarded by other people’s needs that none of mine were met. I found that one on one grief support with a trained professional along with a combination of gentle grief movement work, creative art therapy, ritual, active imagination and dream work, writing, nature and animal support, and sound therapy, was the best fit for my needs. My search for the right kind of support for someone like me led me to create my courses and the Mourning Goods brand of resources, trainings, and support to help other others like me who need to find their own personal recipe of how to navigate grief.
If you are grieving right now, I am not going to tell you it happens for a reason, or that they're in a better place, or that time heals all wounds. I'm going to tell you the truth: this is part of love, doing exactly what love does when it loses somewhere to go. You are not broken. Your entire being - mind, body, heart, and soul, is attempting to reinvent and recalibrate with a large piece missing from your physical world. You are grieving, and that is one of the most natural, most human, most sacred things you will ever do.
Sending you much love and comfort for your loss, Pamela
References:
- Bonanno, G. A. (2004). "Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience." *American Psychologist*, 59(1).
- Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). *Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief*. Routledge.
- O'Connor, M-F. (2022). *The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn From Love and Loss*. HarperOne.
- Kübler-Ross, E., & Kessler, D. (2005). *On Grief and Grieving*. Scribner.
*In 2022, the American Psychiatric Association formally recognized Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) as a mental health diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This marked an important shift in how disabling grief can be understood within the medical and mental health system, including its potential use in clinical diagnosis and insurance coding.
Importantly, Prolonged Grief Disorder is not the same as depression. While the two can share certain symptoms, PGD is specifically centered on the loss of a loved one, with symptoms such as difficulty accepting the death, and significant disruption in one's ability to re engage with life. Major Depressive Disorder, by contrast, is a distinct condition with its own diagnostic criteria. A person may experience prolonged grief, depression, or both at the same time.
**For more on Neurobiology and loss topic I recommend:
The Signs: The New Science of How to Trust Your Instincts by Dr. Tara Swart
The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss by Mary-Frances O'Connor, PhD
The Anatomy of Grief by Dorothy P. Holinger, PhD
Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection by Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo
Before and After Loss: A Neurologist’s Perspective on Loss, Grief, and Our Brain by Dr. Lisa M. Shulman
Pamela Ann Noxon is a Holistic Grief Coach and Educator, and the founder of Mourning Goods, who is revolutionizing the way we support people in grief.
