Grief and loss

Grief is not a disorder

It is an ordinary response to a loss, and in most cases it does not call for clinical intervention. People get through grief with their own resources and those of the people around them, and that belongs before anything else.

What makes a course of work useful is not the intensity of the pain. It is being stuck: when something has stopped and no longer moves, in either direction.

There are no stages

The five-stages model is the most quoted and the most misunderstood: it was described by observing people facing their own death, not people in grief, and it was never a sequence to be worked through in order.

Later research describes something different: oscillation. Days when the pain is full and days when it is absent, and the alternation is not a betrayal — it is how it works.

People expecting stages end up judging themselves twice: for the pain, and for not feeling it in the prescribed order.

When it gets complicated

There are situations where the trajectory does not move: life stays organised around the absence years later, with rooms left intact and routines frozen. Or the reverse — the absence of any reaction, not as strength, but as something that has not yet arrived.

Avoiding everything that reminds you, or guilt that finds no floor, are also signals worth looking at.

There is no date beyond which grief is too long. The criterion is functional, not temporal.

The losses nobody recognises

Some losses receive neither a ritual nor permission: a miscarriage, an animal, a relationship broken off with someone still living, the end of a possibility — a diagnosis, a project, a country left behind.

Then there are ambiguous losses, where there is no moment at which it ended: a person with dementia, a relationship dissolving without declarations.

Where there is no recognition around it, the pain has nowhere to sit, and with nowhere to sit it moves less easily.

What other people say

"He was old", "at least she isn't suffering now", "you have to be strong", "time heals". The people saying these things want to help, and are almost always managing their own discomfort in the face of a pain they cannot resolve.

The effect is that you stop talking about it, and the silence arrives exactly when the network around you thins — after the first weeks, when everyone returns to their own life.

How the work goes

Not to get over it, and not to close it. We start from where the movement stopped and what is holding it there: an avoidance, a guilt, something unsaid, or a life that has organised itself around not touching the point.

There is nothing to be settled. The work is about making room — for what was, and for what is still there.