When we hear the word grief, most of us think about losing someone we love. And while the death of a loved one can be one of life’s greatest losses, I’ve come to believe grief finds us in many more places than we often realise.
In my work as a therapist, and in my own life, I’ve come to see grief as something much broader than how it is viewed in Western society. I think it is something that permeates almost every part of our lives. It seems to appear whenever something meaningful changes or comes to an end, and because life is so fluid, it is a certainty.
I sometimes wonder whether our desire to understand and control life makes grief even more difficult. As humans, we naturally look for certainty and predictability. We want life to make sense. So when something meaningful changes or ends, it can shake the very foundations we stand on.
I also wonder whether our modern emphasis on productivity, resilience, and “getting on with things” has narrowed our understanding of grief. By only recognising grief after death, we often miss the many quieter losses that deserve just as much compassion, and can have even more significant impacts on our day-to-day well-being and life experiences.
So what is grief?
I like to think grief as being the journey after loss. I think grief lives wherever there has been love, hope, identity, connection or meaning. When we limit grief to being only for the death of a loved one we miss all the nuances that grief can have. The losses we rarely acknowledge and allow ourselves to grieve, are vast and broad:
The grief over the relationship we hoped for, that never came to fruition.
The loss of our single identity, or our pre-parent identity that we feel we can no longer connect with.
The loss over the physical ability to do the things we once did so differently or easily.
The grief over experiencing a friends personality in a way that doesn’t align with the concept of them you have in your head.
The loss of our home that we thought we would live in forever.
The grief of our house no longer being the loud, energetic kid centred house we once had.
The grief of looking at our partner and wondering where the person you met and fell in love with has gone.
The grief of diagnosis or lack of diagnosis and how that effects how you identify yourself or even a loved one.
All of this, that’s grief too.
When I am working with clients in areas that you expect have not much to do with grief, I often find grief quietly sitting there waiting to be heard. Relationship issues and new parents are two areas I have worked with a lot that I see grief pop up everywhere.
Taking the time to sit and hear these losses and the grief that comes with it, whatever shape it might come in is so important. And I often think these other types of grief can often cause more issues for us because they are often left unheard, unsupported and not understood. Often this isolation can become a layer of grief on its own.
We push ourselves in Western culture to move through grief at lightening speed. In Australia we get a whole two days paid bereavement leave, and this is specifically for the loss of a loved one, usually to attend funerals.
It highlights that in Western society We have rituals for death. Funerals. Sympathy cards. Bereavement leave. Flowers.
But what rituals do we have for the end of a marriage?
For infertility?
For losing a dream?
For becoming chronically ill?
For realising life isn’t going to look the way we imagined?
We don’t allow ourselves to have time to grieve let alone grieve things that “we aren’t supposed to grieve”.
While we continue to ignore and not allow time for grief it can sit festering and causing more issues in our life than we realise.
Grief changes shape
Another understanding of grief that I think can be limiting, is the idea that we grieve and we move on. But grief is not just felt and then gone. It also doesn’t stay the same. We experience the ongoing layers of grief that we can have over the same thing, over many years, and in many different ways. Sometimes we revisit an old loss because life has reached a new milestone.
The loss of a parent when we are young, is a different grief, to the grief we experience when we feel that loss as we ourselves become parents. The grief again changes and adapts as we grow and experience different parts of life that remind us of the parent we lost.
As we change, grief changes. As fluid beings we are constantly changing, learning, shifting, reacting, that’s one of the reasons I decided to work as therapist, because humans are constantly evolving. So it is important for us to be open to the changes we need to experience from grief as well. As all our experiences change us, so too does grief, and it can be one of the most significant experiences we have that helps move us toward understanding of either self or life in a more accepting and harmonious way.
What is grief therapy?
Therapy isn’t about taking grief away. It isn’t about helping someone “move on.”
Instead, I see grief therapy as creating a space where grief can finally be acknowledged without needing to be explained away or hurried. Instead of moving on from grief, we gently move towards it – making space to understand what it has to say, how it has shaped us, and what it asks of us now.
It is more about acknowledgement and reflection of experience followed by meaning making, reshaping of understanding and learning how to honour what was lost whilst also learning how to carry the grief alongside openness to the new experiences of life.
A gentle reflection
Perhaps you’re grieving something you’ve never allowed yourself to call grief.
A relationship.
A version of yourself.
A dream.
A future you thought would happen.
A place that once felt like home.
Maybe simply naming it is the beginning.
Whatever your grief looks like, it deserves compassion. It doesn’t have to be compared, justified, or measured against someone else’s loss. Because grief isn’t a competition. It’s a reflection of what has mattered to you in your life. And what matters to us always deserves to be held with care.
If there’s one thing I hope you take from this, it’s this:
You have permission to grieve.
Whatever it is you’ve lost.
However long ago it happened.
Whether anyone else understands it or not.
It belongs wherever something meaningful has changed.
Grief therapy in Ballarat and telehealth (online)
If you are grieving something that feels difficult to name, carry or understand, support is available. Visit our grief therapy page to learn more about grief counselling and how therapy can help you make space for what has been lost.
