There Is No Wrong Way to Grieve: A Therapist’s Guide to Navigating Loss

There Is No Wrong Way to Grieve: A Therapist’s Guide to Navigating Loss

October 5, 2025

Key Takeaways

• There is no “right” way to grieve
  Grief doesn’t follow a neat five-stage roadmap. It’s chaotic, nonlinear, and deeply personal. Any emotion, from rage to gratitude, is valid and deserves to be felt. Trying to suppress or rush the process only makes it harder.

• Grief is shaped by who you are and what you lost
  The nature of the relationship, the manner of death, and your own emotional resilience and relational patterns all influence how grief unfolds. Two people can lose the same person and still experience radically different grief journeys.

• Grief can be a portal for transformation
  While it will never be easy, grief can open the door to deeper emotional work, healing past wounds, and strengthening your capacity for connection. If faced head-on, it can become a crucible that forges a stronger, more authentic version of yourself.

Why Our Culture
Struggles With Grief

Our culture tends to posit feelings as problems and promotes the myth that we can buy, work or distract ourselves away from life’s fundamental challenges. Often we’re expected or even forced to do so. It would be normal and expected that someone be affected by grief for a prolonged period of time but, in our fast-paced bottom-line driven culture, you get two weeks and then it’s back to work. If you get anything at all.

People are afraid of death. People are afraid of pain and despair. Grief is certainly not conducive to increased profit or productivity. This mismatch between the experience of grief and what’s available to us can lead to a sense of internal tension—that what’s happening inside doesn’t match with what’s happening outside—and the sense that in grief, we’re doing something wrong.

The sense of grieving incorrectly is one of the most common experiences that my clients report.

“I hurt too much. I shouldn’t still be in this much pain.”

“I’m worried that I’m doing too well. I feel like I should be struggling more.”

“I keep having these feelings about him that I don’t think I should have.”

In our culture of pathologized humanity, where normal experiences of life and loss receive a diagnosis, we tend to gravitate toward problem/solution models of therapy. Grieving is a condition to be treated. A malady to be cured. Do it for more than 6 months and you have a disorder, according to diagnostic criteria that have evolved significantly over recent decades. Perhaps in this haste to rid ourselves of all the “bad feelings” so we can “move on” and get back to work, get back to life, (as though life were something distinct from grief and loss), we gravitate toward conceptions of grief like Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s “5 Stages of Grief.”

This model is referenced as some sort of grief gospel and while still relevant and beneficial in ways, I tend to encounter people who, rather than travelling any linear path through 5 stages, are bouncing back, forth and all around each stage. The seemingly chaotic process of real grief often involves experiencing each stage in rapid sequence in no particular order, sometimes all at once, over and over again. The concept of stages seems irrelevant and insufficient. The idea that grief is a finite cycle to be completed is a dangerous fallacy.

Grief is so much more than that.

Grief, like life and relationships in general, tends to be far messier than how we like to envision it. Hatred. Regret. Sadness. Despair. Gratitude. Guilt; no feeling is off-limits and everything should be embraced. If only it were so easy…

There is no prescripted path through this, even though you may desperately want one, like the mother grieving the loss of her daughter that I once worked with: “I want you to give me a roadmap to guide me through this but I’m realizing that you can’t.”

Yet there are a few things that will aid you profoundly in how you carry the loss as you continue to live.

Common Experiences of Grief

I often hear people in grief talk about some experiences which appear to be relatable from person to person, even when the circumstances of death and loss are quite different. Sharing your experiences and hearing from others can, on its own, be quite therapeutic.

Dates of significance
Many people note that birthdays, anniversaries and holidays tend to be activating for many years after a loss. I have many clients anticipate and orient around these events out of necessity, ensuring that they’re not caught off-guard. One woman talks about how the signs of the change to spring stimulate her feelings a few weeks before the anniversary of her partner’s death. The angle of the sun, the budding leaves, the smell of the first spring rain; all of it connected to the day he died.

All their belongings

Inanimate objects and belongings take on a tremendous significance. It’s common to hold onto belongings, sometimes leaving them in place for years. The physical relics that loved ones leave behind become the increasingly rare and precious direct connection to their physical body that we are often so desperate to hold onto.

I worked with someone once who lost his wife to cancer when they were young and newly married. Decades later, having been happily remarried with several grandchildren, he’d occasionally stumble on something belonging to his deceased wife:

“I was rifling through a drawer and found one of her pens. I sat there staring off into space for a few minutes. Years ago, that might have ruined my day. Now, I cherish those moments with her when they visit me.”

Pictures and memories
Pictures and especially videos can be incredibly consequential to view. You might be going about your day perusing your socials when Facebook forcefeeds you a memory from 10 years ago. It’s a picture next to your best friend who died a few months ago. Boom. The rest of the day is toast. Take the rest of the day off. Reach out to people who you feel comforted by and hope you feel better tomorrow. This too, like the pen tucked in a drawer, will always be of consequence, but it won’t always destroy your day.

Acute suffering, for a time
There is commonly a period of acute grief, marked by profoundly affected functioning. This is especially true in instances of sudden and unanticipated loss, such as in the case of the members of an ongoing group I run for people who’ve lost a loved one in a mountain-related accident. Most members struggle to recall much about the early days after the death, often vaguely remembering a period of near constant dissociation and some needing more acute psychiatric care.

Take for example the tragic case of the Gaudreau brothers, killed by a drunk driver on the eve of their pregnant sister’s wedding, only a few miles from their family home. Their mother was catatonic, completely unresponsive upon hearing the news and needed to be admitted to a hospital for stabilization. This is not an abnormal reaction, but rather a completely understandable response to an absolutely devastating situation. And these reactions are common.

I can’t emphasize this enough.

Everything you feel in grief and loss should be acknowledged and honored.
No feelings should be off-limits. 

The more energy you spend trying not to feel, the worse it gets. The better you get at tracking yourself, and recruiting for yourself what you need, the easier it will be. People tend to suffer more from their attempts to avoid pain than the pain itself.

So go on. You have permission to skip that wedding if you think it’s going to be too hard. Or go, but find people who will understand if it’s hard for you, and sit with them. Sure. Why not take the compost you made from your husband’s body out to the desert and roll around in it for a while?

There are many commonalities across grief experiences, and yet, at the same time, they are also completely distinct, and no two are completely alike.

What Shapes
Your Experience of Grief

There are no identical experiences of grief. There are a few specific factors that I have found to have a strong influence on how people respond to death and loss:

What was the nature of the relationship to the person who died?
Was it contentious? Was there ambivalence? Were they close? Not so much? Were they an important attachment figure in the grieving person’s life?

What was the manner of death?
Sudden or gradual? At an expected time in life or “too young”? Was the grieving person present for the death? Were they an active caretaker in the preceding days/months/years?

Who was the grieving person before the loss?*
*Specifically, how were they accustomed to handling their emotions, and how easily do they connect with others

What Was the Nature of the Relationship to the Person Who Died?

This question can lead to some unhelpful comparison between people’s experience of grief, but if we can avoid those I do think there is some obvious relevance to the quality and significance of a relationship prior to a loss. For instance, my experience losing a friend in my second semester of college would be expectedly different from that of his 3 younger sisters, or their parents. That’s not to say that there isn’t a possibility of wild variation, but I don’t think it should be too controversial to say that the quality and closeness of a relationship with someone influences the experience of losing them.

What Was the Manner of Death?

This is also an area where comparison can fester, but I always advise against that. It’s never very effective to try and express oneself in reference to someone else’s experience. We’d all be well served to do our best to speak about ourselves as best as possible.

That said, whether someone died suddenly and violently does affect the experience that their loved ones will have to navigate. Even differences in sudden tragic accidents, say, between being struck by a drunk driver and falling from a mountain are important. This tends to be clearer as people tend to grasp wildly for culpability in grief, and the details matter here. Other specific factors to consider are whether or not the death was accidental, intentional or by illness, whether the death came at an age you might expect or “too young”, and whether or not any of the grieving loved ones were involved in the events leading up to the death. Were they in the vehicle that crashed? Did they watch from afar? Were they the primary caregiver for a years-long decline into confusion and incontinence? These are all wildly different experiences and they are all important influences on what people have to cope with after the loss.

Who Was the Grieving Person Before the Loss?

People are themselves in grief, and relationships are what they were when they were cut short. If something was a part of you before the loss, it will still be a part of you during and after. As a clinician, when I work with someone who is grieving, I try and assess for 2 things which tend to have a significant impact on how grief unfolds:

1. Capacity to tolerate and regulate strong emotions (Emotional Resilience and Regulation)
2. Ability to engage in meaningful and supportive interpersonal relationships (Relational Functioning)

Emotional Resilience and Regulation
If you think of death and loss like a huge disruptive jolt to the nervous system, someone’s ability to insulate against and withstand that force is vital. Whatever condition your nervous system was in at the time of loss is the environment that grief encounters. For instance, someone with a history of pervasive unresolved trauma will have a very different experience of grief than if they had already done substantial work to heal from those experiences before the loss. If all your heartstrings get plucked violently, having them already tattered and frayed will yield a very different experience than if they are firm, taut, and mostly intact.

Relational Functioning
Similarly, other people can provide support and insulation from the devastation of grief, and so one’s ability to connect to people is also essential. If a person comes from an emotionally unavailable family and tends to remain insular and to not rely on others for emotional support and connection, that will affect what resources are available to them in grief. I worked with a grieving mother once who herself had a history of being severely neglected and abused as a child. Her experience of her son’s death was colored vividly by her own past. Her learned expectation of being abandoned and neglected came on in full force. She simultaneously sought and rejected support. She desperately wanted support but often demeaned and distanced herself from the people who would provide it. In her grief she became entrenched in a world where her husband and surviving son weren’t there for her, and never would be. It was excruciating to watch.

The Grief Portal:
When Loss Opens a Door to Transformation

By now the complexity of each person’s experience should be taking shape. There’s really no way to give any broad and generalized guidance about how to approach any specific episode of grief. It’s intimately connected to the issues that commonly drive people to therapy separate from death and loss; our past relationships; our families of origin; how we handle our emotions and how we do (or don’t) engage in meaningful relationships.

Being thrust into grief is like being thrown straight into the belly of the whale, spared from drowning but a long way from the comfort of land. Death can provide the energy to reach what you might call “escape velocity”; just enough force to engage in therapeutic work that may be long overdue. Sometimes it becomes a necessity, where there is no way through grief without doing some of that work. Grief can open a portal, but you must choose to walk through it, and to continue walking.

But it won’t come easy.

At the end of a recent two-day intensive with my Mountain Grief Group, the group sat and reflected on the work they’d done together and on themselves since their person died.

“The real shit of it is, I wish I could have been this version of myself when she was alive. I’m proud of myself, and yet I feel bad that it took her death to get me here.”

As is the case in grief, the sweet and the bitter now come together.

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Ben White

http://www.benjaminwhite.us

Ben White's practice is based in Boulder County, Colorado where he sees clients in-person and virtually statewide, and also virtually in Massachusetts, Montana, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. With more than a decade of experience as a therapist and over 20 years facilitating groups, Ben brings a mix of skill and wisdom along with genuine compassion and a sense of ease with clients. He balances wit and depth in the right measure, making sessions approachable and meaningful for new clients and therapy veterans alike.