There's a phrase I hear often from people going through grief: "I should have gotten over this by now." Sometimes it comes with a timeline attached — six months, a year, "it's already been two years and still." Sometimes it arrives without a timeline, just a diffuse sense that something is wrong, that they're failing at something everyone supposedly knows how to do: lose.
The first thing I want to say is this: you are not failing. Grief has no schedule. And the idea that it should have one has caused more harm than it seems.
Beyond the five stages
The five-stage model of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — was proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, based on her work with terminally ill patients. Over time it became popularized as if it were a universal map of grief. The problem is that maps are only useful if the terrain matches them.
Megan Devine, in her book It's OK That You're Not OK, names something many grieving people feel but don't allow themselves to say out loud: that this model, though useful for some, can become a trap. If you don't move linearly from one stage to the next, if anger comes back when you thought you'd already "processed" it, if there are days when the loss feels as fresh as day one — you can end up feeling like you're grieving wrong. Like you're the problem.
Grief isn't a process that gets resolved. It's something that gets integrated. And the first step toward making that integration possible is to stop evaluating yourself by how you're doing.
This doesn't mean grief lasts forever at the same intensity. It means it doesn't follow a linear logic, and pretending it does adds an extra layer of suffering — the shame of not being "okay yet" — on top of a pain that's already enormous.
Loss lives in the body
Grief isn't only an emotional event. It's a somatic one.
When we lose someone or something significant — a person, a relationship, a place, a version of ourselves — the nervous system loses a source of co-regulation. Bessel van der Kolk documents this extensively: the body keeps score of grief too. The weight in the chest that's physically felt. The lump in the throat that appears without warning. The deep tiredness that doesn't lift with rest. Changes in appetite, insomnia, that sense of unreality — as if the world had lost some of its substance.
Physical symptoms can appear without clear medical explanation: chronic tension, headaches, digestive problems. It's not psychosomatic in the sense of "it's all in your head." It's that the body is processing something that exceeds the nervous system's capacity to integrate in a short amount of time.
Barbara Brennan describes what she calls frozen psychic time: the system gets stuck in the moment of the loss. There's a part of us that keeps living in that instant — the last day, the last call, the moment everything changed. From Internal Family Systems, we can understand this as parts that got trapped in that time, protecting, resisting, not knowing the danger has passed — even though the loss hasn't.
Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, offers tools for working with these bodily responses without forcing the system to move faster than it can. It's not about releasing the grief all at once. It's about creating conditions for it to move — with safety, at its own pace.
How therapy accompanies the grief process
My work with people in grief doesn't try to speed anything up. I don't come in with a model of how long it should take or stages to check off. What I look for is to create the conditions for grief to move — because what stays completely still tends to grow heavier over time.
Body-based therapy works directly with the physical sensations of grief. The weight in the chest, the emptiness in the stomach, the tension in the shoulders that's gone unreleased for months. Not to make them disappear — but to be able to be with them in a way that isn't overwhelming. That first requires a foundation of nervous system regulation: learning to move toward the pain from a place with enough capacity to hold it.
IFS is especially useful for the parts that resist the loss — the ones that believe letting go means betrayal, the ones that hold onto the other's presence as if releasing it meant losing them a second time. Those parts don't need to be convinced of anything. They need to be heard, accompanied, and eventually able to recognize that they can carry the memory without staying frozen in the moment of the loss.
Grief can also — and I say this carefully, because I know it isn't always the moment — become an opening toward deeper questions. About what matters. About who you are without what you lost. About meaning. Not as a way of forcing significance onto the pain, but as something that sometimes emerges naturally when the nervous system has enough room to breathe.
Well-accompanied grief doesn't end — it transforms. What's lost stops being an open wound and becomes part of who you are. It still hurts, sometimes. But the pain changes shape: it stops being an alarm signal and becomes something closer to a scar — evidence that something was real, and that it mattered.
If you're in that place, you can read more about when it's a good time to start or about the first session. You can also simply write to me.