Somewhere along the way, grief acquired a schedule. People arrive at counselling apologising for still being sad, six months or two years or a decade on, as though there were a published deadline they have missed.
There is not. And the framework everyone half-remembers has been badly misused.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published these in 1969 in On Death and Dying, and the detail that gets lost is who she was describing.
She was writing about terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own approaching death. She was not describing bereaved people grieving someone else, and she did not present the stages as a sequence everyone moves through in order. Kubler-Ross herself later said the model had been misunderstood.
The stages became a public script anyway, and the result is a great many people who believe they are grieving incorrectly.
It is not linear. People describe waves rather than steps: stretches where things feel manageable, interrupted without warning by something that flattens them. A song. A smell. Reaching for the phone to tell them something.
It is often physical. Exhaustion, appetite changes, a tight chest, sleep that will not come or will not stay. People are frequently alarmed by how bodily it is.
It rarely arrives as pure sadness. Anger is extremely common and often comes with guilt attached, particularly anger at the person who died. So is relief, especially after a long illness, and relief tends to be the hardest one for people to admit to.
And it can be non-continuous. Feeling fine for a week is not a betrayal and does not mean you have stopped caring.
People grieve the end of a marriage, a diagnosis that closes off a future they had assumed, infertility, a career ending, a move away from a place that held their life.
These losses often come without any of the social recognition a death receives. No one sends a card. Nobody expects you to take time. The grief is real and the scaffolding around it is absent, which frequently makes it harder rather than easier.
Most grief does not require therapy. It requires time, and people around you, and permission to feel it. Counselling is worth considering when:
The intensity has not shifted at all after many months, and daily functioning is not returning. You are avoiding everything connected to the person or the loss, to a degree that is shrinking your life. You are using alcohol or substances to get through the evenings. There is persistent guilt or self-blame you cannot put down. The death was sudden, violent, or traumatic, which can leave trauma symptoms tangled up with the grief. You have no one to talk to, which is its own risk factor.
Or simply: it is heavier than you can carry alone right now. That is a sufficient reason, and you do not need to clear a threshold to deserve support.
It does not remove the loss or speed you up. What it does offer is a place where you do not have to manage anyone else's discomfort about your grief, which is more valuable than it sounds. Many bereaved people spend a great deal of energy reassuring friends and family that they are coping.
It also helps to have someone who will not flinch at the parts you are not saying out loud. The anger. The relief. The thought you think makes you a bad person. Those are ordinary in grief and they are much lighter once spoken.
Where the loss was sudden or traumatic, trauma-focused approaches such as EMDR are sometimes used alongside grief work, because an intrusive memory of the death can block the grieving itself.
Supporting Wellness offers grief counselling in Calgary, Red Deer and Cold Lake. There is no point at which it becomes too late to seek support, and no minimum amount of suffering that qualifies you. Reach out when you are ready.
If you are in crisis, call or text 988, or the Alberta Mental Health Helpline at 1-877-303-2642, 24 hours a day.
Related reading: Depression in older adults, Paying for therapy in Alberta and Holiday loneliness.
