The most damaging thing we have told people about grief is that it has stages. Not because the stages model is entirely wrong, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was describing something real, but because it was never intended as a roadmap, and it has been used as one. Clients arrive in my room apologising for still being in the wrong stage, or for having moved through a stage too quickly, or for cycling back to anger after what felt like acceptance. They have been handed a script for their grief and are failing to follow it. This is an additional cruelty layered onto an already unbearable experience.
Grief is not linear. It does not move toward a finish line, and it does not complete. What changes, with time and sometimes with support, is the relationship between the person and their loss, the way the loss sits inside a life that is still being lived. Some days the grief is the whole weather. Other days it is background. Neither is more correct than the other. Grief researchers now talk about oscillation: moving between loss-orientation (confronting the grief) and restoration-orientation (attending to daily life). Both are necessary and healthy.
In India, grief is often held collectively, by family, by community, by religious ritual. This can be profoundly sustaining. It can also, sometimes, close off individual processing. When grief is witnessed publicly through rituals that end after thirteen days, or forty, there can be an implicit expectation that the mourner returns to ordinary life on schedule. The community has done its part. The clock has run. For someone still raw six months later, this can feel like abandonment dressed as normalcy.
What is called disenfranchised grief is particularly worth naming. This is grief that society does not fully recognise or permit: the loss of a pregnancy, the death of an estranged parent, the end of a relationship that was not sanctioned, the slow grief of watching someone disappear into dementia while they are still technically alive. These griefs are often carried silently and without community support, which compounds the weight considerably. When a client tells me about a loss they have never told anyone about, the room often changes. Simply naming it, "that is a real loss, and you are allowed to grieve it", can be significant.
What therapy offers in grief is not acceleration. I want to be very clear about this: my job is not to help someone get through their grief faster. It is to offer accompaniment. A space in which the loss can be spoken, in which the complexity of grief, which is rarely pure sadness and often contains love, anger, relief, guilt, and tenderness in uncomfortable combination, can be held without judgement. Often the grief itself is not the problem; the isolation of carrying it alone is.
If you are reading this in the middle of a loss: there is no right way to grieve. You do not have to "move on," and you do not have to be stronger than you feel. You are allowed to be exactly where you are. And if the weight becomes too heavy to carry alone, reaching out takes more courage than staying silent.
Dr. Fathima Zahra is a grief & trauma counsellor practising on GetCalmly.
