Does Grief Ever Go Away? Learning to Grow Around Loss
One of the questions I hear most often as a grief therapist is some version of: When will this stop hurting? People ask it quietly, often apologetically, as if they should be further along by now. The honest answer is that grief rarely goes away. But it does change shape, and you change around it.
I often describe grief as carrying forty burning candles in your heart. With time, one by one, the flames grow quieter. Not because you forget, and not because you stop loving. One candle stays lit, because some love never leaves us.
Growing around grief
In 1996, grief counselor Lois Tonkin described a model many of my clients find relieving. We tend to assume grief shrinks over time. Tonkin observed that for most people, the grief stays roughly the same size. What grows is the life around it: new relationships, routines, meaning, and moments of joy. The loss becomes one part of a larger life rather than the whole of it.
This matters because if you believe grief should shrink, every wave that hits a year or five years later can feel like failure. If you understand that your life is growing around it, a wave is simply the love showing up.
Why grief comes in waves
Researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut described healthy grieving as an oscillation, which they called the dual process model. Some days you lean toward the loss: crying, remembering, looking at photos. Other days you lean toward restoration: work, new routines, laughing with friends. Both are necessary. Grief is like a swing. Healing isn't getting off the swing; it's learning that both directions can exist.
Attachment researchers John Bowlby and Colin Murray Parkes described broad phases of grief: shock, disorganization, and reorganization. In shock, we just want to get through. Reorganization is when life starts to feel normal again. But grief rarely moves neatly from one phase to the next. One moment you're angry and searching for answers; the next you're overwhelmed by how deeply you miss them. Then, for a brief moment, you appreciate what you still have, and guilt almost follows. You revisit these phases again and again. (The familiar "five stages" mislead in a similar way: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first described them in people facing their own deaths, not in the bereaved.)
Continuing bonds
Older models suggested healthy grief meant "letting go." Later research, including the work of Dennis Klass and Phyllis Silverman on continuing bonds, found that many people stay connected to the person they lost: talking to them, carrying their values, keeping rituals. A continuing bond is not denial. For many families and cultures, it is how love keeps its place.
Grief is more than losing a person
Grief also follows the loss of a future you imagined, a role, a home, your health, or a version of yourself. These losses are often unrecognized by others, which can make them lonelier to carry. If this resonates, our post on life transitions may help.
When grief needs more support
Most grief, however painful, does not need treatment. But in 2022 the DSM-5-TR added prolonged grief disorder for grief that stays intense and impairing long after a loss: at least 12 months for adults (6 for children). Signs include:
Intense yearning or preoccupation with the person nearly every day
Feeling that part of you died, or that life has no meaning
Avoiding reminders of the loss, or being unable to accept it
Difficulty re-engaging with friends, work, or plans
Grief that followed a sudden, violent, or traumatic death
Traumatic loss in particular can tangle grief with trauma symptoms like intrusive images, and often benefits from a clinician trained in both.
I know this not only as a clinician. As a grief counselor I understood the phases of grief; as a grieving person, I lived them. What I learned is that one day you realize healing isn't about leaving your grief behind. It's about learning how to carry it.
You don't have to carry it alone. Therapia offers grief and bereavement therapy for adults, children, and families in Beverly Hills and online across California. Read more in Grief Therapy in Los Angeles: When Grief Needs More Than Time, or book a free 15-minute online consultation.