Why Grief Doesn't Always Come in Stages
I wanted to share about a recent training in expressive arts that taught me about the body, the brain, and the parts of loss that are hard to understand.
You are three weeks out from the loss. You went back to work on Monday because the bills do not pause for grief, and you got through the meeting, and you even laughed at something in the break room, and then you cried in your car in the parking garage for eleven minutes before you could drive home. You keep waiting to feel like yourself again, or at least to feel like you are moving through some kind of order, some kind of progress. Instead it feels random. Fine on Tuesday. Flattened on Wednesday. Fine again by Friday morning, gone again by Friday night.
If you have wondered whether you are doing grief wrong, you are not alone in that, and you are also not doing it wrong. The stages you learned about (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) often cause confusion or shame around grief. Grief researchers have known this for a while. Grief does not have clean phases that are linear, more people often describe grief like a wave. The wave crashes in when we least expect it…sometimes bringing relief, another day anger, the next immense sadness.
I recently completed a training focused specifically on grief, the body, and expressive arts, and it helped me find more tangible ways to give clients space and tools to process and make sense of grief. In this blog I will share about how grief lives in the body, why the "stages" framework leaves so many people feeling broken, and why creative modalities like movement, drawing, and writing can reach parts of grief that words sometimes cannot.
Grief Comes in Waves Not Stages
Grief research has moved away from the stage model for a good reason. People do not move from denial to acceptance in a tidy sequence, and plenty of people never experience some of the stages at all, or hit "acceptance" and then find themselves back in something that looks a lot like anger six months later. If you have felt like you failed at grieving correctly, it is likely because you were comparing yourself to a framework that does not actually showcase how people grieve.
The Living and Grieving Cycles
Grief researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut call this oscillation, a back and forth movement between two modes. I like to think of it as the living and grieving cycle. I like to think of it as the living and grieving cycle. One side includes acts of living like showering, going to work, running errands, laughing at a show, or making dinner. The other side feeling the loss and doing things like crying, feeling frozen, the pull to isolate, the moments where the missing person or the missing the life we imagined takes up all of our brain space.
Healthy grieving is not staying permanently on the loss side until you are "done." It is moving between the two. Some days you will spend almost entirely in restoration mode and barely touch the loss. Other days the loss will take over and the to do list will not get done, and both of those days can be part of the same healthy process.
What Oscillation Actually Looks Like
In practice, this can look like grocery shopping and then sitting in the car afterward because a song came on that triggered strong emotions. It can look like a genuinely good week followed by waking up at night crying or reliving a difficult dream. Neither side is the "wrong" one. The goal is to notice which side you are on, and to have some ability to move between them instead of getting stuck fully in one.
Your Body Is Grieving Too, Not Just Your Mind
Grief is not only an emotional experience. It is a physiological one. When you lose someone or something that mattered, your body registers it as a stress event, and it responds the way it would to any major stressor.
Grief as an Alarm
Your nervous system, cardiovascular system, endocrine system, and immune system all respond to grief, not just your mood. Heart rate and blood pressure can shift. Sleep gets disrupted. Cortisol and other stress hormones can stay elevated. Immune function can dip, which is part of why people often get sick in the months after a major loss. Your brain is working to update its internal map of the world, because part of that map includes a person or a role or a future that is no longer there, and rebuilding that map takes real cognitive and physical energy.
This is why grief can feel like exhaustion, not just sadness. You are not imagining the fatigue, the brain fog, the tight chest, the stomach that will not settle. Your body is doing genuine work. Understanding this can take some of the shame out of needing more rest, more patience, and more time than you think you "should."
Grief Has Many Origins
When people think of grief, they usually picture death. That is one form of grief, but far from the only one, and the less obvious forms often go unnamed, which makes them harder to grieve openly.
Obvious loss is what most people imagine. This includes things like the death of a loved one or a pet, a divorce, a job loss, a major health diagnosis. These losses are visible and typically come with recognized rituals, like a funeral or a going away party, that help other people know to show up for you.
Ambiguous loss is murkier. It includes things like infertility, estrangement from a family member, a difficult or unresolved relationship, unwanted singleness, the loss of a religious or spiritual community, chronic illness, cancer recovery, or a loved one's cognitive decline. The person or the connection may still technically be present, or the loss has no clear end point, which makes it much harder for others to recognize and much harder to find closure.
Ongoing loss is the kind that keeps happening in the background of daily life. Body image changes, aging out of a former version of yourself, the gap between what you expected your life to look like and what it actually looks like, difficult relationships you cannot fully resolve or fully leave. These losses do not get a card or a casserole. They often do not get acknowledged as grief at all, even though they can weigh just as heavily.
Why Talking Isn't Always Enough
Talk therapy is genuinely useful for grief, and it is also not the only tool, or always the right entry point. Some parts of grief live beyond words.
Expressive arts, meaning movement, drawing, painting, music, and certain kinds of writing, can bypass some of the brain's linguistic defenses. When you are asked to talk about a loss directly, your brain can activate protective patterns that keep the most painful material at arm's length. Creative expression can access emotional and body based material more directly, without requiring you to find the exact right words first.
This work can support integration, meaning helping the brain and body actually process and file away what happened instead of holding it in a constant state of alarm. It gives you access to grief that lives in the body, not just the mind, and to nonverbal memory. It can also open up creative problem solving, new ways of relating to a loss that a purely verbal conversation might not reach. None of this replaces talking. It works alongside it, especially for the parts of grief that words keep missing.
Grief Expression Menu
If you want a place to start, here are ways to work with grief outside of talking. You do not need to be an artist, a dancer, or a writer for any of these to work. Try whichever ones your body is drawn to, and skip the rest.
Movement
Put on one song connected to what you lost and let your body move however it wants to, no choreography required
Take a slow walk (the Greenway is a good option here in Bentonville) and notice where tension shows up in your body as you walk
Try a few minutes of shaking out your hands, arms, and shoulders when the grief feels stuck or frozen
Drawing and color
Draw the shape of your grief today, using color instead of words
Make two scribbles side by side, one for the restoration side of the cycle and one for the loss side
Create a small piece of art dedicated to a memory, with no goal of it looking "good"
Writing beyond a journal entry
Write a letter to what you lost that you never send
Make a list of everything you miss, even the small or strange things
Write one sentence a day for a week describing where you landed on the oscillation, restoration or loss
Sound and voice
Build a playlist that tracks the different moods of your grief
Hum or sing, even badly, when words will not come
Sit with a piece of music with no words and notice what comes up in your body
Ritual and object based
Light a candle when you want to remember or honor the loss
Create a small altar or box with objects connected to what you lost
Write down a memory and place it somewhere meaningful, a box, a jar, a frame
These prompts are gentle starting points, not a replacement for support. Some of them can bring up stronger emotions than you expect. If you sit down to write that letter and it opens a floodgate, that's not a sign you did it wrong. It's a sign there's a lot there, and you don't have to hold it alone.
In session, the creative piece is only the beginning. We also slow down to notice what comes up in your body, make sense of it together, and find a pace that doesn't leave you flattened for the rest of the week. That's hard to do for yourself when you're the one grieving.
It might be time to reach out if you feel stuck on the loss side of the cycle for weeks at a time, if getting through the workday is taking everything you have, or if you're grieving something the people around you don't recognize as a loss at all.
Another View on Healing
Grief is not a problem to be solved or a staircase to climb until you reach the top. It is a relationship that changes shape over time, between you and what you lost, and between the restoration side of life and the loss side of it.
If you have been carrying a grief that feels too big for words, or a loss other people do not recognize as grief at all, please know there is nothing wrong with you for needing more than conversation to process it.
Ready to Find Support for Your Grief?
If you are ready to work through a loss (whether it is the kind people send flowers for, or the kind nobody quite acknowledges) I would love to support you. As a therapist in Bentonville I help clients move through loss using both conversation and creative modalities suited to how their body and brain actually process grief.
Schedule a call using the button below to explore whether working together is a good fit.
Frequently Asked Questions About Grief
Q: Is it normal for grief to come in waves instead of stages? A: Yes, this is actually more accurate to how grief works than the traditional stage model. Grief research describes an oscillation between restoration (daily tasks, work, connection) and loss (feeling frozen, crying, isolating), rather than a fixed sequence of stages. Moving back and forth between these two modes is a sign of healthy processing.
Q: What is ambiguous loss? A: Ambiguous loss is grief without a clear resolution or a loss that is not always recognized by others as "real" grief. Examples include infertility, estrangement, chronic illness, cognitive decline in a loved one, or unwanted singleness. It can be especially isolating because it often does not come with the rituals or support that may traditionally follow a death.
Q: Why would a therapist use art or movement instead of just talking about grief? A: Expressive arts can access parts of grief that live in the body and below conscious language, bypassing some of the brain's protective defenses around painful material. This does not replace talk therapy. It works alongside it, especially for grief that feels too big, too frozen, or too nonverbal for words alone to reach.
Q: Can grief actually affect my physical health? A: Yes. Grief triggers a genuine physiological stress response involving the nervous system, cardiovascular system, endocrine system, and immune system. This can show up as fatigue, disrupted sleep, a weakened immune response, or physical tension, which is part of why grief can feel exhausting on a bodily level, not just an emotional one.
Q: Do I need to be creative or artistic for expressive arts techniques to work? A: No. Expressive arts techniques used in grief work are not about skill or making something that looks good. A scribble, a hummed tune, or a few unstructured minutes of movement can be just as valuable as a polished piece of art. The goal is expression and access, not artistic ability.
Q: How do I know if what I'm feeling counts as grief? A: If something meaningful has changed, ended, or been lost (a relationship, a role, a version of your life you expected to have) it can be grief, even without a death involved. Ongoing losses like aging, body changes, or a life that looks different than planned are valid forms of grief, even when they don't get the same recognition as more obvious losses.
Q: When should I consider working with a grief therapist instead of coping on my own? A: If grief is significantly disrupting your daily functioning, relationships, or sense of self for an extended period, or if you're carrying a loss that feels too heavy or too wordless to process alone, working with a therapist can help. Support can be useful at any point in the process.
About the Author: Kelsey Brown is a licensed therapist specializing in perfectionism and anxiety in Bentonville, Arkansas, serving clients in-person throughout Northwest Arkansas and via telehealth across the state. Her clinical work draws from evidence-based approaches including CBT, ACT, and mindfulness-based interventions, with a particular focus on anxiety, perfectionism, self-criticism, and burnout. Before becoming a therapist, Kelsey spent more than 14 years working in corporate environments spanning technology, retail, startups, and a Fortune #1 company, experience that informs her understanding of the pressure high achievers feel to perform, deliver, and appear like they have everything under control. When she's not in session, you'll find her on Arkansas trails, making art, or planning her next travel adventure. Schedule a free consultation to see if working together is a good fit.
Disclaimer: This blog post is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you're experiencing significant distress, please reach out to a mental health professional or crisis helpline.
