When Grief Emerges

We often speak of grief as something we move through, a painful journey from loss towards acceptance. Yet there is another side to grief that receives less attention, one that emerges not in the moving on but in what the absence itself reveals. Grief, whether following death or the ending of relationships and roles, has a particular way of exposing parts of ourselves we had not needed to face before. In the space left by what or whom we have lost, something unexpected often appears; a clearer sense of what we truly need, who we actually are, and what genuinely matters.

This is not the neat story of growth we sometimes hear about loss. Rather, it is something more raw and unavoidable. Grief does not ask permission to reshape us. Research by Neimeyer and colleagues on meaning reconstruction following bereavement shows that significant loss fundamentally disrupts our sense of who we are and how life works (Neimeyer, 2001; Neimeyer & Sands, 2011). When someone or something central to our identity disappears, we cannot simply return to who we were before. The absence creates a space, and in facing it, we meet parts of ourselves that had remained hidden whilst that person, relationship, or role was still present.

This discovery is rarely comfortable. Clients often describe surprise at what grief uncovers within them: needs they had not recognised, vulnerabilities they had managed to avoid, or ways they had depended on others without fully realising it. There is something deeply humbling about discovering how much of ourselves had been built around what is now gone. Research in attachment and loss, building on the work of Bowlby (1980) and extended by Shear and others (2011), shows that grief is not merely emotional but deeply physical. The body holds the loss in ways that thought alone cannot process. Tightness in the chest, heaviness in the limbs, a physical sense of absence; these bodily experiences are not side effects of grief but central to how we come to understand what has shifted within us.

Strangely, this unsettling experience, uncomfortable as it is, often becomes clarifying. In facing what we can no longer avoid about ourselves, something resembling purpose can emerge. Not purpose in the sense of finding meaning in suffering, but a starker honesty about what we value, what we need from others, and who we are when the familiar structures fall away. With death, we tend to remember the positive, the cherished moments, yet even this selective memory serves a purpose, protecting us whilst simultaneously reshaping how we see ourselves around what remains.

Perhaps what makes grief so transformative is precisely that it cannot be avoided. Other forms of growth we might choose or delay, but grief insists. In that insistence lies both its difficulty and its capacity to change us.

What might it mean to allow grief not only to hurt but also to teach? What parts of yourself are emerging in this absence that you had not needed to face before? What does your body know about this loss that your mind is still trying to understand?

References:

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 3. Loss: Sadness and Depression. New York: Basic Books.

Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Neimeyer, R. A., & Sands, D. C. (2011). Meaning reconstruction in bereavement: From principles to practice. In R. A. Neimeyer, D. L. Harris, H. R. Winokuer, & G. F. Thornton (Eds.), Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society: Bridging Research and Practice (pp. 9-22). New York: Routledge.

Shear, M. K., Simon, N., Wall, M., Zisook, S., Neimeyer, R., Duan, N., & Keshaviah, A. (2011). Complicated grief and related bereavement issues for DSM-5. Depression and Anxiety, 28(2), 103-117.