There is No Right Way to Grieve: Reflections on Complicated Grief 

Grief doesn’t always look the way we expect it to. It’s not always quiet. It’s not always sad. It doesn’t follow a timeline or unfold in five orderly stages. And it certainly doesn’t fit into the boxes our culture tries to place it in.

During my recent presentation at Nexus, I invited fellow clinicians into a conversation not just about grief—but about the emotions we don’t often name when grief enters the room. Relief. Rage. Erotic longing. Dissociation. Even joy. These are not signs of pathological grieving. They are signs of being deeply, messily, fully human.

Too often, we think of grief as a task: a thing to get through, check off, recover from. But in reality, grief is not a project—it’s a relationship. It doesn’t end when the funeral does. It doesn’t disappear after twelve therapy sessions. And it certainly doesn’t always look like mourning.

Some people cry. Others go numb. Some people find themselves sexually aroused after a loss—then quickly suppress it, ashamed and afraid that something is “wrong.” Others feel rage at the person who died, or relief that the caregiving has ended. These reactions are not failures of grieving. They are grief.

In our field, we’re often taught to look for disorder. But before we reach for the diagnostic manual, we need to ask ourselves: Is this grief truly disordered—or just unfamiliar?

I want to share one framework I’ve found deeply helpful: the Dual Process Model of grief. Instead of imagining grief as a linear path from denial to acceptance, this model sees it as an oscillation between two states:

Loss-oriented moments, where we face the pain head-on: crying, remembering, yearning.
Restoration-oriented moments, where we focus on adjusting to life again: working, laughing, making dinner, even going on a date.

The dance between these two is not avoidance—it’s regulation. It’s survival. And it’s normal. Some clients may spend more time in one than the other. Our job is not to pathologize that, but to support the flexibility between them.

Grief is also cultural. What one culture sees as a dignified response, another might see as stoic or emotionally shut down. Some communities wail, some feast, some build altars. Others grieve in silence, or in song. As clinicians, we need to recognize that Western ideals of “appropriate” grief often privilege a specific aesthetic—quiet, spiritual, contained—and leave out everyone else.

When clients walk into therapy, many are already performing grief. They’re trying to match what they think we want to see: sadness, gratitude, grace. But underneath that performance is often a much more complicated reality. One of our greatest responsibilities is to help them un-perform—to witness what’s actually there, even if it’s messy, confusing, or taboo.

That means watching our own reactions, too. Clients pay attention to our micro-expressions, our posture, our silence. When someone says, “I feel relieved,” or “I’ve been masturbating constantly since he died,” or “I don’t feel anything,” they are watching to see: Will you flinch? Will you judge? Will you try to fix this?

Our job is not to fix. It is to witness. To affirm. To say, “That makes sense,” and mean it.

Most grief doesn’t need treatment. It needs space. But in cases where grief becomes prolonged, complicated, or debilitating—where someone is stuck in rumination, unable to function, or unable to integrate the loss—we do have tools: Complicated Grief Therapy. EMDR. Narrative processing. But we also have storytelling. Ritual. Music. Letters. Breath.

Grief is not one thing. It is a sacred spectrum. And when we widen our emotional vocabulary, we create space for the parts of grief that have been exiled.

So let’s stop asking, “Is this how grief should look?”

And start asking, “What does grief look like in this body, in this story, in this moment?”

If there’s one thing I hope you take away from my talk, it’s this:

There is no right way to grieve.

But there are many right ways to witness it.